The most important point in entering a case from the viewpoint of the auditor is establishing the position of the preclear on the Chart of Human Evaluation as given and fully described in the publication Science of Survival.

Today this is a relatively simple task providing the auditor knows the simple processes which are the basic processes of both Dianetics and Scientology. As given in the last PAB, these processes are: Two-Way Communication, Elementary Straightwire, Opening Procedure 8-C, Opening Procedure by Duplication, Remedying Havingness and Spotting Spots in Space.

The establishing characteristic of the preclear’s position on the tone scale is all contained under the heading of communication lag. Today we do not use E-Meters; today we do not use old-time dianometry; today we have a positive and precise method of positioning the preclear.

Communication lag is the length of time intervening between the asking of the question by the auditor and the reply to that specific question by the preclear. The question must be precise; the reply must be precisely to that question. It does not matter what intervenes in the time between the asking of the question and the receipt of the answer. Incidentally, from my experience in training in Phoenix, this is a very hard point for an auditor to grasp. Thus I am stressing it for you in these PABs. It does not matter what intervenes: the preclear may outflow, jabber, discuss, pause, hedge, disperse, dither or be silent; no matter what he does or how he does it, between the asking of the question and the giving of the answer, the time is the communication lag. The near answer, a guessing answer, an undecided answer, are alike imprecise answers and are not adequate responses to the question. On receipt of such questionable answers, the auditor must ask the question again. That he asks the question again does not reduce the communication lag; he is still operating from the moment he asked the question the first time. And if he has to ask the question twenty or thirty times more in the next hour in order to get a precise and adequate answer from the preclear, the length of time of the lag would be from the asking of the first question to the final receipt of the answer. Near answers to the question are inadequate and are, themselves, simply part of the communication lag.

Example:

• Auditor: How many chairs are there in this room?
• Preclear: Now, let me see. I don’t know — we’re sitting down, anyway.

This is not an answer to the question. The answer to the question is the exact number of chairs in the room.

There are, of course, certain questions which are “fade-away” questions, to which, because of the characteristics of the mind, there is no possible answer. One of these is “Give me an unknown time.” As soon as the preclear starts to answer such a question, he of course has as-ised a certain amount of unknownness and will know the time. The answer to a fade-away question is also measurable, however; it could be said arbitrarily to be answered when the preclear has as-ised enough unknownness to give a known time. There are relatively few of these questions.

The length of time necessary for an individual to ask and answer questions is actually a complete two-way communication lag, but here, in testing a lag, we are interested simply in the question the auditor asks and the length of time it takes a preclear to answer it.

Now here comes a specialized knowledge on communication lag. A preclear may have a very short lag on social questions. He may be able to answer immediately and expertly what his name is, how old he is and many other things. These questions are actually being answered by “social machinery” or habitual practice. He has actually no lag, apparently; but remember, the auditor in this case is not asking the preclear: he is asking a social response machine for the socially acceptable answer. As an example of this as mentioned in Dianetics: Evolution of a Science, I once had a preclear who would answer on any query as to health that she was fine, even though she was lying in the agony of a migraine headache. She had a machine set up to respond. One was not in communication with the preclear; and, indeed, one seldom ever was, for she was psychotic.

Thus, in establishing communication lag, it is necessary for the auditor to ask nonsocial questions. The question “What is your name?” may be replied to very readily. However, this is a social question, and thus one would have to ask the question such as “How many doors in this room?” or “How many feet do women ordinarily have?” in order to pose a question which requires intelligent differentiation on the part of the preclear. The length of time it takes for him to resolve this question as a problem and reply to it is the lag time.

This is an actual measure of the distance and the number of vias on the communication lag line of the preclear.

The phenomenon of communication lag is intensely useful; it tells you immediately how far the individual is out of present time; it tells us also the ability of the preclear to give up a problem. He may be so hungry for problems, and every question is a problem which requires an “answer,” that he simply swallows the problem and refuses to solve it by giving an answer to the question. It also tells us how protective, defensive the preclear is in regard to life and the environment.

An old-time auditor could very probably tell by his tone of voice as he spoke where he was on the emotional tone scale as given in Science of Survival. An auditor not so schooled need only glance at the person’s communication lag in order to know where he stood on the tone scale.

There is an additional phenomenon, a “brother to communication lag,” known as “process lag.” This is the length of time it requires for the preclear to obtain a result from a process. “How many chairs are there in this room?” process, and then let us ask the preclear this question “How many chairs are there in this room?” and discover how many times he has to be asked the question and has to be made to answer the question precisely in order to do so without protest and with instant response. The length of time it would take him to reduce first his lack of knowledge as to the number of chairs in the room and then his unwillingness to be asked the question many, many times over and over (which is his unwillingness to duplicate) would, on an overall count, be his process lag. The process lag is the length of time it takes to reduce all communication lag from a type of question or action in auditing; and a process lag, then, is peculiar to auditing, unless, of course, you wish to examine the whole subject of communication lags, at which moment you would discover all manner of interesting phenomena not particularly necessary to the auditor.

He would discover, for instance, that the length of time it takes for an individual to learn and adequately use arithmetic could be classed as a process lag. He could discover also that there is a communication lag going on in nearly all conversations. One asks the social question, “How are you?” and the person responds from his machinery, “Fine”; and then, as though totally disrelated, one-half-hour later suddenly says to his companion who asked the first question, “You know, I feel terrible today.” There is, for instance, the physiological communication lag. How long does it take for a man’s body to change the consideration that he is tired to the consideration that he is refreshed? How long does it take a certain drug to work? But it is not our purpose to go into the broad study of communication lags, as interesting as that field may be, for we do not need to know any more than communication lag and process lag in order to do a good job of auditing and to position the preclear accurately on the tone scale.

Actually it is the process lag which situates the preclear on the tone scale for the auditor. Let us say that a very long process lag could be classified as “unable to do until processed.” Then we would discover that Two-Way Communication as the basic process would be an inability if not done with ease by the preclear; if it is done very arduously by the preclear, it would take the preclear on the lower part of the tone scale. Similarly, if the preclear has enormous lag on Straightwire questions, it would peg him as on another, slightly higher, part of the tone scale; and so forth.

This is extremely useful information for an auditor, for it tells him that anybody below 2.0 on the tone scale is there to be audited into death. He is not there to be made to survive, and thus a case poses a considerable amount of trouble for an auditor when it is below 2.0 on the tone scale. When, in other words, it does not discover in Two- Way Communication and in Elementary Straightwire easy processing.

Just to make sure that no preclear fools an auditor with social responses and just to make sure that every preclear gets well, we process today in this fashion. First we discover and execute Two-Way Communication with the preclear, even though we have to do it in the field of mimicry. Then, when Two-Way Communication is very adequately established between the auditor and the preclear, we continue with Elementary Straightwire, the commands of which are “Something you wouldn’t mind remembering,” “Something you wouldn’t mind forgetting.” Only then would we go into Opening Procedure of 8-C. It would seem very hard to believe to some people, unless they have considerable experience in auditing, that many people find in Opening Procedure of 8-C a process so arduous that they become sick, fall on the floor and do all manner of weird convulsions. Yet it is true that an individual who has not already been put upscale to Two-Way Communication and Elementary Straightwire will discover considerable difficulty in Opening Procedure of 8-C.

When one has done Two-Way Communication and Elementary Straightwire on a preclear and has recovered the preclear’s ability to get well, he can see for the purposes of auditing that the individual has come to a level above 2.0 on the tone scale and he then is ready to embark on Opening Procedure of 8-C, remembering at all times that he must still be able to maintain his two-way communication — that is, not one-way communication, but two-way communication with the preclear, whatever process he does on the preclear, whenever he does it, no matter what actual condition the preclear is in. Many an auditor fails simply because he fails to listen to the preclear when the preclear has something to say and thus the preclear goes into apathy, for he was about to discover to the auditor that the auditor’s process had done something fantastically interesting to him, and being unable to communicate this to the auditor, the preclear goes into apathy.