In the hectic days while research and investigation were in full swing, it would not have been possible for me to have stated with accuracy what an auditor should know to be a good auditor with any expectancy of the answer remaining valid for more than a few months.
Running Engrams, Black and White processing, Beauty and Ugliness, technique followed technique, each one more workable than the last, each one issued solely on the valid excuse that it was better than anything we had before it.
I can greatly sympathize with anyone attempting to follow what must have appeared to some, scraps of knowledge and disrelated material, and who yet expected to know a whole subject.
After this year’s work in Europe and some six months after the current techniques were last polished, it can at last be stated with security what an auditor is expected to know of Dianetics and Scientology to consider himself adequate to his task, and in order to assure himself of excellent results upon his preclears.
Probably even more important organizationally, certification boards of experienced auditors can be set up who can have before them unchanging standards of examination, to the end that when auditors are at last certified the organization can feel secure that they have “the latest information” securely at work in their hands. It is highly possible that America, with its craving for change, may not find this very acceptable, but it is certain that auditors putting out hard money for training and preclears putting out their dollars for processing will be assured of knowledge and results which are standard and predictable.
Many things have changed, but many things remain the same. To those who stayed with me for three years — and these number the majority — the shifting panorama and emphasis have at last begun to make sense. These people, in effect, have been studying a gradient scale of technology. They have been studying life, human behavior, and psychotherapy. It is astonishing to many of them now on reviewing Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, to find most of what they know stated in the first place in the first book.
This graduated scale enters with the most basic knowledge man has, as represented by the Asclepian Priests of Greece, continues through the work of Freud and is continually back-shadowed by the knowledge of the wise men of the East. It goes then into what we now call facsimiles (which is to say mental pictures) and all techniques which address the past, and into processes which directly adjust the future.
The marriage of the deepest knowledge of India with the latest technologies of nuclear physics could not help but result in a swift climb upwards into the understanding of the behavior of life in the physical universe, and could not help but deliver into our hands technologies with which to resolve the immediate problems of Mankind.
In a recent book On Auditing by Martha Courtis, the gradient scale of Dianetics and Scientology is made extremely apparent, and it is shown there quite expertly how each advance only extended knowledge already held, and the inevitable consequence of Standard Operating Procedure in Scientology.
It could be said that those auditors who entered early have spent those three years studying the same thing, and they now can look back upon an integrated picture. Indeed, it is a necessity for auditors contacting Scientology now for the first time, without any background knowledge of Dianetics, to review the entire process of the evolution of the science. Just as an auditor would be foolish indeed to know nothing more than the running of engrams now that far faster techniques such as those contained in SOP exist, so would it be foolish for an auditor to study SOP only, and with no knowledge of earlier processes find himself adrift, alone and incapable some dark night with a preclear who is stuck in and is looking straight at an engram. Just because phenomena have been more adequately handled in these later months is no reason why phenomena discovered earlier have ceased to exist, and auditors in training are confronted by each and every phenomenon observed in the last three years. While this makes, apparently, a complex picture, the simplicity lies in knowing the entire story of the preclear, and then in applying techniques so simple that they could be used by a child upon children, and indeed often are.
What should an auditor know? He should know how to run engrams and secondaries, he should know effort processing, he should know how to apply, in its entirety, Advanced Procedure and Axioms, Handbook for Preclears, and Self Analysis, old and revised editions. He should know the 50 Course Books. He should have a good understanding of the axioms as they appear in the Handbook for Preclears. He should know Scientology 8-8008, and he should have a command of all the SOP’s from 1 to 8L. He should know Formula H, Acceptance Level Processing, Change of Space Processing, he should know the theories of randomity, and automaticity and the processes by which these are remedied.
If that is an appalling lot of knowledge, be assured that the auditor who knows it-knows it well — and who is himself cleared will have excellent results, and that an auditor who knows only fragments of it will continue to run into cases which he cannot solve, even though he may solve by rote procedures over 50% of the cases he addresses. The question of training is the question of how many cases is the auditor going to resolve out of the hundred cases presented, and the length of time the preclear must spend in processing.
What the auditor should know is answered by what the auditor wants to expect in terms of results on himself and preclears.
An auditor who knows and knows well SOP-8, Short 8, and Six Steps to Better Beingness, and yet does not know other phenomena as it may appear in a case, may find some 30% of his cases unsolvable. What might happen to render a case unsolvable? A preclear in 1953 can be expected to be stuck in at least one place on a time track just as in 1950. The preclears haven’t changed, the techniques have. Generally, the preclear is in a “secondary engram.” While there exist techniques in advance of SOP-8 which run secondaries rapidly, the auditor is poorly equipped if he cannot discharge a “grief charge” which is lying there waiting for him, the discharge of which will in itself entirely alter the attitude of the preclear toward the world. The auditor may have before him someone who actually does not have sufficient randomity to interest himself in further living, and who is yet incapable of creating more, the auditor may come up against in this what is termed “the speed factor” a subject discussed and covered in late 1951. Only by “increasing the speed potential” of the preclear can the auditor place the preclear in a situation to engage in sufficient action to discard his boredom. There are fifty reasons why a case can hang fire. The auditor who doesn’t know at least ten of them will often find himself staring into an enigma past his understanding. Further, he may be astonished by the material if he does not know the strange adventures of preclears as they rise on the tone scale.
All too often an auditor is so set on enforcing his own concept of existence upon the world at large that he insists that a science agree with him, and lays down the boundaries that the science must not exceed what he himself, before he studied the science, believed to be true. The auditor who is not trained through all the data i prone to make errors which will cost him the resolution, not only of his own case, but case after case if, in ignorance of earlier data, he. is seeking to warp theta clearing into some tract of mysticism where it does not and cannot belong.
I recently resolved the case of an old man whose trouble was that he desired no more of life. Observedly, his body could no longer serve him, and his hope in being audited was that he would die. I have recently seen several such cases. The auditor who is not sufficiently wise to establish the actual goal of his preclear will continue to try to make this person physically well, while the entire attention of this preclear is absorbed in using auditing to assist his dying. The only thing one can do for such a person is to bring him into a situation where he is no longer entirely dependent upon his body, but does not need to destroy it in order to be interested in life.
What does an auditor need to know? What he could know is formidable. What he must know is easier to face.
Abstracts of all past data have been prepared at this time, and the courses available from the HAS are now highlighted by the necessary knowledge.
The difference amongst auditors is the difference of what percentage of cases is the auditor capable of solving. It can be observed that any psychotherapy in the past could have reached, and did reach and remedy a certain level of case (Step 1). This case continues to be resolved with great ease and in a few minutes with Scientology today, no matter what is wrong with it. The same case was resolved, within two years, by psychoanalysis. Earlier the same level of case was solved with great ease by Asclepian Priests. Analytical Procedure will solve such a case. Lock scanning will solve such a case, as can any elementary and shallow process, including a changed environment which promises a good present time. And so an auditor who has little command of the subject, obeying most of the rules of the Auditor’s Code, can solve it.
But immediately adjacent to that is the one which doesn’t quite solve, which improves a little, but not a lot. This one (a Step 2) also improved after many years of psychoanalysis. This one was solved also by the first techniques of Dianetics, even when they were crudely used.
The third level of case (a Step 3) was the one which psychoanalysis hoped about, but never improved, which Dianetics kept from deteriorating, but seldom (in the hands of average auditors) stabilized, and with this level of case we have departed completely from the past abilities of man, and the abilities of Dianetics as used in the field.
We have reached at this point some 50% of the populace. We have 50% remaining. The intriguing thing about this is that these first three grades (or 50%) number amongst them sane, insane and neurotic alike, for these step levels are not established by sanity, but by the ease with which they recovered.
The remaining 50% were never touched by the Asclepians, the psychoanalysts or auditors using Dianetics in the field. These 50% numbered amongst them some of the most able people, but not necessarily all the able people in the society. They were sane, neurotic and psychotic, just as the first three types of cases I have mentioned, but the workability of the case exceeded the ability of all.
The three cases mentioned above are referred to in Scientology as Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3. The remaining four steps, as represented in Standard Operating Procedure 8, are resistive to any betterment regardless of the sanity or ability of the case.
What we are gazing upon here is, distasteful as it may seem, the ratio of the potential of the individual being met by the environment. The last four cases are not necessarily more able, but they have met more resistance than their reality potential could accommodate, and although they continue to function, their certainty is insufficient to their environment. Their native ability permits them to continue their performance, to exceed former skills. We are now handling these cases in Scientology. All but a few of them, in the hands of an able auditor, resolve with the use of SOP-8. The few require even more advanced techniques, such as those being given to the Clinical students in the East.
What should an auditor know? He should know enough to resolve those cases which come to him and to retain and increase his own stability. Now at last we can write down in specific detail the exact data which he must command in order to do his job well.