Find the reality of the preclear. This is the watchword of processing. Although communication, as completely outlined in Dianetics, 1955! is a universal solvent, remember that there are also two other comers to the triangle, and that one of these corners is Reality. That R corner of the triangle is very important to you as an auditor because you, having very great certainties on this and on that, are very prone to forget that your Realities are greater than those of your preclear.

The reality level of the preclear is dependent on how much he is “not-ising” his environment. If he is not-ising it, he must believe that it is dangerous, and must believe that he himself does not have the power to make anything in it disappear or vanish for himself. Therefore, his reality level is as great as he is strong, and it is as poor as he is weak. Do you know that you are processing preclears who do not believe that thought has anything to do with action? You are processing preclears who believe that thinking a thought will influence nothing. You are processing preclears who believe that thinkingness is one thing and actingness is an entirely different thing, and that no amount of thinkingness is going to influence any amount of actingness. This is apathy, indeed, and along with that goes an unreality which would appall you.

Yes, these preclears can get mock-ups. They can get concepts. They can be very obedient. They can even be run with SOP 8-C and somehow or another muddle through it, but the joker here is that the auditor is actually monitoring the body of the preclear, and of course a body can respond to orders, and will respond probably faster to the auditor’s orders than to the thetan the auditor is processing. Thus a preclear can be put through any number of contortions and convolutions in processing without getting anywhere at all. The auditor is simply doing it.

Find the reality level of your preclear. Unless you find the reality level of the preclear you are not going to reach the preclear, because the preclear is as alive as things are real.

Now, if this is so important, then let us see how far south we would have to go to reach some preclears. Mechanical two-way communication might very well be much too tough for 75% of the preclears you will process. Just ordinary conversation is actually over their heads. People that we are trying to reach do not know the auditor is acknowledging them when he says “Okay.”

Let us look at this acknowledgment of the preclear, and let us discover that the auditor, in order to acknowledge the preclear, must also make the preclear aware that he is being acknowledged. Thus, when an auditor says “Okay,” or “All right,” or “That’s fine,” the other part of the statement is to make the preclear aware that an acknowledgment has been delivered. Thus, a “Did you hear me?” is quite often beneficial. When the preclear finally admits that he did hear the “Okay,” and when the auditor makes sure that he time after time hears the “Okay,” you will notice that the communication, on the acknowledgment level, starts to work with the preclear. But it won’t work as long as the preclear is oblivious of the “Okays” the auditor is giving. Of course, you must give the preclear an “Okay” for every action or completed thought he performs. You must acknowledge what he has said or done, but you must also be very sure that he receives that acknowledgment. It is not out of order to face him squarely and hold up one finger and say, “Wait a minute, did you hear me say ‘Okay’?”

Now there are two processes which are at once the most basic of processes and which are very low on the Reality Scale as well as high on it. A person processed on these processes should not believe that the auditor believes his reality level is low. Quite the contrary. Such a process as this one happens to be very good anywhere on the tone scale. And this process is, “Think a thought,” “Receive a thought.”

You are in essence processing thinkingness. I wonder how long and how often you have processed preclears who could not clearly or differentiatively understand that they were thinking a thought? The auditing command is simply, “Think a thought.” The preclear is given this command time and time again, and he vocalizes the thought back to the auditor, and the auditor acknowledges the fact that he has received that thought, aloud. And the preclear is run until the preclear knows, absolutely, that he himself, not some machine, not some energy mass, not his toe, or his hat, is thinking the thought. The preclear will start out thinking thoughts which are actually handed to him from some mysterious source. When the communication lag on this is entirely flat, and when the preclear knows that he himself is thinking the thought, the auditor can then run the other side of the process.

“Receive a thought” is run with the following auditing command: “Tell me a thought you would be willing to receive.” This is then run until it, as a process, is entirely flat: when it is no longer producing any result or comm lag.

Part of the “Think a thought” process is to have the preclear place the thought in various locations after he has thought it. Have his shoe think a thought, have his hat think a thought, have a lamp think the thought, have a rug think the thought. This gets the preclear into the practice of placing the thought somewhere. Thus, thoughts are less likely to appear suddenly and magically out of his machinery.

Very curious phenomena result from “Think a thought” and “Receive a thought.” It will be found sometimes that it is easier for the preclear to think a thought for another universe than for himself to think a thought. Let us take for example a preclear who is entirely interiorized into the universe of his mother. It would, therefore, evidently be much easier for him to have his mother think a thought than for the preclear himself to think a thought. As a matter of fact it might be an enormous struggle, resulting in rebellion, for the preclear himself to think a thought, but it would be very easy for the preclear to have his mother think a thought. The way to go about this would be to take an E-Meter, or simply estimate, by finding out who the preclear most resembles, the probable universe into which the preclear is interiorized. Having established this (and you would only do this if the preclear were rebellious about thinking a thought himself) you would then have this likely universe think a thought, with the auditing command (having established that he is interiorized into his mother’s or his father’s universe): “Have your mother (father) think a thought.” This would then be carried out until the preclear was absolutely sure that he was making his mother or his father think a thought. This would betoken an initial division of the universe.

Slicing up universes with communication processes is a very easy thing to do. All one has to do is use the process: “What could you say to your father?” and have the preclear say it, and get an Okay from his father. And when this was flat, “What could your father say to you?”, and when the preclear has vocalized this, the auditor would say, “Now give your father an ‘Okay’ to this.” However, this workable process which splits universes (in old-time parlance “valences”) is yet much too high for a preclear who is very low on reality, and would take a very long time to do. It would be a process into which you would eventually move the preclear who had been thinking a thought for his mother, but remember that thinking a thought for his mother would be only a start into communication processing, and would be an elementary process, run until the preclear is entirely certain that he is thinking a thought that his mother would think or that he can make his mother think a thought — the latter being the most desirable condition.

You should be aware of the fact that you are processing thinkingness. You are not processing spaces, you are not processing masses at this day and state of development of Dianetics and Scientology. You are processing thinkingness. A man is as well as he thinks. The more masses and spaces, phrases and engrams you process, the less you are validating the fact that you are actually processing a thinkingness: a thinkingness that we call a thetan. To process this directly is, of course, the most indicated process there could be, and sure enough, we are producing good results with it. But the remarkable thing about the process is that it works on people who heretofore have had very, very poor reality.

Now there is a process which is a little bit lower than this “Think a thought” process, and this is the process of finding something real in the room. Recently I have had some very excellent results with “Find something in this room that is comfortably real.” This is a variation on the initial auditing command as given in the early SOPs. It is apparently better. A preclear who is not-ising everything in sight will find things real, he says, but actually he is not comfortable about it, and if you ask him to find something that is comfortably real, it may take him a long time to discover anything that he would tolerate to continue existence, and once you have begun this process of toleration you would be able to do a great deal for his case.

“Find something comfortably real” is not necessarily a low-toned process. It will work in varying degrees on anyone. It is not recommended for any particular case level. If a preclear utterly bogs on “Think a thought” (which isn’t likely), then you should have him “Find something in this room that is comfortably real to you.”

I am reminded of an auditor recently processing a very bad arthritic, who processed him as an exteriorized case for some little time without any apparent gain in the case before it occurred to this auditor that something must be wrong. Actually, a great amount of time was invested. The auditor asked Nibs, my boy who was then instructing the ACC course in the United States, and who is at this writing in England, teaching the BScn course there, what could possibly be wrong with this hung-fire preclear. Nibs looked him over and discovered that the auditor had never yet gotten the preclear into any kind of a situation which was even vaguely real to the preclear. The auditor in one chair and the preclear in the other chair was not a real situation to this preclear, and yet the auditor was running him as an exteriorized case. Of course he was exteriorized, but with such a low level of reality that very little benefit of course was resulting from the processing.

Processing is as beneficial as it is real and factual to the preclear, and if you cannot raise the preclear’s reality level by the use of Affinity and Communication, then you are letting the whole triangle hang fire. This triangle of ARC may have suddenly gotten very important on the C corner, but it is still foremost in the tool-kit of the auditor.

Now you will want to know why you should use “Think a thought” when what is obviously wrong with the preclear you have in mind is a withered leg. Let me assure you that if you process directly this withered leg, you are processing something and somebody who probably has a very low level of reality. He wouldn’t have a withered leg if he had a high level of reality. Where you have anybody who is neurologically, physically, or psychosomatically ill, unless it be from an acute infection or an accident, you have somebody who has been trying to not-is his body. When an individual is not- ising his body, making his legs wither, or his stomach get ulcers, or his head get migraine headaches, or his teeth fall out, you have somebody who is trying to not-is the environment. He is already going in the direction of succumb. The one thing that would make him very happy would be the entire disappearance of the physical universe. Well, with modern processing you can make this happen, too, and maybe this is something you should have happen for him in order to demonstrate that it could happen. Of course, if you did this you would have to go through a modern BScn course at least, for this is a very tricky procedure. In view of the fact that unreality is the action of realizing things are there and then saying they aren’t there (not-ising them; see Creation of Human Ability and the Axioms of Scientology) you are dealing with a protest against reality which results in unreality. A person will let things be as real as he is willing to let them exist. When an individual isn’t willing to let a leg or a tree, or this universe exist, then things are not real to him. One of the best ways you could get him to raise his level of reality would be to give him some reality on thinkingness. It isn’t actingness, it isn’t getting tired, it isn’t being unable to work, it isn’t the second dynamic that impedes your preclear — it is his thinkingness. All you have to do is to get him to change his mind. If you could get anyone to change his mind enough he could then command anything that was bothering him. But a preclear who is not-ising things is trying to use force and pressure of one kind or another against physical objects and spaces in order to push them out of existence. This will never win, let me assure you. Energy will never destroy energy, I don’t care how many atomic bombs the peanut whistly brigade builds, they will never destroy any space or energy with them. Your preclear who finds things unreal has stopped trying to do anything with thought and is trying to do something with force. He no longer conceives that thought can generate or handle or give existence or life to space and energy.

Now you take this to heart, and take a good, hard look at some of these preclears you have been processing on very fancy and frilly processes, and you take a think back over all of these preclears who, after you processed them, didn’t think anything had happened. When the preclear didn’t think anything had happened, nothing happened. What was in error? You were processing him above his level of reality. If you could get him to think a thought and know he thought it, and receive a thought and know he had received it, even though he put it there to receive it, which is what he does, you would then be directly addressing the very thing that is doing unreality and reality. An individual who has a compulsive outflow is simply unwilling to receive a thought. An individual who is silent simply can’t think of anything. Thus, if an individual had control of his thoughts he would have control of the universe. We can prove this now in a process.

And don’t think you are going to finish this process, either side of it, in a half- hour or forty-five minutes. Some of these glib preclears you process will “fall in” on this process and begin to comm-lag an hour or two after you start processing them on it. The main errors which have been made with this process so far have been failing to run it long enough to have the preclear really know and really understand that he, himself, has thought the thought and that he, himself, has received the thought, or is willing to receive the thought.

“Find the reality level of the preclear” is one of those bywords that you can’t use too often or look at enough.