When one is associating with or attempting to guide or handle a person, it is necessary to know something of the nature of a being.

If a being were a single unit, separated from all other beings, conditions and current influences, the task of understanding him would be relatively simple and philosophers would have had it all worked out long before Dianetics and Scientology.

A single unit being responds to the most elementary and simple rules and laws you will find in Dianetics and Scientology. Affinity, Reality, Communication and Understanding; the time track; mental image pictures; the earlier incident holding the later in place; responses to Matter, Energy, Space, Time, Form as well as force; and the axioms. On this you can rest assured. And one might even wonder why we need all the additional bulletins and cautions and provisions and lectures.

The fact of the matter is that when one addresses a person, a human being “in the flesh“ one is not addressing a simple being.

Possibly an example will illustrate this: I had just finished giving a congress and a staff member had made some appointments for me to see people who wanted to talk to me. And, in a conference room, I was suddenly confronted by a woman who was demonstrably and actively insane. She was incoherent, she was being “pursued“, she was utterly agitated. Well, I was not then and never was in the business of treating the insane. Yet here was a situation which had to be handled if only to maintain social calm. In those days there were many techniques for exteriorizing people and so I used one of them, putting her back of her head. Promptly she went sane, calmly reviewed her problem with her husband, sensibly made up her mind what she was going to do to properly resolve the matter, thanked me and departed. For a brief time she had temporarily become a single unit being.

I have not given the example as a lesson in what to do in such cases for exteriorization techniques are not reliable. But only to illustrate the complexity of people.

What you see as a human being, a person, is not a single unit being.

In the first place, there is the matter of valence. A person can be himself or he can be under the belief that he is another person or thing entirely. This removes him a step from being a simple being.

Then there is the matter of being in a body. A body is a very complex contrivance, quite remarkable, quite complicated. And it is also quite subject to its own distortions.

There are also the entities (as discussed in Dianetics, The Modern Science of Mental Health, pages 84-90, and also The History Of Man, pages 13-14, 43, 75-77). These follow all the rules and laws and phenomena of single beings.

And then there is the matter of influences of other people around this human being.

From a single, simple being there is a progressive complication setting in as one adds all these other factors.

The single, simple being, without any further associations can be out of valence even miles away from other contacts.

It is the aggregate of all these factors which you address when you seek to guide or handle the usual human being.

This is also why objective processes are so effective — they get many of these factors all going in the same direction for once.

None of this is to say that it is impossible to handle all this. Far from it. But it does tell one why all the additional precautions (like don’t overrun, like careful session procedures) are there in all those materials.

But mainly it tells you that full recoveries seldom happen fast and that cases require an awful lot of work and often for a very long time.

And like the woman at the congress, one sometimes gets a sudden near-magical result. The trouble with that one was that she soon went back into her head and became again a composite, even though she now did have a sane plan of action to follow.

Results, if you follow the rules and laws carefully and with good heart, can be obtained. And you, knowing your business, can obtain them.

But don’t become discouraged if it all doesn’t happen fast and if it takes a long time. When you are handling a human being, you are handling a composite.

We did not construct the human mind or human body. We did not put the universe there to involve, oppress or complicate life. We are working with the end product of an awful lot of trials and tribulations.

If we were working with single beings, it would be a nothing to do. We are not. We are working with a complexity and we can do an awful lot, far more than anyone could do before us. And our work with life has effects and influences far beyond our auditing tables. It took vast, vast numbers of years and eons for life to get that involved and complicated. Be glad that it doesn’t take even a tiny fraction of that to dig it out and smooth it out with Dianetics and Scientology.