There are two extremes a Dianetic student can go to on the subject of erasure.
A. He can grind and grind and grind (ABCD, ABCD, ABCD, ABCD, on and on) with the TA going up up up and never once tell the pc to go earlier.
B. He can watch the TA come down to between 2 and 3 and go loose on the last incident run, ask the pc „erase or solid” get a non-committal answer and send the pc earlier. He can keep sending the pc earlier and earlier on another chain without ever noticing he’s finished the first chain.
These are the two extreme cases. In Case A it is OBVIOUS from TA rise that the chain has an earlier incident. In Case B it is obvious from the TA that the chain erased.
In A the student is preventing the pc from going earlier when he should.
In B the student is forcing the pc to go earlier when he shouldn’t.
In both cases the student hasn’t a clue of what an engram chain is.
It is marvelous how students demand „the exact phrase” to use as an effort to avoid having to really understand what he is doing in auditing.
If a student hasn’t a clue about what he is doing then a thousand goofy outnesses will keep cropping up, each one requiring (a Supervisor thinks) a special instruction. After a while you get a course text weighing one ton, and all because the student didn’t grab the basic definitions in the first place.
A student who will do either A or B above has not grasped that an engram chain is held in place by the basic for that chain and that basic is the FIRST TIME and that the clue to erasure is unburdening down to first time and erasing first time and that all picture chains are there because the first time is there.
The student assumes one always asks „solid or erasing”. Or that one always does only what the pc says. Or some such consideration.
I would damned well never ask „solid or erasing” if I saw the TA start to climb. I would know the TA measured mental mass and that it was accumulating and wouldn’t erase. I’d just ask for an earlier incident.
Honest, it’s awful easy.
A very odd outness a student will encounter when he is so dedicated to the exact words is the fast pc who erases before he can tell about it. Along about no. 3 of R3R the TA blows down and the needle F/Ns.
A student who knew his business by understanding would ask, „Did it erase?” of course. The pc would say, „It vanished,” and VGIs would come in.
A fast running pc on a light chain can occasionally blow an engram by inspection.
If it was basic for that chain, one would be committing the crime described in B above. The pc is likely to go into another chain or a heavy protest.
So you see, there’s no substitution for actually understanding what’s going on.
There’s the pc, there’s the bank, there’s the meter needle, there’s the meter tone arm and there’s the auditor, there’s the procedure, there’s the report. That’s all the parts there are to a session.
When one understands each one, one can audit. When one doesn’t understand some part of any of the above, he will require unusual solutions.
Anything truly powerful is truly simple.
So a student who goofs is being complex and hasn’t understood something about one of the major parts named above.
I just saw a goofed-up session that went like this:
PC: It (the engram) happened every day for three days.
AUDITOR: ABCD.
Flunk. The auditor was so deficient in knowing about chains and first time that he didn’t tell the pc to go to the first day’s engram but let the poor pc flounder in day 3! And so the chain did not erase and the pc hung up in it.
If the rule of First time is really understood, one would realize a lot of things, even that the pc was beginning an incident half way through it and hadn’t begun to run the beginning of it so of course, no erasure. If this happened on basic… „There’s no earlier incident” (TA high).
„Does the one we’re running start earlier?”
„Hey, yes it does.”
„Move to the new beginning of the incident…”
Yoicks, an erasure!
This is no invitation to depart from procedure. It’s an invitation to see procedure as an action, very precise, capable of being understood and done, not a rote chant.
I’m sure some students are ex-medicine men who did their spells with exactly worded chants. It’s time they understood the brew in the pot !
That’s the procedure — not do the commands rhyme!