Here are two answers to correspondents which are of interest to other auditors:

“You write about a preclear that cannot persist for more than half a second. You say that it does not matter whether he is attempting to do a mock-up, a concept, a matched terminal or a feeling. I have not had this complaint from other auditors, but there is a general type of case known as the ‘non-persistence case. ’ This is a gradient scale, of course, which starts in with the preclear who puts up a mock-up but, due to blackness, the thing disappears almost immediately. It disappears so fast he cannot see it. Of course, he himself will go on putting up mock-ups as long as you tell him to go on putting up mock-ups, and soon he will have one that he can perceive. The energy he puts up there is too slight when in contest with the tremendous saturation abilities of the blackness with which he is surrounded. Now your statement here is quite unique. I would say offhand that this person is in extremely bad condition and is actually a Step# I would start in training this person on reaching and withdrawing from MEST, and I would keep him on this until he had a wonderful sense of reality about being able to hold on to MEST. Just use Step VII as given in Issue 16-G.

“The basic trouble with this preclear is, of course, in the matter of location. If you recall the Prelogics, theta locates things in time and space and creates space and things to locate in space. Close order drill for a military squad on the part of the sergeant eventually places the sergeant in the position of being able to evaluate for every private there. This is probably the only reason privates can be made to attack machine gun nests. Now the trouble with your preclear is impersistence. He cannot locate anything anywhere, but actually he cannot stay anywhere. He is racing around in his mind at such a mad rate that he is unable to take a stand anywhere against anything. This sounds like a very severe dispersal case running on enough fear to defeat the Russians. His solution is to keep running. You are asking him to stand still and hold something. He knows he cannot hold anything. The obvious thing to do with this preclear is to give him some close order drill yourself until you are able to evaluate enough for him to make him start evaluating a little bit for himself.

“The way I would handle this case would be to have the preclear move to various parts of the room and stop still while I counted ten. Then I would move him to another part of the room and have him stop still while I counted ten again. In other words, I would move him around until he would listen to me. He would do this with his physical body well enough, and after that one could tell him with some effect upon him that he should do this or that. Now I would have him take his hands and reach towards the realest thing in the room to him and pick it up and examine it and then put it down and withdraw from it. I would have him go and pick it up and move it to some other part of the room and withdraw from it again. I would have him do this with numerous objects until he was perfectly confident of being able to reach and withdraw from MEST. I would keep this up until this preclear was stable beyond stable. Only then would I go into processing with him. I would have him do mock-ups and then go straight into SOP 8. He could use, of course, ‘remembering something real’ and so forth with great effectiveness.

“This brings to mind the fact that the occluded case is too fixed, he is fixed in position and does not conceive himself able to move. He also could use a lot of reaching and withdrawing, but in the case of an occluded case who tended to persist too long and was very slow in his replies, who insisted on holding his mock-ups endlessly, I would ask this case to put himself in various parts of the room or the yard, and I would move him this way and that, until he suddenly realized he could control his own body. The occluded case really does not realize he can control his own body. A very funny and effective method of bringing him into this realization is to have him sit down and flap his hands vertically up and down with considerable violence, and simply to keep on flapping his hands until he realizes fully and completely that it is he who is flapping his hands. You would be surprised at the reaction on this even when used on a very sane individual.

“In closing let me assure you that when you hit on work in any form, run best with Expanded Gita in brackets, you are heading into the center of what’s wrong with a human being.”

“An interesting variation of ridge processing is to consider the ridge, as preclears often do, as an entity or a being with a life of its own. This is generally used when the preclear says that he has a spirit or a guiding angel or is haunted by a dog at his throat or some such thing, which the auditor knows is only a ridge activated by the preclear himself.

“Instead of trying to disabuse him of the idea, the auditor makes the preclear process the ridge as an auditor, which is to say he makes the preclear into an auditor for the ridge. Circuit cases and occluded cases are always sitting way up above the case processing something else as though they were an auditor, and an auditor auditing them is actually an auditor auditing a person who is auditing a ridge. Hence the slow progress of such cases.

“In any event, in this method of handling ridges, the auditor has the preclear make the ridge find the two upper corners of the room, just as Step III in SOP 8, and make the ridge hang there from the two upper corners of the room and not think (that is to say, the ridge isn’t supposed to think). The astonishing part of this technique is that it will generally show up some sort of a double overt act mechanism. This will immediately come to view. The auditor should resist the temptation to audit the overt act but just continue with this process. The ridge may turn into some kind of a bird, or some horrible figure with a gruesome face, but after a while the preclear loses his fear of the thing. After all, he does have it hanging up there, black and ugly though it may be, on the two upper corners of the room. The preclear may have removed this thing from his own eyes or from his mouth or from his chest or from his stomach and hung it up.

“After the ridge has been suspended there for some time (for ridges of this character do not easily dissipate when grounded), the auditor then has the preclear move it all around the room, turn it upside down, put it behind him, put it under his feet, until the preclear is at length entirely contemptuous of the thing and bored with it, at which time he will throw it away.

“This does not resolve the case but it takes considerable pressure off the case and is one of the steps of upward progress. There are no instances on record yet of the ridge exploding when treated in this fashion, and no particular reason why there should be such instances.”