PTPs, OVERTS AND ARC BREAKS
A lecture given on 10 November 1964

Well, either you look better or I do. Wonder which it is? Oh, you’re doing all right. One isn’t. Somebody audit him. You, too. You look all right.
What’s the date?
Audience: 10 November.
Ten November AD 14, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course.
Well, what’ll I talk to you about today? What’ll I talk to you about today? I’ve had a lecture sitting back of me left ear here for some time that I had just not gotten around giving you.
I could mention in passing—and this is merely in passing—that you have a new bulletin out that has to do with auditing styles and you’ve all done these various styles but you’ve never had them categorized into levels. And the first mistake you will make about the bulletin is that the auditing style is determined by the process being run, and the reason you make this mistake is because those auditing styles are so precisely matched to certain processes.
I want to call to your attention that it—that’s totally incidental. The auditing style given at a level is the best style for a particular process, but that doesn’t make it why that’s an auditing style. These are the progressive stages of auditing necessary to make a totally finished auditor, and that’s the really—reason for it. And each one of those styles is very effective, and can be performed rather easily by the auditor at that level.
So you have auditing styles and don’t—don’t make the mistake of saying, ”Well, they go with certain processes,” because they don’t. You can audit almost any process with almost any of those styles. For instance, you could probably audit R6 with itsa. Yes. It wouldn’t be very effective, but you could do it. Don’t you see? And so on. And the—I think you’ll find that this makes training much, much easier. Because I left this until last.
Had to have all the processes and know where they all fitted and know where the person was going to go, you see, what level he had to attain in order to move up to the next one. After I had all that, well, I had to decide how is he audited. And then I went back over about fourteen years of auditing experience and then I found out that there were only a little handful of auditing styles; they weren’t enormous in number; they were very few and they could easily be broken down.
There is an auditing style I should mention, between Level 0 and Level I or between Level 0 and Level II, that you occasionally use, that isn’t mentioned in auditing styles. And that’s—would be a version of guiding style which didn’t wind up with a repetitive process. It’s a guiding style that goes into itsa, and you do that quite frequently. And that’s actually a coffee shop sort of style. It doesn’t necessarily fit the dignity of a level, but it’s a—it’s a combo, it’s a cross.
So it’s guiding style; you’re guiding the pc into what he should talk about. You very often—well it, at II, is done with a meter, don’t you see? And then you let him itsa. We even had a process which calls for that particular style and it isn’t one of the styles mentioned. It’s a combo of two different styles. Because pure guiding style—I don’t want you to make this error, either—pure guiding style, which is Level II, would be simply guiding the pc into what he was going to run on. And many auditors err: They don’t guide the pc, they just let him wander you know? They don’t head him off, they don’t practice multiple acknowledgment at the right places.
You know, you can herd up a pc just like you can dogies, you know? You can—the dogie has to be—has to be yipped at when he goes too far off the trail, you see? So what you want to do is you yip at the pc by multiple acknowledgment. It’s actually a little trick. It isn’t covered in the bulletin, but it’s multiple acknowledgment. He starts talking about his mother—in—law and we don’t—we don’t happen to be covering the area of family in this particular session, and he wanders off there about his mother—in—law So we say, ”Well, all right. Good, good. Well, I’m very glad to know that. Fine, fine. All right. Now, ahem!” It herds him back on the trail again, you see? And then there’s—that’s the overacknowledgment. It has a use, you see?
And then there’s the underacknowledgment or the half—acknowledgment. And you want the pc to go on talking about what he is, well, you give him these little encouraging nods: ”Hm—hhhm, hm—hm, hm—hm, hm—hm.” And you’ll find out if you do that to somebody he’ll go on talking about what he’s talking about. And you can actually use acknowledgment to make a person go on talking about what you want him to talk about or, reversewise, use it to head him off And the only thing you do is just faintly acknowledge and he will go on talking; and of course, if you heavily acknowledge, it operates as a stop and you can halt him.
And that is probably—will be the most adroit use of one of those styles that stands up at Level—at Level II, Guiding—style. Actually, Guiding—style, as such, is you guide the pc into something, then run a repetitive process on it or some process on it. That’s the pure style. It’s a guide and a process and a guide and a process and it’s just an alternation of that sort of thing. And then of course, we find this appearing up a little bit higher in assessing and processing, see? We process what we assess. It’s a harmonic on it.
But this other one is a very narrow—band sort of a situation. Let’s find out what we ought to run on this pc and let’s guide him around to talking about things so that he can give us enough information so we know what this is all about, you see? And then the next thing we’re saying, ”All right. Good. Now, what communication haven’t you completed to that person? Thank you. What communication haven’t you completed to that person? Thank you. What communication haven’t you completed to that person? Thank you.” Tone arm starts damping out of the thing and you know you’ve got it.
In other words, it’s—you guide him into something, then you run it. And at Level I, you don’t guide him into nothing. You see? And that—you find out that these fit at, actually, the stages of development of the auditor and what they’re really compared to is the return of self—determinism to the auditor of the ability to occupy a viewpoint.
Now, as the auditor goes up in class, he will partly be going up in ease. And he’s more and more capable of looking at who is there across the table from him. See? And as such, the early levels, therefore, you must actually never permit a Level 0 Auditor to tell the pc what to talk about off his own bat. It would require a certain amount of diagnosis, you see? (To use a medical term.) He—he’d have to know what was wrong with the pc to get the pc to talk about something. Therefore he’d have to go into upper stages and upper grades of auditing in order to run it, you see? And the mistake you make in training, when you make any mistakes at all, is not keeping those levels pure. And demanding more of the beginner than he can possibly perform.
You look at this poor, poor bloke; he’s come in almost on a public co—audit. Yes, he’s had some HAS lessons, you see? And you say, ”All right. Now, find out what the problem is all about and get the pc talking about it. All right. That’s your assignment for this evening.” Well, that sounds awfully simple to you! But you’ve just left the guy sitting there.
The idea that he could start and stop somebody else talking will be completely beyond him. How’s that done? Now you go in with upper—scale ways of bringing this about and you just get yourself into endless complexities. Your training, then, starts getting very tangled and very long and the student gets very confused and he can’t figure out what you’re trying to train him in and he gets the idea that auditing is all impossible anyhow, and so forth. Simply because you’re giving him an upper style to do a lower style with that he—he hasn’t ever advanced to this point, don’t you see?
So actually, the styles of auditing are arranged very carefully against the ability of the individual progressively to confront his pc and handle pcs. Now, we get the idea of a Class VI Auditor tells a Class II Auditor, ”Well now, it’s very simple. Just get him talking about the primary buttons, you see, of his case, and watch those things carefully and monitor them down on the E—Meter and make sure that he itsas them properly and that you’ve guided him into that. And it’s very simple; you can clear him very easily.”
Level II Auditor, you see: ”All right.”
You come back a half an hour later, or you get the auditing report, and it is the most horrible, messed—up blackbird pie that ever got a wing fluttered in it, you know? It’s a mess. What has gone on?
Well, a confusion has gone on. That’s what’s gone on. Because you just gave this guy something that—wuhnu! So you see, this thing is fitted against the idea that the Level 0 doesn’t even get TR 1. Apar—they just never have had it, see? And so where do they get their auditing command? Well, they get it off the blackboard or from the Auditing Supervisor. That’s where they get their auditing command.
”Now, what I want all of you pcs to talk to your auditor about is . . . ” see, and you say, ”your job—considerations you’ve had about your job. Now, that’s what I want you to talk to your auditor about.” And the auditor is supposed to sit there and listen. And you can’t even kick him for not acknowledging, don’t you see, because he doesn’t know anything about that.
And you’ll find out people can do that just by the hour. They just do that by—nothing to it. That’s easy. That’s easy for them to do. But if you tell them to give the pc the auditing command, you have now made them take responsibility, in their eyes, for somebody else’s whole life and they ponder this as a philosophic impossibility, don’t you see? They’re not upstairs far enough to recognize the relative values of these things, and so forth. And you’re talking against all the confusions that you ever heard of. All these confusions.
Now, that style of auditing, actually, we take from psychoanalysis. Actually, we developed that independently because many analysts don’t listen.
You heard the joke about the two analysts coming down in the elevator and one is all worn out and the other one looks bright and happy. And the one that’s all worn out says, ”How can you possibly go through that many patients in a day and look so bright and cheerful?” And he says, ”Doesn’t it—doesn’t it just about kill you sitting there listening to all that stuff all day long?”
And the bright one says, ”Who listens?”
So ... And you’ll find that the automatic auditing command was put in
by Freud, not by the analyst. The analyst really never gave anybody anything to talk about. He sort of just infiltrated it somehow or another, told them about something and somehow or other the guy started talking—they didn’t have a TR 1. So actually, the high point of psychotherapy never attained Level 0. Now, if professionals in this field were not up to developing any higher style of action—evaluating, interrupting, do the wildest things, you see—if they were not up ... Now, don’t expect some bloke just off the street that you’ve got in a co—audit someplace, or some bird who is just starting in, wondering if he should be a student of Scientology—see, he’s still in this terrific rat maze of puzzlement—taking him and throwing on his back anything above that auditing style. And you actually will have to curb yourself from throwing more things on it than that.
That style is the one, oddly enough, that you as an Auditing Supervisor will have the most trouble with. It’s the hardest for you to understand, the hardest for you to pass a student on, the hardest one to find out if he’s confronting—is the student confronting or listening? It’s hard to establish. It’s very difficult from a viewpoint of supervision. It’s not difficult from its performance. But its performance looks difficult to the person because it’s so simple. He’s supposed to do that one thing. And you know, you’ll have some bird you’re training in this, some fellow you’re training in this, he will actually go for days and days and days and days and days before he finally gets the idea of what he’s supposed to do.
And then you sort it out—one datum. He’s got this one datum: He’s supposed to listen. He’s not supposed to do anything else, he’s supposed to listen. He finally sorts this out as a performance or an action which is pure in its own right and which is performable, and then he finds out that he can do it and at that point you have put an auditor’s feet on the road up. And if you miss that, then that auditor would be falling off the road all the way up. Do you see?
But you could make it so unnecessarily complicated as to how you listened and what you were supposed to do, that he’d get a lose before he began and therefore he’d remain in Confusion forevermore. Don’t you see? So you have to adjust not just your auditing to this—you can do that easily; that’s very easy—but you’ve got to adjust your supervision to this. And that’s what mainly has to be adjusted at that basic style. Because it’s very hard to supervise at that level of simplicity.
Oh, you take a Class IV Auditor who is competent and capable at Class IV: He knows very well what should be done for the pc. He sees exactly what the pc should be guided into; he sees exactly what the pc should be assessed on; he sees exactly where that pc should go; he sees what’s wrong with that ease; and of course his basic impulse as an auditor is to just run the case toward maximum gain. But the mistake he makes is, it’s his running of the ease toward maximum gain. You got it? See, then he adjudicates what the session should be by how he would run the ease toward maximum gain. You follow that? Well, he’s short—circuited it because he isn’t running the case!
Now, the way to run that case toward maximum gain, oddly enough, is to run the ease at a level the case will gain on in the hands of the auditor auditing that case. And once you’ve made that differentiation and snapped out of the valence of the pc’s auditor, you will see that that would be the maximum gain; because now you’ve made an auditor, now that pc is gaining the little bit possible at that level and so you’ve got it.
So the material which you have in the way of processes, and so on, is matched up not against maximum gain, it’s matched up—matched up against the gain attainable in the auditing at that level that we can be sure of. See, so it’s matched up against certain gain in the hands of the auditor who will audit it. And if the auditor doesn’t do anything more than audit that level and run the processes of that level, his pc is going to gain, regardless of what you or I would do. Do you see? Somehow or other they’ll struggle in—through it and they’ll wander out of it and they’ll get themselves into some sort of a—of a bettered situation.
You see, for years people were being very successful at the processes we now have at Level I: Havingness, Trio, 8—C. Look at these things, man. And how were they run? Well, you sat the pc down, you told the pc he was supposed to answer the question and you just banged questions at him. And he gave you the responses to the questions and you acknowledged them. All right. Well, that was all the—all you had to know and that’s all you had to do and the question was the magic chant and you didn’t even have to know it wasn’t ev—it wasn’t a magic chant. You didn’t even have to know that it had any sense to it. Don’t you see? It was a rote process. And auditing could go on like that for years. So that level has become extreme; that it is muzzled. That’s the style at that. That’s muzzled. Level I: muzzled auditing.
We’ve had it for years. We take an ACC; there are a certain number of the students in the ACC just aren’t—their pcs aren’t progressing. And you listen to them for a little while: The pc opens his mouth to talk, the auditor interrupts. You see? Other things are going on and crisscrossing; other things are being entered. So we just put a muzzle on the pc—pardon me, a muzzle on the auditor. I’m afraid that I would regard those people as pcs; that’s the Hobson-Jobson there. They needed a lot of improvement. Well, we put a muzzle on the auditor and the pc would gain.
I’ve watched it. And I’ve seen a pc come right on up under muzzled auditing. Rather fabulous. Actually—actually making fabulous gains. Nobody being very smart about what process was being picked, see? So you use of course at those levels the crash, bang, hammer, pound, exclamation—point processes—you know, like, you know, ”Look at that wall. Walk over to that wall.”
Those things require no judgment as when to run them; they just get broad gains. Do you see how all that would be? So anyway, the auditing style is adjusted against the capability of the auditor.
Now, unfortunately there are three things—and now begins what I’m really talking to you about—there are three things which are in the road of every case. There are three things. There are all those things in The Book of Remedies, of course. In The Book of Remedies you find there are a great many different things that can be this way or that way about a case. But these data have never been set aside and there is nothing that overwhelms these data or overcomes them or fixes them up except addressing them: and one is the PTP, another is the overt with its companion withhold and the other is the ARC break. Those three things. And they’re present, potentially, in any session at any level anyplace.
Well, we’d normally handle these things with ”call in a higher—level auditor” at the very low levels, don’t you see? We’d handle them by special auditing. ”You, Joe, require special auditing.” You see, that sort of thing. ”You’ve got to be handled at a higher grade.” We don’t try to run into those things head—on at 0 and 1 particularly. But at II, the door opens and the totality of processes at II are contained in the book which you now have, The Book of Remedies.
But the woof and warp—rug terms, weaving—of any case is composed of a certain mental makeup, attitude or Combination don’t you see, of a chronic or continuous nature. In other words, there’s a continuous case mess—up. You follow me? I mean he’s got this wrong with him all the way along the line, don’t you see? This is wrong with this pc. These are the rocks in his head; these are the permanent fixtures, you might say, of the joint. Well, you got those things, but then you have the things which keep those things from unraveling.
I can’t think of a simile offhand, here, that would exactly—well, yes I can. You’ve got a whole big pile of rocks in a courtyard, and you could move those rocks very easily, or demolish them or set them up in an orderly fashion so they could be viewed. You could do things with those rocks, except that every once in a while some lunkhead drops the drawbridge or raises the drawbridge and you can’t get across the moat. Or once in a while they shut the gates. Do you see? Well, the moat and the drawbridge and the gates would be the PTP, the overt, the ARC break.
All those things just bar entrance to the case. They are entrance barriers. They keep the case from being entered. And of course, those things, one or another of the three can happen at any time. And that’s the liability of a session. And those are the three things which prevent the pc from being in—session and oddly enough, there aren’t any others. There aren’t any others.
There aren’t large numbers of things which prevent the pc from being in—session—there are just those three. Given, of course, the fact that he has an auditor of even indifferent skill. The auditor doesn’t have to be a screaming genius to audit routine cases.
But sometimes—sometimes it appears to you that you have to be a screaming genius to audit a certain case because you just can’t seem to get to first base with this case. You can’t get anyplace with this case. You can go nowhere. Very discouraging. And what you’re looking at is a PTP of chronic or temporary nature—continuous or temporary nature; you’re looking at continuing overts or past overts; and you’re looking at an ARC break which may have just occurred or may be of long—standing. In other words, those three things become six just to the degree of their position in time.
Now, you’ll accuse me of expanding it out too far, but if you really know your basics you realize I’m not. You see, the overt act will go into action when a withhold is put on it. You have to have a restraint before this thing really starts biting, don’t you see? You have to have a secrecy involved in the thing. You have to have something else involved before you get into any serious mess—ups with this, you see? You have to have censure.
Now, either it’s the censure of the fellow’s own decency or a censure of the act by the public or social mores or something, but there’s censure. He doesn’t think it’s good or somebody else doesn’t think it’s good and he goes into being made guilty or becoming guilty of this act. And then, although he is performing the act, he will withhold it. And what we’re doing, actually, is discussing the overt—motivator sequence; so when 1 say ”overts,” of course I mean the overt—motivator sequence. You see, the overt is always prior to the withhold. Always.
So the dominant factor there is the overt. Now, what are all of the things we know about handling overts and their consequences and what they track back to and everything else? Well, now this gets encyclopedic. See, this is lots. There’s lots to know about overts. Tremendous amounts. There are lots of ways to run them—all of them more or less effective. There are processes and processes and processes.
But how do you—how do you classify all these processes and this phenomena, and so forth, including withholds and missed withholds and everything else? Well, just classify it under the heading of overts.
Now, present time problem is peculiar, and well named, by the way, because even though it occurred in the past it can float in present time. And it’s the floatingness of the problem that we find fault with, not the fact that somebody has problems. It’s the—it’s the present existence. See, even though its genus was long ago, it still exists as a problem because it’s peculiar to the problem that it hangs up in space. And it’s interesting about the problem that it itself in its examination was what brought me over into a view of the Goals Problem Mass and gave us all Class VI. See? So it’s a basic mechanism in which a thetan engages.
And it’s postulate—counter—postulate, mass—counter—mass, you see? A is starting—is trying to go north and B is trying to go south, and there they meet in perfect balance, and there they stay and so they hang up in time. And they’ll just stay there forever. You’ve got one and then the other, you See? You’ve got these two forces counter—opposed.
The Russians actually have dignified this by calling it dialectic materialism, or ecclesiasticism or something—I don’t know their terms very well. But I was amazed. I went to the trouble of studying this subject that the Russians have whipped up to go along with German Marxism, and—your Russian really never realizes that he’s following a German philosophy; and the public at large doesn’t know that it was the last of the Kaiser’s official acts to finance the Russian Revolution. He paid for it since, rather heavily. But the German system probably could be traced back to some philosophical nonsense someplace or another on the line as the foundation of this dialectic materialism or whatever you call it.
And that is that ideas are only produced by the meeting of two forces. It’s marvelous. It’s marvelous. How anybody has made a philosophy and deified and enhanced and enshrined the problem by giving it this vast virtue of the fact that the only generating force of ideas anywhere in the universe is when a couple of planets collide or something, see? If you got a big idea, it’s because two big things collided; if you got a little idea, it’s two little things collided. If you want a real idea, why—if you want a nice idea, why, you smack your hands loudly and of course you get an idea. I don’t quite dig it. But anyhow, it’s very interesting.
I’m being serious about this, by the way. There is such a philosophy and that is its genus and it is ”force versus force produces ideas.” Well, actually, ideas versus ideas produce force. But they would not be likely to know that one. They’ve got their hat on backwards, you see? It’s like the doctor. He says, ”All—all function is determined by structure.” That’s taught. That’s the basic datum of a medical school. ”All function is determined by structure.” So if you’ve got your structure out, why, then the function will go out, don’t you see? And he’s never heard of anybody writing a story with a broken pen, see? But it can be done. You see?
And the reason we collide with them—aside from their own ideas of medical imperialism—is a very elementary reason—is because we have ”function precedes structure.” In other words, this—what the guy is doing in life influences what’s going to be built and made and what he becomes. And we’ve also worked with the idea, ”If you’ve got your ideas in crosswise, why, the broken leg won’t heal.” See? Well, the doctor looks at it that if you’ve got the broken leg in crosswise, why, then the ideas won’t heal. And that’s why they use shock and surgery to try to ”cure” insanity. That they have never succeeded in doing so in the entire history of the thing does not seem to convince them that they must have something backwards there.
Any clever research man would look at this sort of thing and he would say, ”Hey, well, wait a minute. There must be something wrong with the basic theory.” But no, that theory is so enshrined: that if you have a broken leg you get evil ideas about man, see? Yeah, this—it works this way, see? If you’re thinking wrongly it must have been because your brain cells were warped. So then of course, all you have to do is unwarp the brain cell to make somebody think rightly. That they’ve never succeeded in doing this does not deter them from believing it implicitly. It’s very funny. It’s a backward situation.
So you see, there’s a lot of ideas about ideas; and there’s a lot of ideas about structure and function; but man, basically, in this culture, is more devoted to materialistic ideas. That is to say, he says that ideas proceed from force. Man is generated—in the whole field of biology, man is generated from mud. They’re dramatizing its Darwinian implant that’s up the line up here. You see, ”Man comes from mud.” You see? ”Force makes ideas,” the Russian says, you see? The medical doctor says, ”Mental condition is caused by structural upsets.” See? It’s all proceeding from mass over to ...
Well, I don’t know what they could be hung up in, unless they’re just totally overwhelmed in their own problems. A problem is basically generated by postulate—counter—postulate. And if those postulates, neither one overwhelms the other, you’ve had it. Because now force is going to start accumulating on those two points. And if the force, unfortunately, does not overwhelm—force A does not overwhelm force B, force B does not overwhelm force A, the thing stays in balance now. And the balance, then, is maintained.
As long as the balance is maintained, you will have these two postulates counter—opposed, no matter how buried or hidden they get. And they will be represented by two forces counter—opposed, no matter how big they get. And they will remain to a marked degree equal, because they will only remain that way if they are equal.
So you see, you could have thousands of problems, none of which became a present time problem, you see? A pc could have the most brain—cracking problems he ever heard of in his past or background, you see, without doing very much to the pc, whether he solved them or didn’t solve them. Because they’re not held at this delicate point of balance. A—force A is not exactly opposed to force B, don’t you see? That imbalance there causes it to rock off and go into the distance someplace. And actually the solution of problems is more or less performed by unbalancing the postulates or forces which are involved in them.
You have the North and the South fighting over the 1964 election, something like this. Some are—certain ideas existed in the South and certain ideas existed in the North, you see? Well now, that war would still be going on unless somebody had started to change his ideas. Somebody must have started to change his ideas. Somebody must have gone into agreement with the North or the South wouldn’t have lost—something or somebody.
Now, communism right now is playing footsies with coexistence. Well, you see, they’ve weakened the force with which they’re pressing against the West. And it’s not going to remain that way; you’re not going to see a forever Cold War. In fact, they could work very hard in Russia right now to try to put the Cold War back together again and they wouldn’t win. Why’.? Because the idea has become unbalanced, you see? The idea of ”You’ve got to fight the dirty capitalist in the West” has been watered down.
Now, to some degree, elsewhere in the world, we have the idea that you ought to exist with the communists, but actually it hasn’t become that watered down. I notice they still have all their bases and missiles, and so forth, pointed in that direction, that people are agreeing they should do something about it. I notice they’re burning up an awful lot of manpower and petrol down in South Vietnam right this minute as a conviction that this should not go on, don’t you see? That communism shouldn’t go on.
So the idea against communism is, if anything, strengthening, and the idea of communism against the West is weakening, basically because they can’t get the materiel that the West has. You can’t buy powder puffs the way you can from drugstores, you see, over in New York. The populace itself’s havingness is down, don’t you see? So it’s unsettling them and making them question this philosophy, and that’s why they popped off Papa Khrushchev. They no longer believed totally, don’t you see? They believe that you might be able to do something.
For instance, one of their number—one men—I don’t know which one is which these days, but he is an expert on industrial improvement. And it’s interesting that this man, the most—the most informed man, possibly, in all of Russia is—now finds himself in a position of tremendous power in the Russian government. Well, he’s the boy that studied how to put industry on the road. How to bring in these various things. And he’s the boy who has probably been standing around recommending Western reward practices—Western supervision practices. Western capitalism has been consistently recommended and is being recommended right this moment to Russian industry as the way to get the show on the road.
That cold war is going to blow up. It can’t help it because the idea over here is diluting and, although we’re getting some dilution on it, in the West we just had a presidential campaign fought more or less on the basis of we ought to fight communism, which looks like it—there are an awful lot of people still agreeing, hm? The guy got some votes.
Now you see, what I’m trying to put across to you is if you as an auditor recognized this, you’d be able to clear cases easily, but more important, you’d be able to get them into session easily—that it isn’t every problem, see? It’s just that freak which is exactly balanced—its postulate—Counter—postulate and its force—counter—force. It’s just that freak is the only one you’re looking for and that’s the only thing that saves your bacon as an auditor. Because let me assure you, if you counted the number of problems which a thetan had had on the whole track since the beginning of this universe and you wrote the number up on the wall, it would exceed the number of years by considerable, because I think that people have more than one problem per year. Be an unwritable number! It would just go on endlessly; you’d go on writing, see?
And if you as an auditor had to take each one of these up, and even though you became very good and could handle a problem in a minute of auditing, you and the pc would be something like a million years old apiece by the time you had all the problems of the track audited. See, you’d have been that long auditing the pc at a minute apiece, you see?
In other words, you got this fantastic, overwhelming number of problems which the person has had and you’re not interested in any of them. And therefore—therefore, at a lower level, yes, you’ll see some pc sitting—oh, you’ve got problems; and he’ll go on about these problems; and he’ll go on about these problems; and he’ll delineate problems; he’ll describe problems; and he’ll go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, hour after hour, session after session, intensive after intensive. And you’ll say, why isn’t he getting any better?
Well, it’s because nobody has picked up the problem that was balanced perfectly. Now, in actual fact, there is a problem there. He just doesn’t happen to have mentioned it. And what’s very peculiar about this is that any condition—and now we’re not speaking of general pcs but any condition, even a neurosis or a psychosis—is so delicately balanced between postulate—counter—postulate, mass—counter—mass, that if an auditor just slips it just a little bit, the guy can’t go on holding onto it, see? This is such an accidental series of forces, you see, it’s so accidental that that thing is suspended in time that if you—if you just tick it, it starts going bzzz, bzzz, zzzz, zzzz—where is it? You know?
And you’ll sometimes see a dog or something like this that—not comparing pcs to dogs, but you see a dog once in a while will have a sympathetic limp. And he will—he will go out racing around the countryside, running on all four feet beautifully and then he sees his master, don’t you see, and he wants his master. He’s supposed to have a limp, he just remembers, see? And he’ll start limping. And he limps with great patheticness, don’t you see? He’s trying to hold one in, don’t you see? He’s trying to hold in a service fac of some kind, something for which he got paid and something and so forth. But he really can’t do it.
And right in the middle of his great pose of holding this thing in, why, a rabbit runs under a fence someplace, and ”Rowr rowr rowr!” you know, and all four feet on the ground, man, running like a whippet, you know? Forgotten all about it.
Oh, 1 just give that offhandedly. You’ve got a—that dog has to consciously hold in the limp, don’t you see? And you will see some poor neurotic sometime or another—you will actually see this as an auditor—trying for days after you have knocked out a PTP or knocked the few little pins out from underneath this delicate balance, that it’s gone and yet he’s used to it. It isn’t gone to the degree ... Don’t you see, you’ve triggered this and it’s sort of a way of life. You know? And you’ll see this poor person trying to recover this thing. You once in a while will see this. And you’ll see your tone arm is hanging now between 2.5 and 3.0 and it doesn’t anymore stay around 5.5 where it always did. Don’t you see?
But you sometimes will see—when this thing particularly became what we’d call a service facsimile or something like that; it had some element of survival in it, you see; he isn’t comfortable about it still—you’ll see this confounded thing—he’ll be trying to pick it up and put it back on. You’ll—he’ll want you to audit some more about it, or something like this. And it never even trembles on the needle. You can’t even get it to wiggle. It gives no tone arm action and so forth. And yet the pc will be trying to persuade you to audit it some more. You see?
Well, it was a present time problem for so long that it became a way of life and he’s not adjusted to not having it. The reason for that is, is he’s still got tremendous accumulated forces involved in its solution, you see, and it isn’t there. And there isn’t any reason you should do anything about it at all. It isn’t going to interrupt auditing for a moment. You go ahead and audit him on anything.
Now, just as there are these three things—the PTP, the overt and the ARC break—which have the moat and the drawbridge and the gates closed, you see, there are still these rocks in here, see? And they really got to be moved and straightened out before the guy can do anything at all, or before you could do anything whatever.
Well, now, on those rocks you use processes and those rocks will move, providing you can keep the gates open and get across the moat. See? The rocks, you can move them. Well, that’s done by a routine. Just to pick up your terminology. What we call a routine: That’s a rock—moving activity. And the only reason the routine will not work is because you couldn’t get in the courtyard. The routine always works if you can get in the courtyard. So if the routine isn’t working, you then must assume that you’re not in the courtyard. And the reason you’re not in the courtyard will have to do with a present time problem, long or short duration; an overt, continuously performed or being performed now or someplace, see? Overt: Something about overts with withholds mixed up in them, and that sort of thing; or an ARC break, which means a bypassed charge, which means some incomprehensible influence upon him which is making him go bzzzzzzz! and he can’t tell where it’s coming from or what it is. Something has made something go bzzz.
He’s got some charge loose someplace and he doesn’t like it. It’s like a—like you had a very large—hoofed donkey with all his hoofs on an organ keyboard. You see, this charge has all of a sudden—is alive someplace. Something is going this way and that way and he can’t tell what it is, where it is, or anything else. And that’s an ARC break. It’s a reduction of affinity, reality or communication, but in actual fact I can tell you exactly what an ARC break is: is you unwittingly ticked some major restimulation. Now you understand, something was in major restimulation in R6: data, track, end words, root words, something; and you ticked something that was already in tremendous restimulation in that bundle of the reactive bank and it went bzzz. And until you tick it again and key it out—and I give you right away that List 1 is perfectly adequate, see, to key it out—why, the guy is short—circuited. He looks like a switchboard that somebody has thrown a wire net over.
He’s going bzzzzz! There’ll be something there on the whole track that’s going bzzzz. And that has various things that can key it in. Now, what you’ve done is gotten a direct short circuit into the bank.
Now, that’s done in various ways and the things that are in chronic restimulation are very few. Difficulties with communication is primary. That is the primary end word that gets into restimulation. There’s no reason under the sun, moon or stars why anybody should communicate about anything, except there’s an end word on the subject. And this is always there. It’s a way of life.
Actually, you can sit down and ask somebody, ”Recall a time you communicated. Recall a time you communicated. Recall a time you communicated,” and they emerge at the other end of the line feeling much better and you can always get tone arm action on it and so forth. You should realize you’re running 268 GPMs all at one fell swoop.
Now, one of these things, you see then, when you—when you fail to carry out a communication cycle on the pc, why, you’re going to knock one of those end words into bzzzzzzzz! And he’s going to go, ”Nyow! Nyow! Nyow! Nyow!” or ”Mmm—mmm—mmm—mmm—mmm,” or apathy, or ”I can’t go on,” you know, or something like this. Something wild is going to happen. Exactly what the pc does is probably the root word. And if you get the root word ”to kill somebody” or something like that, you see, that would be quite interesting. Do you follow me?
Nevertheless, the lists themselves are tailor—made to knock the top off that’s got this thing in cockeyed, and if you can locate and indicate—just on, let’s say, List 1—what has occurred, and then tell the pc what it was, then this thing goes on a lie—down—dog thing and it just becomes quiet. And it’s quite interesting. You’ve probably had a lot of subjective reality on it. The mystery at which you’re feeling all ”Nyaaww!” And then somebody says that it’s a so—and—so, and you say, ”Oh.”
What actually has happened is, is one or another part of the GPMs has been yanked madly into restimulation or existence by some life proposition. But remember, it would have had to have been powerfully in restimulation because of life, before a little something you did could knock it that extra little flick. And of course, when you quiet that down by locating and indicating the bypassed charge, you’ve simply dropped it back to former status. Don’t—realize you’ve not done anything for the pc, but you’ve made him—his case—but you have made him auditable. You follow that? And that’s the total composition of the ARC break. There’s nothing more mysterious about ARC breaks than that.
Somebody has just reached in and pulled half a manual into a dead short. You got to get that hand out of there. You don’t have to straighten up the manual. Many an auditor makes the mistake of thinking he has to rebuild the whole organ in order to cure an ARC break. No, no. ”Take your hand out of there, Joe.” About all there is to it and the sound dies down.
So this is the—this is the crux for—you’ll find that things that are in chronic restimulation with men are something like time, problems—these are the big dogs that are always there. And bits of items, like havingness. That’s out of an item. But that item repeats itself endlessly through the bank.
These are—these are the things which jaw at men most of the time and of course which they ARC break on most. And they’ll ARC break most on communication or time and much less so on a problem (which is of course an end word). But they’ll sometimes ARC break on a problem. Somebody is giving them more problems and they go zzzzzz! But it tapers off then. But there’s such a tremendous gap—there’s such a tremendous gap between the value of communication and the value of time, and the next nearest competitor, don’t you see, that it’s a very silly looking chart. You couldn’t even draw it on the wall. You have these enormous values, you see, and then somebody tries to tell you that these little marbles lying on the floor, don’t you see, alongside of this Mont Blanc—there’s a marble in the bottom of the valley alongside of Mount—Mont Blanc, you see? And he says, ”Now, that’s as big as Mont Blanc.” Somebody is crazy, see? That couldn’t be.
Well, that would be the next value. That would be the next value, and that’s havingness, as compared to communication and time. These are the big dogs.
Communication is the biggest one. That’s huge. It’s rather unfortunate, because it’s way to hell and gone back in the series. It’s not close to PT at all. Way back! And you can ARC break somebody snapperoo on that big one, very easily. Just don’t answer him. Or answer him a little bit cross—toned or something like that. Well, this thing is in restimulation all the time, and of course time is in restimulation all the time or you wouldn’t have any time. Get late for a session sometime, you’re going to see a nice ARC break. You as the auditor are late for the session. See, making somebody wait.
You look in vain for something—some significance to the word ”wait.” There’s no significance to the word ”wait”; it’s just time. It’s maladjustments of time. Somebody throwing the switch off. You know, wrong way to. And the motor isn’t now running as smoothly as it did. It can’t be dramatized. Dramatization of the—the smooth turnover of the clock going tickata—tickata—tickata has been interrupted and it’ll throw it into restimulation, and you’ll have yourself an ARC break.
Now, knowing that that is the character of an ARC break, you should therefore, at lower levels particularly, devote it very exclusively into the lightest possible feather—touch methods of keying it out. You don’t go after an ARC break, you know, with a crash and you certainly don’t try to audit one. You just assess it. Pc sitting there not saying a word or screaming at you like mad; you just go on and assess it. You don’t care what the pc is doing; this is no auditing. Whatever the pc says, you don’t answer the pc; you don’t have anything to do with this at all. Because anything you do further than that, you’re going to mess it up further, see? Because you’re just going to key in that thing harder.
And the thing to do is to find the ARC break fast and find the last key—in of the ARC break quickly and expertly and key it out. And you find out it all dies down. It’s a very, very mysterious proposition. It’s almost like waving the magic wand across the booming surf and having it all of a sudden go into a millpond, you know?
Very often an auditor has done this expertly on a screaming, howling, raving, homicidal pc, and so forth. And he’s just gone on about his business somehow or other (while being almost knocked away from his E—Meter, you see); he’s managed to keep the pc on the cans and go on with his assessment and never answered the pc. All of a sudden says, ”All right,” gets a nice big fall on the fact that something or other has gone into restimulation on something or other, whatever is on the list, don’t you see? And he simply indicates this in its purity to the pc, brrr—bow. And all of a sudden, ”What happened?” Dead calm, you know? Pin drop a mile away would be loud compared to the ensuing silence. This—the pc’s all right. ”Well, I don’t know why we were worried about this.”
Now, a pc, by the way—this isn’t necessarily so true that it has to be audited, by the way. This isn’t one of these conditions that has to be audited. The pc very often feels guilty of overts against the auditor. Very often feels guilty of overts against the auditor, feels propitiative and that sort of thing. And I’ll give you news; there’s no particular reason to audit it. Because you’re just going to get back into the ARC break again. So that, you might say, is one overt you leave alone. Don’t pay any attention to it. So he feels propitiative, all right, let him buy you a pack of cigarettes. Who cares? It isn’t going to do him a bit of harm. He can just feel as propitiative as he likes about the subject or as guilty as he likes and it isn’t going to hold up his case, it isn’t going to do him a bit of harm, providing—providing only that he doesn’t get up to such a peak that he feels he shouldn’t have any auditing because he doesn’t deserve it.
And the way to handle that is not by pulling his overts, but by a little rat—a—tat—tat sort of an action of just a little bit of itsa on what he deserves or anything. It’s what he’s brought up as the reason why. Well, just get it itsaed. Get it out of the road. You’ll sometimes run into this sort of thing. But in actual fact, you wouldn’t even really have to do that. If his ease was making any progress, he’d come out of this too. Do you follow me? Now, this isn’t one of these important factors; I’m just giving you some sidelights on it.
But the ARC break is an R6—not an R6 action to handle, but it’s R6 materials going into restim in that bank. And what you’ve got to do is neat them up.
What you actually are doing—you were in there piling up these rocks in the courtyard, minding your own business and everything was going along fine; and then suddenly you find yourself not even outside the gate—you’re clear out there on the meadow looking back at the castle, with the pc saying, ”Nyooowww!” or the pc just nuuhhhh, nothing.
The only one that’s dangerous is the one that you don’t detect, that he has at the end of the session and so he doesn’t come back for his next session. And that’s only dangerous because it interrupts auditing. You get what happens?
Now, if you didn’t have a recognition of these three things—the PTP, the overt and the ARC break—as being the only three barriers—the only three real barriers to a case—you might have difficulty in aligning all of the different phenomena you find in a case. Because there’s tremendous number of phenomena in a case. Oh, and just thousands and thousands and thousands of conditions which you could equate up to ”he wasn’t being audited,” or something, ”he wasn’t responding to auditing.” Just be thousands of these things, you see? But the funny part of it is, almost all of them depend on this—these three things’ direct handling.
In other words, the major things are those. Now, there are other things which prevent the case from being audited, like he doesn’t have any money or you haven’t got any time, you know, or the auditor hasn’t been trained or the pc is being talked at all night long when he should be getting some sleep by his wife who wants him to stay good and sick because, after all, the will is in her favor and here’s some guy auditing this bird, you know? No, no, didn’t like that. So he’s argued at all night, ”Well, how do you know you’ve had any gains out of your auditing?” Typical sample question.
He comes back to session, you see, at eight o’clock the next morning. Well, it’s just all covered in the Auditor’s Code. He hasn’t had any sleep. He would be a troublesome ease, because he’s a trouble source. He is a trouble source because he has somebody on the other side of him who is doing him in and he’s such a knucklehead that he won’t knock this off, you know? It’s something like somebody hitting himself on the head with a hammer all the time because it’s habitual. And he really won’t knock it off long enough to let himself recover, you see? He’s trying to cover these two spheres. He’s trying to propitiate over here to somebody and at the same time trying to get better, and he eventually only winds up by trying to make them wrong, don’t you see, by quitting, or them wrong by not getting better. How he eventually figures this out, Lord knows, but he would eventually figure this out.
He would first begin to try to prove them wrong by getting better. Well, let me tell you, if he’s trying to get better to prove somebody wrong, you have set up the postulate—counter—postulate and so you have a continuous PTP running in the session. Don’t you see? And if you ever wanted to see a graph sit in one place intensive after intensive, it’s to get somebody with a chronic PTP which is actually riding in present time which nobody ever does anything with. And then you will see that graph, intensive after intensive remain exactly the same. It’s the most marvelous thing how that graph can remain poised in that one place.
He has to be audited pretty clumsily to have all this always missed, don’t you see, because auditing itself, chipping away at the case, is liable to hit that PTP too. See, and it only has to take a milligram off the side of one of the forces to unbalance it. Do you see? It’s not really a hard trick, but if it’s just blindly ignored and somehow or another never gone into and it somehow or another gets avoided all the way along the line, then you’re going to see this constant graph, constant graph, constant graph. Not necessarily a low one. Not necessary a high one. Just any graph. And if you want to see a graph that just doesn’t change, doesn’t change, doesn’t change, doesn’t change, doesn’t change, well, you know very well that the person has a chronic present time problem of some kind or another. It’s just not going to shift.
Now, there’s a different behavior on a graph for overts, oddly enough, a different behavior. Overts carry a lot of different reactions with them. Some fellow is just so not—there and so irresponsible that the overt has nothing to do with him. And there are various types of responses or reactions to overts. Somebody is going on doing this ”but,” you see? There’s always some ”but.” But it’s—his attitude toward this type of overt can be varied. Sometimes it’s very propitiative, you see? He just can’t help but do this overt and he’s getting more and more propitiative. But actually, overts are a source of change. They are not a source of constant behavior. And if you see a case—if you see a case constantly and continuously shifting, but never shifting steadily, see, you get—you get the idea? I mean, this ease is shifting—it goes up a little bit and then it goes down, you know, and then it goes up a little bit and it’ll go down and around, and this intensive he did well on and the next intensive he doesn’t do well on. You know, it’s a sporadic result to auditing.
Don’t always blame the auditor. There is a bunch of overts mixed up in this that the pc is performing or are going into resti—they are going into restimulation during the session period, or weren’t touched by sessions. Do you see this? So there’s something—there’s something wrong there. Well, what you get is an instability.
And it works like this: The individual won’t let himself get any better. If he finds himself improving, he yanks himself back downstairs again. You got all kinds of odd computations on this, like he doesn’t deserve to get better and if he got any more—if he got any better he would destroy everybody. He mustn’t let himself get strong because he might commit this overt again. Do you see? He’s on—either he or the society are on a check, don’t you see? If the society is on the check, well, if he commits that overt again he’s liable to go to jail. See, that’s society checking him. And the people around him see him get more active and know that he’s a bad man basically, and they don’t want to see him more active, so they see him a little more active ...
You find this, by the way—we had one up in New York one time, many years ago, that led the auditors up there the—about the maddest chase I think I have ever seen. There was some girl up there. Somebody didn’t have any better sense than to audit somebody who was an institutional case. Well, that’s trouble to begin with. All right. The mad spin that went on from that, I listened to for the better part, I think, of a year and a half. Every few weeks I would hear some more about this case. It was something on the order of The Perils of Pauline. It was a real cliffhanger. I felt sorry for the poor girl, but there wasn’t anything you could do about it. The auditor would get the pc and get her somewhere where she could be audited and then would proceed to give her some auditing. The girl would come up toward anger, and then get loose from the auditor, one way or the other, and get home and ream everybody out. And then would be taken by the family to the local institution and—or to the local psychiatrist and knocked into seven different contortions, don’t you see? I think they have seven contortions, is what the code is. (That’s a joke, by the way.) I was just thinking—this is very interesting, I wonder if there is a connection between—between some—some certain practice I know of in India and what they’re trying to do with electric shock, because they sure go into contortions.
Anyway, the—this poor girl would then manage to escape or get away; and the auditor would get ahold of her, and he’d audit her back up again; she would get angry; she’d go back home, ream the family out. And this went on for a year and a half Same cycle.
There was another one that went on for a long time, in that same vicinity, that was more pathetic. It was just the fact that the brother con—had the power to sign checks if the girl continued to be non compos mentis. It’s just a very sordid, commercial affair. And the poor girl would get auditing, you See; and the second she’d get any better they’d have her thrown back in the institution. And she wasn’t bad off, but it just got her so rocky after a while, she didn’t know whether she was coming or going. It was just the fact that any time she was in an institution then the whole wealth of the family—which had been left to the brother and the sister—came under his control for the period that she was in an institution. And he was the sort of a bird that liked to drink and go to Las Vegas and blow dough, don’t you see? So it was just a jockey. I think no auditor seemed to ever be able to do anything about it. But these are crazy ones.
You’ll see these kind of cycles going at one time or another. Well, they’re not exactly composed of overts, they’re composed of the restraints of the society against the pc. We must take that into consideration. It isn’t just the pc himself, you see? The society could also be chivying up the pc one way or the other. That’s why I’ve given you those two examples. Some mad dance could be going on around your pc, don’t you see, that you yourself have wot not of, or haven’t evaluated the importance of Well, you’d have to handle that. You’d have to handle the social environment of the pc quite in addition to that, but it would give the same symptom of overts, is the point I’m making here. See? You’d have the same behavior. The person would get better and get worse and get better and get worse and get better and get worse, and that sort of thing.
Well now, a person who has a tremendous number of overts, when they remain constant, are simply trying to solve a present time problem with overts. And you’ll find most anybody is trying to solve a problem with overts. That’s why they commit these—why they keep doing these things, because they got some problem. And it goes back to a PTP.
But the overt itself can be on the part of the society or on the part of the individual during any course of auditing. Over a month or year, but not over the course of a session.
So you sometimes wind up with this kind of a situation: You audit the pc just long enough to get the gates open and the pc leaves the session and gets the gates closed in your—your face. And what you’ve got to have, then, is sufficient gain so the pc gets up high enough that the gates don’t get closed in your face before you get to audit the pc again. And that is the primary problem of overts. It isn’t whether or not society will be damaged. I think it will take care of itself until we get around to it, by plenty of damage.
We’re not worried about, like the psychiatrist, the total evaluation of the psychiatrist is whether or not people in society will be damaged. That’s why he has to damage people. He’s solving the problem of ”the destructive conduct of people.” That’s the one—that’s what brings him in close to the police all the time, why you always find him in—representing people in police courts and all this sort of thing. He’s—his problem is the problem of the society—that people shouldn’t act destructively—and he considers himself a sort of a mental cop.
It’s not for the patient, you see, it’s for society that he’s operating. Well, that explains most of his inhumanities with regard to the society.
Well, his problem is a social problem and he’s trying to solve it in his own way, peculiar as they are. But now, your problem then at that time would become a social problem, and you would find yourself having to solve the social aspect of the case, because you can’t make any progress with the case. You sometimes collide with this unwittingly, and you just think it’s out of your control, and so you don’t handle it.
But a case can commit a whole bunch of series—a whole series, continuously, of overts with consequent withholds from you which park the case into a thud. And this is more or less the continuous, no—changing overt case. That case, however, does go up and down. It doesn’t hang like a PTP does.
But the—the guy—the guy for a whole week goes without hitting any little kids over the head. And then he’s just got to hit a little kid over the head toward the end of the week, and this is another overt; but you don’t hear about this.
I was very interested one time, in a pc I was supervising the auditing of, to find out that this pc habitually killed animals. It was very interesting, you know? Just well, animal—kill the animal. He had to do it, don’t you see? It’s all very reasonable. And the pc was making no progress at all. And this was the mystery which was being posed. What was going on, don’t you see?
And eventually, why, we dug and dug and dug, and we finally found out that it wasn’t something—it wasn’t an animal, the way Freud would have had it, that the child had killed when they were two by accidentally sitting on it. No, this was the—this was the simple procedure of when a cat was seen and nobody else was around, then the cat had to be slowly choked to death, until it was very dead, see? So, this was what the auditor was going up against, you see? That gate was closed. Did this person ever dare be frank with the auditor? Oh, no! Do you see?
Well, the pc had the gate shut and intended to keep it shut. And therefore there could be no communication with the auditor, and you saw the result of a wobbly type of gain. The pc, for a little while, would knock off this sort of thing, you see, and the force of the process all by itself would start driving the pc up the line. Now when either society or the pc sees they’re all of a sudden getting better and that mustn’t happen because they really should stay in a very weak state—otherwise they’d be very destructive—so they pull themselves back down again, and you see the case going this way on the graph, see? Just up and down, up and down, but not getting anywhere. You know, they climb up the well three inches and—at night and fall back three inches in the daytime. They don’t even make it two; they fall back three. When you get that you know you’re looking at a continuing overt.
That isn’t well documented. I haven’t got tons of cases against this representation for this excellent reason, is you don’t find out about them very often. It’s very hard to collect data on, because the mechanism of it is a withhold, see? So you suspect more about that level than you ever really find out on a broad level. Because very often auditors are shy about inquiring into the private lives of others to the force and duress necessary to have cracked this one. And if the auditor—I’m now talking on the basis of a relatively untrained auditor. He has a diffidence, don’t you see? The personal privacy of the pc is ...
Well, of course, he doesn’t know enough about the mind to realize that that personal privacy is what is making that pc have lumbosis, and that it’s just about as safe to have around, don’t you see, as a handful of scorpions. It—as long as this remains terribly private, our pc is going to remain awfully sick. That doesn’t look to me to be a sensible attitude therefore. But nevertheless, you find that auditors, when they first enter training and that sort of thing, you find they’re being very diffident. Diffident.
”Did you ever commit an overt against the HASI?”
Well, I missed a withhold someplace in the group right now. All right, that’s all right, I forgive you. Now, somebody, some year or two from now, is going to come along and say, ”You remember that thousand pounds you missed? Well, I took it, and you forgave me, remember, in the session.”
And having asked this question, this auditor received the response, ”Yes, I once stole a pen. 1 think it was off the Registrar’s desk or something.”
And the auditor was so relieved to have pulled this overt and knew the pc was now going to get better. That stayed in my mind as a classic, man. Classic. This was an overt.
So that’s the wobbly condition which you find at that level. They won’t let themselves progress because they would do much worse; they’ve got it all figured out, you see? If they catch themselves getting well, they put themselves down to the bottom of the well again, quick. If society sees them getting any better, why, everybody opens up on them with guns because they know this guy is dangerous, don’t you see?
And you get a wibble—wobble going on, but you know that there is a—really a continuous—a continuous type overt there, a repeating type overt. That’s what you know about it. And that’s—that’s the key to that gate. It’s a continuous, repeating type overt; there’s something going on. It happens over and over; it’s happened many times and it’s been very dangerous and it isn’t stealing a pen from HASI. It’s a little worse than that.
And not only that, but society agrees it’s worse than that. It isn’t the personal mores of the individual has now figured it out ... Guys who try to give you overts off the past track—as soon as somebody tries to give me some overts off the past track I stamp them down into this lifetime. Why? Well, if they haven’t run well on overts in this lifetime, why, I know that they will then go on the backtrack, because I’ll call to your attention that none of the Praetorian Guard of Rome have any longer any power of arrest. That’s a safe overt to disclose, see? So I figure the guy is dodging around about something. It’s not that there aren’t whole track overts. Good heavens! But a guy would have to be flying like a bird to really be taking responsibility for them. Look! To really call them an overt he would have to have taken some responsibility for his past lives and he’d have to take some responsibility and he’d have to have some positive memory of this, and so forth. In other words, a lot of conditions are there.
And this rule, then, it doesn’t pervade 100 percent that every time you audited a pc and he brought up a past track overt he was dodging a present life overt. No, I’m talking about this bird—he hasn’t been audited that long or that effectively, you understand? And he’s giving you past track overts. Oh, no! Don’t you see? We’re dodging some continuous chain of overts.
And the proof of this thing is—the proof of this thing is that I have watched several such eases never get any better on auditing and finally have chased it down to that. And it was only when I began to load up a blunderbuss and say, ”This life, brother! Now! Where you live this life. Where you have been John Jones. Now, that’s—we want something that you have done during this period of time. See? Now, when were you born?”
”Well, I was born ... Well, you’re invalidating my past track.”
”Yes, I know I am. Thank you. What I want to know is, I just got to be sure here, that in this span from the 21st of June, since 1921, or something like that, until now, what’s the date?”
”Well, it’s—it’s—it’s 1964.”
”All right, that’s fine. Now, during that span of time, have you ever done anything that you considered socially reprehensible, or that anybody else did?”
”Oh well, they’re always being unreasonable about it.”
”Unreasonable about what?”
Now, of course, the eat leaps out of the bag. See? What is this thing.? Now let’s find out what this is. When we get that one out of the road, we’re into the gates. Otherwise, this overt running can be sometimes used by the pc to keep you outside. Do you see? So running overts can be a backfiring proposition. And you sometimes can run overts endlessly without ever getting an overt, don’t you see? This becomes, then, the peculiarities of some failures that you run into in cases. This is all covered in dozens of different ways in The Book of Remedies.
But now, those are the primary—the primary things that are going on. And you’ll find out in The Book of Remedies that they equate down—the general thing is, although it may not be totally plain to you when you look over the remedy, you actually are going toward an ARC break the person has had in life, or is in now; or overts or withholds or missed withholds of some kind or another that have been passed up, that nobody has found out about, and even the pc might not know about. Or it’s some kind of a locked—up postulate—counter—postulate, mass—counter—mass that is in that delicate balance that permits no possible case gain.
See, the person is so fixated—he’s postulate A, and he’s looking at postulate B, and he would so little be postulate B, and he is being so much postulate A, that he is just pinned right there. He looks like somebody, you know, that’s just got his eye glued to one of these machines that you drop a penny in, in the penny arcades, you know? And somehow or another it’s gotten busted and continues to run. There he is, man. He just isn’t going to take his eye away from that, man. And he appears to ARC break easily. He appears to do various other things which are quite peculiar. Beeau—truth of the matter is, when you have distracted his attention from what he is so fixated on, it hits him. So he knows better than to let his attention be distracted from this peephole. See, he knows that if he takes his eye away from it, why, somebody is going to hit him. He mustn’t leave it, and so there he is.
So you’re auditing and he’s sort of putting you off over here. You’re sort of auditing at this three or four feet distance, you see, from the pc, and he’ll sort of handle these things backwards and forwards and you ask him a question and so forth. You suddenly say to him very searchingly and so forth, ”What was the question I just asked you? How does that answer the auditing. . .”
 ”What question?”
”Well, the question that you were—you were just asked.”
Actually, you’re talking, you know—this guy—all of his attention is fixated right here, see? And he says, ”Well, what question are you talking about?” And you get into some of the silliest discussions. When you find yourself in one of these silly discussions, realize that you’ve never had any part of the pc’s attention, that you don’t have the pc’s attention in session; the pc hasn’t been in—session. You’re auditing his right hand.
So when you have a—when you have a situation going—when you have a situation going that you don’t easily comprehend, you’ll find it added up in The Book of Remedies. But you could possibly whip yourself up a nice bowlful of remedy yourself, if you just carefully took this apart on the basis of. Is it a PTP? Is it an overt with its withholds and so forth? Or is it an ARC break?
Now, you’ll find out that in general auditing you don’t have to fall back on The Book of Remedies. But you find out if your pc has a PTP in session and you don’t handle it, you’re going to get into trouble; if you try to audit over the top of an ARC break, you’re going to get into trouble; and if the pc has committed an overt between sessions that you don’t know about, you’re going to get into trouble. So these things you’ve always got there. And they’re—they’ll be constant. That’s why I’m pointing them up. They are not, then, just merely a remedy of a whole case, they take place in the small portion of a session.
So you see then, an auditor’s actions are broken down into two sections. And one is the action of a routine, where he’s following through, and the other is making the case auditable and receptive to the receipt of the routine. Now, he’s got to do that before he can run the routine. So the auditor has these two different—widely different—classes of action. And the hunt—and—punch proposition of trying to find out what ails this case and that sort of thing is frankly not necessary on all cases. You won’t find all cases are equally difficult to start, fortunately. Actually, it’s not a majority, even; it’s a minority.
So a tremendous number of people, they’ll make some distance, in other words, just on a plain repetitive process, don’t you see? And as they’re going up—as they’re going up through I, and so on, they’re not getting so much better that it alarms them. You don’t have the overt mechanisms jumping in. And you know, various other factors enter in here to support the Grade I Auditor. At 0, well, it doesn’t make any difference, you see, to him. And he isn’t up there. But at I, when he finally gets up to a level of Release, then he’ll put himself back downhill again if you’ve got an overt mechanism present, so therefore we have to bring in The Book of Remedies at Grade II.
And all the way along the line from there on up the auditor has to be alert to these in any session which he is conducting. He’s got to be right on the ball on those three things. Those are the things that will keep him out. When it’s something more than this and appears to be more than this and appears to be terribly serious and it—so forth, just knock it off, knock it off, it’s one of those three things. ”Oh yes, I know, but it’s such a terrible situation and it’s so ghastly and the results of this are so awful that it must possibly be more complex than simply PTPs or overts or ARC breaks.”
No, I am sorry, it couldn’t possibly; because they are about as bad as you can get and you can’t get any further south with the surface manifestations of the ease than a case in a chronic PTP, a case chronically and continuously committing the same type of overt, or somebody who is very badly ARC broken and doesn’t know what ails him and is just out of control with his switchboard shorted up from one side and one end to the other.
Now, when you have those conditions, why, you’ve got the chronically failed case. He isn’t going to destimulate because this is so restimulated, don’t you see? An auditor is going to have to do something about it to make this person auditable.
So even at Level 0 and Level I, these people exist. Don’t you see? And they are in a terrible state, let me assure you. They are—they don’t improve. And anything you do—you point a finger at them—they—one or another of these factors will restimulate, whatever one is wrong.
So, your proper procedure at those levels would be to turn the pc over to an auditor who knew how, straighten the pc up, and then turn the pc back over to the original grade. Just because he’s been straightened up at II or III is no reason he is now in shape to run at II or III. He’s now about in shape to itsa. Because these processes are pretty heroic. If you look them over, they comb a pc’s hair mighty smooth, but it sometimes has to be done very roughly. Trying to get somebody to come up with the actual overt necessary to resolve the case, and so forth, it can be a rather duressful situation. ”Well, I’m just going to sit here all night long. I’m perfectly willing to sit here all night long; and you’re going to sit there all night long, and we’ll just wait until you finally do tell me what has fallen on this meter.”
And you find the pc saying, ”Well, all right, if you put it that way, it was I who threw the handful of tacks down on the gutter that your ear ran over and why you had a flat tire last night. All right. Now go ahead and shoot me.”
This is pretty wild. Sometimes you come up on this, you can’t get onto the gradient of communication at all, don’t you see? ”What are you willing to talk to me about?” and so forth. That would work in almost all cases. This guy is perfectly willing to talk to you about anything except this one overt. Well, there’s only one thing to do from that point on is practically choke it out of him by duress.
”All right, I tell you what; when you’re willing to tell me about this, we will have some more auditing. Okay? End of session.”
”What? What happened? Oh, you put it that way, I’m perfectly willing to tell you about it. It’s just sort of a nasty habit I have. Nasty habit I have. Actually, it’s an impulse to drown girls.”
It’s quite, quite interesting. There are ways to approach these smoothly on a gradient, but in the final analysis it comes up to the fact that it’s something you have to do. And you can be as nice about it or as smooth about it as you want to, but remember, it is something you have to do. And sometimes that exceeds being nice about it.
Well anyway—anyway, those are the barriers, but they exist all the way on up the line. Now, The Book of Remedies, of course, falls back and leads to those things one way or the other throughout its length and breadth. And it might be rather obscure how some of those remedies do lead to some of those things because they are empirically arrived at, the remedies are; they’re just things that have worked consistently for a long period of time. But these three are the dominant ones and these are the three which get in the road of routines and which you have to handle continuously as an auditor, so I thought I’d better sum them up and tell you all I knew about them as rapidly as I could.
Thank you very much.