The first thing to cover with Standard Procedure is the subject of accessibility. The Standard Procedure Charts should begin with accessibility. It actually begins with “For Accessible Cases.” There isn’t any difference in Standard Procedure for an inaccessible case and Standard Procedure for an accessible case except that one is just a bit further removed from a pianola case. The effort is the same; the distance is much greater.

The problem of accessibility is not just the problem of treating someone who is inaccessible by reason of insanity. The accessibility of an individual has to do with his own ability to communicate with his environment and to communicate with his own past. When we regard accessibility in this way we find that we have a great deal more scope in the word inaccessible, because there are many people who can turn in something like a day’s work who are yet inaccessible cases. For instance, the person who is bound and determined to stay sick, who won’t talk to you, who will have nothing to do with being healed in any way, is an inaccessible case.

In the past, insanity has been measured in terms of the danger the society could expect from the individual rather than the rationale of the individual. Therefore we have made an error in this society of just branding certain people as psychotic who are intractable and who are dangerous to themselves or to society. Start to go into legal codes and you will find out that what occupies a very dominant position in every code is whether or not this person is dangerous to himself or society. That certainly does not include all that it should include.

The rationality of an individual is very much to point, because that individual who will not ably care for himself, for his family, for his group or for mankind is not rational. And that person who, by his acts, actually endangers himself, the future, the group or mankind (the classification should not be limited just to a person who strikes a blow or tries to eat razor blades), who is so irrational, for instance, as to believe that the atom bomb is the answer to our future security, is of course insane. What is insanity? It is just irrationality. And does that person threaten the society? Yes, he does.

So let’s look at the psychotic in terms of a time factor. Let’s not overlook the important by stressing the dramatic, since the important is not always dramatic. The sudden punch, the immediate slam of impact, is very dramatic.

Look in the newspaper headlines and you will see “FIVE-BILLION DOLLAR WAREHOUSE BURNS UP.” That is news. And right alongside of it there is a little item which says “The United States now has 3,750,000 juvenile delinquents.” I’m afraid that warehouse can be rebuilt rather rapidly, but the job of rehabilitating 3,750,000 juvenile delinquents is an enormous task and it means a great deal in terms of the survival of this society.

The evaluation of the data is all wrong. You find that three people died in this five-billion-dollar fire, but you look over here in this juvenile delinquent column and you are probably looking at hundreds of thousands of dead people. This shows the value of a sudden punch to newspapers. The time factor enters into it. In other words, if we spread bad news over a long enough period it is no longer bad news. Is that rational? That says that if bad news is spread over a long enough period — no matter how bad the news is — its not bad.

What one is doing is walking away from the sudden impacts that cause communication, affinity and reality break engrams. A sudden impact creates a rapid encystment, but if it were spread out over periods of days or weeks it wouldn’t be so bad. That is, if the information weretrickling through a little at a time without creating any anxiety (since this is a dispersal of attention and is in itself bad), it would not deliver this impact, although it is no less serious on an analytical or reactive level.

Is one driven to the conclusion, then, that the press is mainly interested in reactive news? And is one driven to the conclusion that the field of healing has been too interested in reactive logic (if you can call it logic)? There must have been a lack of rationale in the way the problem was regarded. That regard must, in itself, have been a reactive regard. They have been living on a tremendous amount of engrams in this society. So the five-billion-dollar fire gets the headlines.

Actually, war news more closely approaches important news, and so we get the old truism that if we can just get a good war started, the newspapers will sell like hotcakes.

There is a story about William Randolph Hearst, a United States editor and newspaper publisher. He sent a photographer down to Cuba to get pictures of “that there Cuban war” before the United States went into it. The photographer cabled back and said, “There is no war down here.”

Hearst sent him back a message which said “You get me the pictures and I’ll get you the war!”

A war is a great menace to the society. It menaces a lot of people. It continues over a long period of time at a high dramatic level, and so we concentrate our attention upon war. But it is an interesting thing that the focus of attention is so sharp on something dangerous that man begins to look like a bird hypnotized by a snake.

Reactive attention is very interesting. When attention is too fixed, such as when a datum is too fixed in thought, one cannot be completely rational regarding that thing at which one is looking. In other words, he isn’t evaluating what he is looking at with relation to the rest of the environment around it; he is merely looking at it. That is what happens in a war. Everybody starts looking at the war and their attention gets fixed on it because the war is news, it is dramatic, it is dangerous and so on; and as the attention gets more and more fixed, the society gets more and more psychotic on the subject of this war.

There are two reactive things about attention. The first is this fixing of attention. The other one is too great a dispersal of attention, which is very bad. That is actually fear of the unknown. The mind is hunting; it knows there is danger in the vicinity and it is trying to find it. It can’t fix that danger on anything and so it hunts, distracted — it can’t fix itself. All of a sudden such a mind may, out of sheer relief, fasten upon one thing and then fold all of its attention in on that one thing and fix it too closely. The optimum attention would be a little span wide enough on the subject to see on either side of it and evaluate it, but not too big a span to lose sight of that thing which is being observed. And so we have a great deal of reactive attention.

You will find that this is the main trouble with an engram; it either disperses the attention completely or it fixes it completely. It deals in lights and darks. And this is the main trouble with news as it is promulgated. It seeks to fix and root the attention by making a big dramatic splash, whereas an evaluation of the situation would demonstrate that there are much more important things, perhaps, in that same newspaper than this thing which is supposed to fix the attention. Unfortunately newspapers are thought to sell better this way, and so five-billion-dollar fires and so forth get punched up and poured at the society continually.

The rationale involved, then, has something to do with the time span. “Five-billion-dollar fire,” hitting fast with impact, is very interesting. It is a sharp point. But the same words spread out over a long period of time would, by proportion, not be as interesting.

If a person is suddenly dangerous or irrational, you say immediately, “Obviously a psychotic”; but if the person is just continually irrational, and none of his acts draw any blood from anybody, apparently, you say, “Well, this person is not particularly irrational; this person couldn’t possibly be a psychotic,” and yet, actually, they should be so classified.

The society, the group, the family, the future, are most seriously menaced by the things that go along nicely and plainly, not the ones that puff up and hit people in the face — the obvious things. It’s the ones that just go along, psychotic all the way through, that are dangerous.

I have talked to people who were most “reasonable” on some subjects, who were actually gibberingly insane. And if you go down to an institution you can always find somebody there who appears to make sense. The only trouble is that after you have listened to him for a while you can’t add up anything he said because it just didn’t make sense all the way along the line. He merely sounded rational.

Our standards of requiring rationality from human beings are very low. We are very tolerant as to the amount of rationality which we expect from people, and as a consequence a great many inaccessible psychotics go unnoticed right in our vicinity. You might not realize this until one day you as an auditor sit down and start to talk to Grandpop. Well, Grandpop has always had the pip and he is a bad hypochondriac and so on. (Incidentally, he takes care of the baby most of the time.) But you want to do something for him. So you say, “Would you like to feel better?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ve got to take my tonic. That will make me feel better. That’s the stuff.” (His tonic happens to be eighty-five percent alcohol!)

And you say, “Well, no, I mean we could really do something about this. Now you see what it has done for Betsy Ann, you see what it has done for Uncle Joe, and you see over here what it’s done.” But regardless of the evidence he will stick with his tonic.

Watch this man’s patter. It is fascinating — not because he is resisting any processing; that is not your test. That happens to be an excellent test but one which you should not use; it’s not proper. Compare him with what his environment demands of him and whether or not he answers up to the demands of his environment. There is rationale. His environment demands certain things of him. Does he do those things? He demands certain things of his environment. Does he accomplish them? There is the full-dress-parade rationale, including the dynamics, including competence and everything else in this interplay. It isn’t whether he matches up to one thing. You could start to address him on almost any subject and you would get more or less the same answer.

It’s very interesting; he is very skeptical and doubtful but says he is so reasonable about all of this. (It’s sort of like the lady I knew who had an open mind — it was always open to doubt.) For instance, you talk to him about the fact that maybe it would be a good thing if he moved to the house down at the other end of the garden, which he could have all by himself. And he is very reasonable about the whole thing but it just somehow doesn’t get accomplished. It’s actually desirable from his standpoint, it’s a lot better, but he just doesn’t go down there. It never works out, and you can’t quite put your finger on why. It is like trying to pick up handfuls of water.

A social worker knocks on a door, and here is this man who is pretty badly unshaven and so on. She wants to know why he doesn’t go to work and support his family. Here he is, an able-bodied man. And he has got the best reasons you ever listened to, wonderful reasons, why he cannot work. He is apparently very rational. But there is work. There’s the kind of work that a human being would normally desire to indulge in. He is starving, the children are sick and dirty, and his wife is in bad shape, and he should do something about this. But no, he has got lots of reasons. And that fellow passes for a sane individual — only he’s not. He is actually an inaccessible case. We will just drop this word psychotic (giving you to understand that it means the sudden punch) when talking about the inaccessible case.

This case is inaccessible to the social worker. This case will probably be inaccessible to you. This case is also inaccessible to the medical doctor. This case is just inaccessible across the boards to anything, except maybe the bartender’s offerings.

Here you have a consistent, continual break of communication between this individual and his environment, and the environment and this individual. You have a broken communication line. Every time there is one of those there will be a broken affinity line too, and you will also find the broken reality line is there. This person isn’t facing reality at all. He isn’t in concourse with his fellow human beings at all. He is merely going through the motions.

The real test of such a person — and as you begin to address such people you will begin to appreciate this more and more — is whether or not he can communicate on any subject lucidly. That’s fair, but let’s see how many subjects he can communicate on and let’s find out whether he is really communicating on these subjects or just running on. Does it really make sense? Is he facing the reality of his environment or isn’t he? There is your test of accessibility.

Accessibility, then, is whether or not these lines of force flow more or less uninterruptedly between the individual and his environment, and the environment and the individual. That is the measure of accessibility. Is he capable of affection? Is he capable of communication with things and can things communicate with him? Does he see a reality in various situations? Can he create, himself, a reality? One of man’s greatest functions is creating realities.

Little kids are always at this and they generally get cuffed for lying. They understand so little of what reality is that they think it is perfectly permissible to create realities all the time.

I wish I had some of that imagination left from my youth. You can sure write fiction once you have the data. The only trouble is that the more data you get, the less you do it.

These are the tests. And I place in your hands, right here, an intelligence test and a measure of rationale which you can use without paper or pencil or anything else. If you understand this you can talk to a person for a short time and you will be able to get a fair measure of his accessibility.

When you start to put him into Dianetics you will start to measure his accessibility more closely, because you are now testing his ability to communicate with his past, his affinity with himself and his sense of reality about his own past. And you are measuring those things directly, so you will know more about his accessibility. Just because a person will lie down on the couch and close his eyes and go back down the track is no reason that this person is accessible. He may be standing completely outside of himself. He may not really be in contact with any part of his past, or he may be in contact with a past that never existed. It’s fortunate if you can at least get him to lie down and go back down the track, because then you can do something about it. The cases you are worried about are the cases that won’t lie down and go back down the track. So that is your measure of accessibility at its optimum; less optimally, will this person answer questions?

That may sound ridiculous to you as a gain — will he answer questions? Regardless of whether the answer is rational or not, will he just answer them? But I can see somebody walking down the cells of an institution and at about the fifteenth or twentieth cell saying “This person is all right, he can answer questions,” and feeling very relieved that he had found somebody who was practically sane in relationship to his environment.

Will he answer questions? If you can get a person to do so, you can start to regain attention units. You can get his attention on you, and the second you do that you can build up his affinity with you by getting him to agree with you. Remember that these points are very closely related. Understand that in processing you should get a person to agree with you. For instance, if you can only get him to agree to the fact that there is a day, not even if it’s a good day or a bad day, that its just a day, and he says yes, you have already punched up his reality, his communication and his affinity, right there. So you get him to agree with you and you agree with him.

Some very adventurous and quite brilliant psychiatrists in the past have sometimes gotten into super agreement with psychotics by imitating them. The psychotic picks up a chair and he smashes it against the wall, so the psychiatrist picks up a chair and he smashes it against the wall. What is agreement but mimicry? And so the psychotic goes into affinity with the psychiatrist. After that they can talk. They just built up an agreement, which immediately built up communication and affinity.

When you are talking to a relatively inaccessible person, you are talking at him. So, if you can get his attention just long enough to get him to agree with you, find some points in the conversation on which he will agree and stress those points, and then agree with his points even though they seem a bit irrational to you — ”pick an agreement” with him, in other words — you will get the whole stack of triangles marching up the line. That’s one of the best ways to begin.

You can conduct a few experiments on this. If you, for instance, stepped into a padded cell with a psychotic (meaning the extreme inaccessible case) every day at about ten o’clock and did what he did just for a moment, just made the same motion that he made and then walked out again, and you did this for a while, I think you would find yourself eventually getting up to a point where, when you said what he said, you could interject something with which he would agree. And if he demanded something of you, you would agree on that and demand back and forth. If you kept on doing this you would eventually get into communication with this person and he would probably sit down on the edge of his bunk and have a long conversation with you. He might not talk to anybody else, because you have just built up one person as a reality to him. But you could pick it all the way up the line. If you can get one person to be real with him, then you can get other people to be real with him, and finally what you are really trying to do is to get him out into the world where all is real.

We are dealing with a spectrum, then, that has to do with just these things. Any time you can pick up one point of the triangle and increase it just a hair, you have picked up each of the other points and so you have brought about accessibility.

The whole problem of inaccessibility is the problem of a person being low on the tone scale reactively. What you want to do is pick up the points of this problem — pick an agreement with him. To hammer him and force him will not work. This person is usually just sodden with circuitry, and someone has been highly dominant in his vicinity.

So the first point on Standard Procedure is accessibility: How do you increase this accessibility and how accessible should a person be to run engrams? Pay very particular attention to this. You should understand how inaccessible cases really are. Understand that it is a gain if you can get this person to answer a question. If he can answer a question and remember something about his own past, that is a pretty big step. If you can get him to actually contact pleasure with his eyes closed, or contact anything with his eyes closed, that is a big gain there. Now, if you can get him to move down the track and contact his past, that is a big gain. But don’t think that the person is accessible yet, until he can run an engram with all twenty-six perceptics, in valence. At that moment he is accessible. There are few people who are!

Now, the problem we are going into here is the problem of the “normal” person.

On the Standard Procedure Chart it says, “For Accessible Cases.” I never wrote that on there, by the way. Actually, no threshold of accessibility had been considered at the time that was written. What is the threshold of accessibility? It is when the person is accessible to run engrams with all twenty-six perception in his own valence, and doing fine. Of course, he could not run them with twenty-six perceptics out of valence. So when he can run the engrams in that fashion, then he is accessible for running engrams.

Earlier than that, he is accessible for repairing breaks on communication, affinity and reality. Earlier than that, he is accessible for being talked to. Earlier than that he is accessible for being looked at. Now, you wouldn’t consider that that had anything to do with accessibility, offhand, would you? It is awfully hard to audit somebody who is running so fast you can’t catch him!

So the problem of accessibility is a problem of degrees. The highest degree is the pianola case, the case that plays itself. A pianola case is able to run engrams with all twenty-six perceptics. You keep patching up and repairing and taking circuitry out of the case until such time as it will do that, and then you run engrams — unless you actually can get charge off the case. But again, you are really dealing in terms of accessibility to run engrams.

You sometimes have to run engrams with the person out of valence, more or less, because they are pretty jammed up and so on, but it is not a good thing to do. You can get tension off the line by doing that and regain a few attention units, but this will not fix up that case.

When you start to take circuitry out of the case, for instance, you will very often run engrams with high line charge, very intense, with the preclear out of valence. You will run the charge off these things. You will try to get him into his own valence and to get him back down the track to the earliest time this circuitry appeared. But don’t think you are really running engrams off this case to the degree and magnitude that you should. You do not start an erasure on this case when it is doing that; that is just the beginning.

Take an auditor, for instance, who goes down into the basic area and starts to run out engrams in a routine fashion on a person who is consistently and continually out of valence, whose sense of reality is very poor, whose affinity is very bad, and who, as he is running them, gets some kind of a vague impression that something might be happening but he isn’t quite sure, and so forth. The auditor who will go along and run that case that way is going to be a very confused auditor before long because he is going to find that the darned engrams seem to reappear. Of course they never went anyplace. He is going to find that the person’s valences are all messed up. He is going to start getting unconsciousness.

After a person has been run that way long enough, unconsciousness will start to come off on every moment of the past. In other words, if you send him to yesterday, when he was wide awake, and run him through a moment of yesterday, unconsciousness will start to come off because unconsciousness has been restimulated on this case to such a degree that it is just loaded with it. It just comes off anyplace. It is an interesting thing.

But that would be thoroughly bad auditing. It means that the auditor has attempted to pronounce a case pianola and run it long before he should have. He has abandoned the job of taking off painful emotion, communication invalidation’s and reality breaks. He has abandoned this job long before he should have. He has just kicked all that out and said, “Well, there’s no reason to go after these things; there’s no reason to get any circuits off the case. We’ll just run engrams.” He will find out that something somewhat like a file clerk will work with him and the somatic strip will work with him, and he can get the guy to move on the track and to run out a valence, maybe, in spite of a very, very low sense of reality and very, very poor communication with his own engrams. But the auditor will find these engrams reappearing. Of course, they never disappeared. And he will find all sorts of strange things happening to this case. When that is occurring it means simply that the auditor pronounced the case accessible long before it was.

Now that is what is meant by accessibility and that is what we are trying to attempt. There is your first major step: determining the accessibility of the case, and repairing the accessibility and increasing the accessibility up to a point where it can run engrams — physical pain engrams in the basic area with all twenty-six perceptics. You keep working at this case until you can do it, and you do not do anything to this case which keeps the case from doing it. And the first thing you know, your case will be running fine. This is Standard Procedure.

So that is a wide look at this problem of accessibility. We have looked at how to patch up and put together the affinities, the communication abilities and the reality conceptions of the individual. I point out here that these things have to be done, and you have to get out the circuits and get the person in his own valence. Sometimes you have to work with a case a long, long while.

I wouldn’t really call a case open until it would run an engram in the basic area with all twenty-six perceptics on. That case I would call open. As for the preclear whom we can just get to move on the track, his case is not open. Nor is it open if we can run an engram way out of valence; nor if we can just run some kind of a grief discharge or something on this person — ”He’s crying his mother’s tears, of course, but he’s at least crying.” No, those would not be open cases.

The case is open under two conditions. The first is when a major portion of the grief is off the case or when you have got the central grief engram off the case. The second is when the case can run basic area engrams with all twenty-six perceptics on. Then the case is really open, because it says immediately that you must have gotten some grief off it, and it says immediately that you must have repaired these vectors of communication, affinity and reality.