I want to call your attention to something you might watch with some interest. It is the systematized generality with which a certain type of preclear answers questions. He categorizes. You ask him about a cat and he gives you all cats. Many people will answer in that way, and they very often answer with system.

There is nothing mysterious about this, but it denotes the existence of groupers, good old Book One groupers. When a preclear answers in this fashion, his track is very grouped, whether he knows it or not.

In auditing this type of preclear, I have countered this with some highly general processes. I took up solutions, but I didn’t leave them specific. Why did I leave them unspecific? Why didn’t I leave solutions and problems as solutions and problems? Simply because such a preclear’s attention needs direction.

One of the handiest ways to go about this is just to take the Eight Dynamics with the Know to Mystery Scale. If you are going to categorize something you will have it well covered, and you are going to hit most of the corners of the universe one way or the other.

By way of example, I would like to tell you a little more in detail about one such case I audited. Although his case level was in poor condition, psychometrically and actually conversationally, this man was sane among sane. He had a very good impulse toward healing, he was very sensible and so forth. He was rather intensely local in his Scientology interests, and he had a tendency toward “the only one” and rather resented anything that might come in from another quarter on this. (This is the critical level.) He was not really powerful, but he was a fine man and had done a lot of good processing.

At the beginning, I had to actually work around in the session to get some sort of communication with the man so he could answer questions. In other words, “Give me some solutions for God” was utterly beyond him. He couldn’t communicate on this basis. “What is God a solution to?” did communicate, so that was the question we settled with, and from there he went on down through all the dynamics. We did not bother to take up “himself” very much because his generality was so great that he probably wasn’t there!

Now this man was not in bad shape. He was in pretty good shape, but case-wise the mechanical aspects of his case — he was grouped, generalized, and far, far too fixated on others to the exclusion of himself. He wasn’t there. The optimum situation is: Earth is here, other people are here, I’m here, my machines are here, my body is here, the reactive bank is here — awareness of all these things. He, however, was so far from being exteriorizable from the body that he had to be pulled out of the planet, then out of some other bodies, and then out of his own head, one way or another. It took some doing!

At first I could only try to develop some kind of two-way communication with this man. I found him hell-for-leather on an obsession toward knowledge, and telling a person that you did not know something was not a communication to him. If you said “When does the train leave?” and he told you “I don’t know,” he would not have communicated to you. I almost bludgeoned him into the recognition that there was a communication involved in telling somebody “I don’t know,” that you did refer to the problem or situation if you said “I don’t know” and went right on off on one of those techniques which can be used on a low-level case: “Give me an unknown datum.”

Consider the case reality! If I asked him for “Something you wouldn’t mind remembering; something you wouldn’t mind forgetting,” I would have actually exceeded his level of reality. Any man who is as obsessed on the subject of having to know as this, normally is sitting in a tremendous “I don’t know.” So I just used one of the R2s: “Give me an unknown datum.” He didn’t interpret the auditing command. He missed on each one of them. Somehow it came out wrong. He couldn’t be audited on whom he wouldn’t mind communicating with. It just didn’t audit. He didn’t have any reality. There was no reality on the process as far as he was concerned. We were just sitting there talking.

Somewhere along the line, when you have to handle such a preclear, you’ve got to find some kind of problem that’s real to him; or something that is real to him; or something that will register if you are trying to get a case entrance on a case of this kind. I get some lulus for some reason or another. This man was really a very able man. There was nothing really wrong with him, nothing specifically upsetting with his life; but his general tone, his general reality was just down — real poor.

I said, “Give me an unknown datum,” and he started reeling them off — and he came into present time with the process. He was naming abstractions, abstractions, abstractions, unknown, unknown, “I don’t know when a train leaves,” and so on— things he wasn’t looking at. Then, the next thing you know, he was giving me unknown data about the material in the immediate auditing room, and he gave me a lot of it. So, for my money, that process flattened.

That’s a very covert way of running 8-C on somebody, isn’t it? “Give me an unknown datum,” and finally he just came up splendidly and was actually looking at his environment.

Actually, just listening to the preclear and predicting about where he is going to go is quite a game. With this man I got groups, high generalities, terrific classifications; he was giving me back Scientology as he had read it out of a book. There wasn’t any thought in it at all. He wasn’t giving me name and energy, but by not addressing the point particularly, but just drumming it and keeping in two-way communication, we were suddenly getting him so specific that he was naming articles in the room.

We, as auditors, know what’s wrong with somebody. It’s a matter of time and energy to resolve it. The preclear doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, so there’s no real talking to him on the subject. If he knew what was wrong with him it wouldn’t be wrong with him! This man was glibly unaware of being there, and he saw nothing strange or peculiar in his answers to questions: “Anything,” “Everything,” and so on. In a situation like this you have to degrade the question down to actual action. If you had two universes, you would say, “What are some things you wouldn’t mind saying to your mother?”—and maybe he would find them. You would go on, and on, and on until that was flat. And then, “Some things you wouldn’t mind saying to your mother,” and make him say them. And on, and on, and on, and you would watch those universes go up in smoke. Always find what universe he is stuck in, and then talk him out of it in this fashion — that is, make him talk himself out of it. You really can!

Now it is almost unimaginable not to be able to run this process on a preclear, and yet here was a preclear that could not run it. In such a case, you have to take the action dramatization of the communication. “What wouldn’t you mind saying to your mother?—Come on, give,” and “What wouldn’t you mind your mother saying to you?” Of course, the first answer you get in this case is the tip-off. It is: “Anything,” “Everything,” “Anywhere,” and then they’ll come up with qualifications. “Well, if we rule out pain, then I wouldn’t mind communicating with bang, and bang, and bang,” and you’d say, “Just a moment. We haven’t ruled out pain.” “Well, then— nothing! I wouldn’t communicate with anything.”

It is interesting in Spotting Spots in Space that this person is very definable. You can test him, and find this case out immediately. You simply say, “All right, let’s spot a spot in the space of this room,” and the fellow will say, “Well, it’s there.” You say, “Now, put your finger on it,” and he will say, “Oh, I couldn’t do that!” “Well, go ahead, put your finger on it,” and he will probably say, “Well — why?” And you get into that! He will not spot a single spot in space. When he does that, he also qualifies everything, he gives everything conditions, and in addition to all that it’s “Anything” and “Everything.”

When you run up against this case, then, he cannot run this process very fast or very easily: “Things your body wouldn’t mind communicating with,” and “Things you wouldn’t mind your body’s communicating with,” because he is in this “Anything Everything” class.

The thing to run then is obviously just what kind of universe he is stuck in, and to begin splitting it up with an axe!

They’ll hate this process. They’ll practically, if you insist on it long enough, get down and chew the rug. “Give me some things you wouldn’t mind saying to your mother.” It’s just horrible! The thought of having to go through all that communication. But this they can’t dodge. So we can grade the process. We can say this “Anything and Everything” process wouldn’t be the optimum case, and quite possibly wouldn’t run at all “Things you wouldn’t mind so-and-so communicating with, your body communicating with,” or anything else. That process is too subjective. They can’t grasp it enough. They can’t play the game. So you make them sit there and you go on down for this other process.

How do you find out whose universe he’s in? Just ask him who he most resembles in his family.

There are two things which will create change. One of them is Postulates, and the other is Communication. A live communication, postulates, will always create change of one kind or another. Now, the point is, how ably can your preclear communicate? If he can’t communicate very ably, then you are going to have to make him dramatize communication. Mechanical two-way communication is one method of dramatizing communication — you have the preclear refusing mass, and at the same time he’s communicating. This will persuade him to communicate. But there is another way of doing this, which is what I used on this preclear successfully. I actually changed his skin tone, and did something to the universes, and there was some change on his psychometry as a result thereof.

I went further and did him a dirty trick. I gave him the same process to run, but thoroughly flat, on all members of his family, and that process was: “Give me some things you wouldn’t mind saying to you.” “Give me some things you wouldn’t mind saying to .”

Now actually, it isn’t that the sense of the thing he is saying or has said has anything to do with it. But with this process your preclear is going to do something peculiar. He is going to pick the bank clean. Any time somebody is super-generalizing on “everythings” and “nothings,” you can absolutely count on the fact that he is not capable of creating energy. He will be able to create some ideas, but this will be rather slow, and he’s lazy. So he will take actual phrases and things that occur to him when his mother really said something — anything — and things he would say to his mother.

With this particular process, we picked his bank clean of things he would say to his mother in about three minutes, and he went into a horrible comm lag. Finally he said, “Well, actually, I never say anything to her. I never did say very much to her.”

Just as a result of that processing and no other (two hours out of the five I used on that process), he had markedly changed his consideration. But if you think he had improved, you are mistaken. He had gone downhill, and the reason he had gone downhill is that he had given it all up. He had really got into “Everything and Nothing” now. He was really willing to let his body communicate with cannon balls. He was willing to let his body communicate with anything destructive. He was not yet covertly hostile to the body; he just didn’t mind communicating.

What changed this was separating the two universes.

The interesting thing about any of these cases is that a person who qualifies all statements, who can never be specific, would apparently suffer intense pain if he were to say “oatmeal” when you asked him to “Give me something you wouldn’t mind eating,” and he never seems to grasp the fact that the auditor wants him to say “oatmeal.” You can just keep on telling him that this is what you want him to say. I have actually made this test, too, by the way (not that it was as a good auditor, but as a good research man). I have sat and I have said to a preclear, “Now, I want you to name a specific kind of food that you wouldn’t mind eating. One is all I want you to name, and one is all I will allow you to name. Now, what kind of food wouldn’t you mind eating?”

“Any kind of food.”

Now, if you get that kind of conversational manifestation, it is a fellow who disperses away from every spot he tries to look at. You’ve got the case pegged, postulate-wise and mechanically. He can’t locate a single spot. You would say, “Where are you from?” and he would say, “I’m from the New England part of the country.” If you ask somebody who can spot a spot “Where are you from?” he is likely to come back with something like this: “I’m from Bramblebury, Vermont. Were you ever there?” He would suspect you had probably been there. You know, anybody could locate that place! Precision. Spotting.

But “Anything and Everything” is an imprecise spotting. It’s buttered all over the universe, and it is peculiar to the mystic. And let me assure you that it is very unusual to find a process short of Spotting Spots in Space which relieves this condition — but that process is: Figure out the universe he is in, make him say something to that universe by asking him, “Things you wouldn’t mind saying to your mother” (or father, or whoever it is). He will hate you like poison before you are through. Halfway through the process he will just as soon cut your throat as look at you. You are making him communicate, and this will break up.

I’m glad we’ve had a good look at this case. I’m glad we have some inkling of this condition, but you are going to run into it. It’s the one that makes an auditor blow his brains out most often. You give the preclear an auditing command. You KNOW this command works. Then this — everything, anything, nothing.

Now let me be very specific to you. This is the thing that drives an auditor away from using good processes. He strikes one of these high generality, unable, on high semantic sensitivity cases, and uses a process, and the auditing command does not communicate at all. He should be sure that the case is incapable of doing that process, but instead of that he will feel that the auditing command must be bad, or the process must be weak. No. It is simply that the process is above the individual’s ability to handle. Now it becomes a study of how far south can human beings go, and how far south can we reach and actually audit them.

Now you will understand that two-way communication simply makes the preclear say something to you, and you say something to him, and he says something to you. We could come up above that a little bit, and we could make him tell us things he would say to people and things people would say to him, and it becomes a “wow” of a process at that level, because you pick the universe and you blow him out of that universe. This universe he is in is probably an “Everything-Nothing” consideration, and you unburden that — and he comes on up. This is an indirect version of Two-Way Communication, and it hits straight at Universe Processing.

There is a solution to that case!