When you start to audit new pcs the liabilities are these:

1. If you do not show him what auditing is, he does not know what is expected of him. Thus he is not only not in session but in mystery.

2. If you do not indoctrinate him into what he is supposed to do when the auditor gives him a question or command, he often does not answer the question or comply with the command and only then can things go wrong in the session.

3. If the pc is not in the auditor’s control and if anything goes wrong, then the auditor can do nothing about it as he does not have any session or control of the pc.

Some, particularly HAS students, are very remiss in this and “covertly audit”.

In “talking” to someone they also seek to audit that person “without the person knowing anything about it”.

This of course is nonsense since auditing results are best achieved in a session and a session depends upon a self-determined agreement to be audited.

You can achieve changes in a person with covert auditing — I won’t say you can’t since I have done so. But it is uncertain and not very popular.

You have to audit without agreement when the pc is unconscious and can’t respond.

But to make it a common practice when it is really used only in emergency (as in unconsciousness or when you have no time) would be foolish.

Further, using Scientology to handle situations in life is a whole subject in itself and it isn’t auditing. (Example: Person angry, a Scientologist locates and indicates the by-passed charge. Example: On a raving psychotic, the Scientologist arranges for the person to have a rest away from his ordinary environment and associates and forbids damaging “treatments”. Example: Somebody seems to have lots of problems so the Scientologist teaches him what a problem is. Example: By observing the anxiousness of a person to receive motivators the Scientologist estimates the degree of overts the person has committed. Example: One sees a difficulty in planning is not getting any better so he decides there must be a lie in the plan and locates it at which time a good plan can emerge.)

There are countless ways to use the philosophy of Scientology in direct application to life. And even hopeless physical conditions respond to just understanding more about life. For instance there are many cases on record of a bedridden person reading no more than Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science and becoming well and active.

So one doesn’t have to “covertly audit” if any communication is possible. One can teach, advise, orient someone in existence, applying the truths and knowledge of Scientology.

The point is, when auditing is begun it is best done by agreement to be audited and is most successful when the preclear understands what he is supposed to do in response to auditor actions, and is only disastrous when there is not enough control in the session to set things right if they start to go wrong.

Any auditor who just sits and lets a pc ramble on and on with no regard to the subject being handled, even in Itsa, is very foolish, has no session and is wasting time.

The wrong thing to do is chop the pc up and cut his comm because he is so far adrift.

The right thing to do is to prevent it before it happens by not auditing preclears who have not agreed to be audited or who have no faintest idea of what’s expected of them.

In the hands of an unskilled “auditor” I have seen a preclear, who was running a psycho-analytic type session, giving all the expected psycho-analytic symptoms and responses. And getting nowhere.

There are two ways it could have been handled — one is to have explained this wasn’t psycho-analysis and then explained the auditing cycle. The other would have been to run O/W on the analysis the pc had had or even do a by-passed charge assessment on the analysis. Probably both would be necessary if mere information about how auditing was done did not care for the condition.

One of the rules of auditing is never to let any part of any question or command be agreed upon once and never repeated. Example: The auditor tells the pc, “When I say ‘her’ in this command, I mean your mother. Now what have you done to her?” The pc is always having to think back to this agreement to answer the command.

Educating a pc is not the same thing. Here one is knocking out past response patterns, as in social actions or some earlier form of treatment. One is in effect cancelling out earlier habits of response in order to get auditing to occur. Once that is done one does not of course have to do it again and what the pc says in a session is what the pc says. Sometimes he wanders all about before he answers the question. But the auditor in any case must get his question answered or the command complied with.

So auditing in general is a clean-cut agreement to be audited, a session is conducted with an auditing cycle, no matter how long or short that cycle may be.