J of S EDITOR’S NOTE — Auditors and preclears too often complain that Scientology is invalidating itself; that today’s techniques are making those of yesterday obsolete. L. Ron Hubbard, in a recent lecture, said definitely that you audit the preclear, not the technique; that the first book still will do exactly what it said it would do, and new developments have only one purpose: to give auditors newer and better tools with which to work.

Because we feel that this lecture is of extreme importance, it has been edited somewhat, and is being reprinted serially in Scientology. This is the first chapter.

In the opinion of many people, this science changes — rapidly, radically, sporadically and unpredictably. When someone tells you this, you know he does not know his Scientology.

In DIANETICS: The Modern Science of Mental Health, in a chapter called “The Cell and the Organism,” there is a statement (though not in these words) that the structure of the human body is a series of efforts and counter-efforts. In the chapter on emotion, there is a discussion on unburdening the misemotion by which the body is controlled. There is a statement that emotion is a theta thing, which we can use though we do not fully understand it.

This consistency of theory from the time of the first book to now is easily observed. There is one major error along the line, of which I know: the theory of valence. One glaring error out of all the hundreds of theoretical building blocks of this science is not a bad record.

Valence, as we used it, was wrong. We do not want anyone getting into valence. We want him to get out of valence. Why? Because if he is thoroughly inside his body, the thetan has almost ceased to exist, and the Genetic Entity is in control of the organism to a large degree.

Nowadays we are using Technique 80. That was not in the first book. But does Technique 80 invalidate what was in the book? No! In the first book we got around what we now do in Technique 80 by finding the basic on the chain. You can bypass the whole of Technique 80 if you can find the basic on the chain. But that is a long and tiresome search, and now Technique 80 makes it unnecessary. Instead of running down chains of this and chains of that, looking for the first counter-effort on the line, Technique 80 just picks up any effort and counter-effort anywhere on the line and takes it from there. Still, finding the basic on the chain was a workable technique, though it required much greater art and many more hours than Technique 80.

Technique 80 says that we can use any effort or counter-effort anywhere we find it and unravel the track from that point. What has the preclear done with this countereffort, and what has this counter-effort done to him?

The motivator and the overt, the DED and the DEDEX: that is Technique 80.

This is considerably easier than looking through all tangle and confusion of incidents for the basic on the chain, but that does not mean that the auditor should never have heard of basic-basic. Because one fine day he may find a preclear who can go back to the first moment of pain or unconsciousness in the life and run it out — and blow the rest of the track clean.

The processing in the first book was designed for the wide-open case. In a tougher case, you had to know how to shoot demon circuits, as they were called. We don’t shoot demon circuits much any more, but now and then you may get a preclear who is being told what to do and think by a voice inside his head, and if you know what it is to shoot a demon circuit you can just turn it off at will and go on to the next problem.

There was a lot of art involved in processing in those days. Some demons had to be attacked by running imaginary incidents. The more difficult the case, the more art was required.

We have been replacing art with technology, until now the case which was a great challenge in 1950 is only the standard routine, but that does not mean that the firstbook case no longer exists. There are still cases which have to be processed by 1950 methods before they can be processed by 1952 methods.

The first-book case is stuck in a prenatal engram. He is spouting the words of the incident. The auditor ignores concepts, attention units, effort, emotion, thought, and so on. He just gets the preclear to tell him what is happening. The incident runs and reduces. Pretty soon the preclear begins to laugh and line-charges all the way up to present time — or scans the locks, as we would say it now. A great improvement has been made in the case, because the auditor knew enough to use the appropriate methods — first-book auditing for a first-book case.

Book One addressed the psychotic. But every time we turn around, we find that our sights have gone up. In 1950 we were trying to take a case and process him up to the point where he would no longer rub his mashed potatoes into his hair. Now we are trying to recover the full identity and knowingness of the being and causality of the immortal, imperishable self, forevermore.

It is quite a different goal.