In this lecture I am going to cover the Auditor’s Code and beginnings of Standard Procedure. Very bad things happen when the Auditor’s Code gets broken.
There are two major crimes in Dianetics. The first one is the invalidation of the preclear’s data, and this is probably the most serious breach of the Auditor’s Code. The second one is failure to reduce every engram which is contacted, or the basics on that chain. Those are the crimes of high treason against your preclear
The reason the Auditor’s Code is the Auditor’s Code doesn’t have to do with whether or not it is nice or civilized. It has to do with whether or not you get processing done on your preclear. Actually, an auditor by reversing the code could considerably upset the mental health of the preclear, and if he could upset the preclear’s mental health, he could probably upset that person’s physical health too. This is not something that should be regarded lightly.
The invalidation of data is a very serious thing. When we regard the tone scale and affinity, communication and reality, we can see immediately that the invalidation of data is a reversal of reality.
This shows you the dynamic nature of affinity, communication and reality. They are vectors which represent something, rather than just static lines on a graph. They have in them force values. There is a certain flow along these vector lines, and by interruption of that flow one can actually reverse its polarity at a particular point.
If we knew more about the actual electromagnetic-gravitic nature of thought as opposed to energy we would be able to understand just what was getting reversed, but just by the fact that we can see that something is getting reversed we have approached this problem of what the energy is that is contained in thought itself. We can see that there is a flow.
Take affinity. It is a flowing line of force which, if suddenly reversed, reverses the polarity and makes an encystment. There is a sudden impulse which makes a storage of energy. This would be impossible, however, in the absence of something to store it in.
There has to have been a collision with MEST, or something wrong between thought and MEST, for these lines to be severely interrupted. And we have to have physical pain before the reversal of one of these lines becomes highly dangerous to the health of the individual.
It is the communication of thee to me via MEST that is important. If we could have a communication between just thee and me without sound waves and cells and matter and so forth, we wouldn’t get this phenomenon.
By looking at affinity we see how very easily one of these lines can be suddenly interrupted and an encystment made over an old physical pain area. We can see that in a grief charge. Many grief charges, when they release, are very strong indeed.
It is hard to understand, at first, how the simple transfer of a piece of information to the effect that one has suffered a loss could encyst so much energy, but we are actually already dealing here with a turbulence in thought. We have a vector of affinity, which is a measurable force line; then there is a loss, a sudden reversal of force, and finally an encystment of it.A reversal in the force vector of reality is the same problem, except it has to do with one’s concept of reality, which has a great deal to do with agreement. We have agreed that we perceive what we perceive.
Now, there are many question marks that could be interposed between perceiving something, recording it and recalling it. Just how all this takes place, what is actually being perceived, what is actually being recorded and what is actually being recalled we are not in any position to say.
This has been a philosophic football for ages. The last person to take a kick at this football was Bertrand Russell, who in a recent long and learned tome concerning perception entered some new confusion into the subject. Descartes also mentioned this, but it had been going on for a long time before that.
In other words, if there is a shout in the forest and there is nobody there to hear it, was there a sound? Or, the barn is red but is the barn red unless somebody sees the red barn? If you get into this, it might be a red barn, who knows? But we do know that we are perceiving parts of this material universe with the perceptions of sight, sound, tactile, kinesthesia and so on.
In parapsychology you start running into communication that hasn’t anything to do with perceiving the material universe, and looking this over, one would predict that such things would exist. It would seem impossible that people who were operating off the same energy bank could not be in communication other than via the material universe. So there is an apparent communication there.
Incidentally, I have picked up some engrams out of people that blocked telepathy, and their sensory perceptions seemed to pick up. It seems like almost anybody has some telepathy, but it certainly does get closed down.
Reality is that thing which thee and me agree is real. We have agreed it is real and so it is real.
Suppose somebody says “Well, look at those twelve black cats up there on the stage,” and we don’t see any black cats; if he keeps screaming about these black cats and makes any commotion about them, we have him put away. He has not agreed with our reality, and that is the prime insanity.
It doesn’t mean that there weren’t twelve black cats on the stage; it means that we didn’t agree that there were. That factor has got to be interposed because, after all, we are dealing exclusively with perception in this case.
If everybody decides, for instance, that Marshall Field does not own Marshall Field and Company, then he doesn’t own it. If he continues to say “But I do own it,” and everybody has agreed that he does not, the fellow must be insane because he obviously isn’t facing reality.
If reality has so much to do with agreement, how is it that we all agree so well on reality? Maybe evolution isn’t the most accurate theory on which one can embark, but certainly it has the factor of natural selection. Perhaps the race has naturally selected out of itself people who have disagreed with our realities. A fellow doesn’t have much chance to reproduce in an insane asylum. So natural selection seems to have taken care of the fact that we all agree pretty well on what reality is.
For instance, if somebody says “Communists should rule the world; democracy is a decadent imperialism and you have got to change your government immediately,” I don’t think many people would agree with him. He is not agreeing with our reality, therefore we put him out of communication with us. We also don’t feel much affinity for him.
But taking reality by itself, it can be seen as a force flow. If somebody suddenly says, in a moment when a person is completely disarmed, that this force flow is in error, there will be a reversal of polarity on the force flow of reality — with exactly the same mechanics as in grief.
Such an invalidation of reality is saying “Your reality does not agree with us,” and that is non-survival.
If a person’s reality continues to agree with those around him (even if not very well), he can get along fairly well in his group. But if he is suddenly found to be in error as to his own reality, and if he is challenged at a moment when he is relatively disarmed, or if he has embarked upon a new reality for the group, which he is hanging on to rather tenuously but on which he is depending greatly, and somebody invalidates it, the encystment is very severe! It is a species of grief charge, but it is on the reality force line. That should tell you how important this reality is to us and how desperately we hang on to it.
The conservative, for instance, is doing nothing but hanging on to a reactive reality. He doesn’t want things changed. He may have spent all of his life trying to assemble a reality. If somebody then says “That isn’t real,” he must either fight and go right down the emotional tone scale, or fall into apathy. If he says “My reality is not real, I confess” — how wrong can a person get?
So it is a very serious thing to invalidate somebody’s reality unless it’s for the betterment of the reality of the group, and then one had better invalidate it rather artfully. One could invalidate reality so thoroughly, so suddenly and so well that it could kill a person. The bottom of this strata is death.
Take a small group within a larger group and invalidate the reality of that small group, and then force home through the larger group that what the small group has been dealing in, which has been recognized for a long while as being real, is actually unreal. That small group will die. That is the way one could knock out, for instance, a minority in any government — simply invalidate it and then prove that it is invalid. In other words, add a reality to the invalidation so that the invalidation itself becomes a reality to more minds than the smaller group and there will be an immediate disappearance of it.
This information could be very dangerous in the hands of an agent provocateur or a propagandist, but that is the way it is done; and where they have had successful operations, they have stumbled across this one.
There is a time factor involved here — the speed with which it is done. If one could space out over a time period the relay of the information that someone had suffered a loss, the encystment would not be so sudden or sharp. That is a theoretical statement. It’s something one could prove or disprove by test. It is something that is predicted, and that I believe to be true.
That is very true on the subject of reality. The forcefulness depends upon the thoroughness, of course, and anything that would be tremendously thorough would probably be very sudden. If there was a rapid enough encystment, with enough impact in it, the person or group would die.
We hear of people dying of a broken heart. Probably people can also die of a broken reality. One of the main things that happens between friends who become enemies is the fact that their reality line breaks down, though it may be less, for instance, than an affinity line separation. How do we express a break-up between friends? By saying they had a disagreement; their reality line severed.
Now, there is a similar force vector in existence on communication. The suddenness with which a communication is shut off and the counter-force which shuts it off create an encystment on the communication line. For example, the psycho neurotic stutterer has had a sudden, sharp shut-off of communication.
One can therefore predict that it would be possible to reverse the polarity on the force line of communication, reverse the polarity on the force line of affinity, and simultaneously reverse the polarity on the force line of reality and kill somebody just like that.
We are not playing with a flock of words on a page when we talk about the Auditor’s Code. We are talking about life and death. How wrong can you get? Dead!
There is an interesting thing about thought: It is dealing with MEST in such a way that it doesn’t have too good a grip on it. Space, time and elemental forces have a very bad impact against those things which thought has managed to assemble from the material universe. The concern of thought is to be right and to survive infinitely. To be infinitely right would be to infinitely survive.
The analytical mind has as its first computational basic “to be right,” and when a person starts admitting he is wrong, watch the downward curve of that person’s mental health. I don’t mean a dramatization of “I’m wrong, I’m wrong, I’m wrong,” but someone having it proven to him continually that he is wrong. He has a computational break there on the subject of “I’ve thought these things out, but they are wrong.”
This sort of thing can’t happen in the absence of considerable turbulence between thought and the material universe — in other words, a series of physical pain engrams. That makes these things possible. When there is no physical pain engram the amount of this that can be done is slight, and it would pass away in a few minutes.
But when thought has already been pretty well convinced that it isn’t kingpin over this material universe because it has been hurt by it too often — there is too much pain and turbulence there already — and when you start convincing somebody, on top of that, that he is continually wrong, you will get a very serious brand of trouble; because the moment he starts saying “All right, I know it, I realize it, it’s proven to me, I’m wrong,” he is saying, “I’m dead.” How wrong can you get? Dead.
Take small children in school. They start handing in their work and the teacher keeps saying, “Well, you’re wrong,” and “There’s an error here, and this is wrong and that’s wrong, and I have to correct you. You have to learn to accept criticism.” How these children have an IQ of five left when they get through most schools, I don’t know. But what they are wrong on are subjects which have not been properly taught to them. If a child is wrong on a school subject, the thing which is in error is the school curriculum. The insidious thing called the examination has probably destroyed more ambition and ability than Genghis Khan with his piles of skulls.
The human mind is built to be right. One of the main difficulties the analytical mind has, after it starts to accumulate a few engrams and they get into restimulation, is trying to keep on being right although it knows there is an error in the computer.
For instance, a fellow driving a car down the street suddenly climbs the curb and runs into a lamppost. Probably it was an engram clicking in with “You’re just wrecking yourself,” or “I’ve got to make a wreck of myself to convince you.”
If you asked this person why he had this accident, he would probably say, “Well, it was the sun shining on a windshield over there; and besides, there was a pedestrian up on that corner and he almost stepped out into the . . .”
And somebody else might say, “There was no pedestrian there, and the sun is way over there,” and the person would get very confused because he had given a justified reason for having done something that he was not aware of having any reason for doing. It was inexplicable.
The analytical mind suddenly observes itself in operation, observes the vehicle in operation, observes that an accident has taken place, says, “Must have been a reason,” can’t find one rapidly, tailor-makes one and says, “Well, there you are, I’m still right.” Then somebody comes along and invalidates that reason.
If you want to see a man spin, just invalidate his justification. The justification is already so tenuous that it can’t support any challenge. The analytical mind has to justify itself for having done what it thought it did, since it doesn’t know about the existence of the engram that caused it, and it can get into a mighty fine setup on justifications. I have read some of the most remarkable and wonderful justifications. There are whole philosophies which are the justifications of one man. The world is filled with them.
Go down to the police court, the magistrate’s court or the supreme court and listen to lawyers telling the judge, back and forth, why their client or this corporation did something. Then the client stands up and says why he did it and so forth. They have at least reached an honest dishonesty. They know they are lying, but the analytical mind doesn’t know this when it starts justifying.
If a person was really right, he would have a rather calm attitude toward what he had just done. But if he is running on a justification, his reality force flow is already so dispersed that it can be hit rather easily and rolled up and encysted. So that is another kind of an engram that can be implanted into a person.
There are actually, then, two new kinds of engrams. There is the physical pain engram (which is practically all the engram there is), and there are three others which can impinge upon it:
They could all be done forcefully enough so that a person would practically fold up. Have you ever seen anybody fold up in grief? Have you ever taken some preclear and run out a grief charge and then seen this person look about ten years younger? That is what can happen with grief.
In people’s lives you will also find these other two types of engrams. They have been handled all the time, but we had not suspected their magnitude and how they had to be cleared up to get a case to progress.
The reversed communication engram is as important as a grief engram. It is sitting there on actual physical pain on its own vector line. You can turn on sonic on a case by finding and running these reversed communication engrams.
For example, suppose the physical pain engram is a prenatal As you come up the line you may find this communication engram at four or five years of age which has no physical pain in it, but it is a reversal of a communication line.
These are two new factors in Dianetics. I found out that people were contacting them just in the normal course of human affairs but not assigning to them the sudden and abrupt shock value they could have — that it could happen in a very short space of time.
Most psycho neurotic stutterers, for instance, have a reversal of communication on themselves which is quite sudden and sharp. It is usually along this line: Let us say a boy is telling something which he knows to be the truth. He is communicating, and he is putting forward a reality at the same time. Then somebody, to protect herself or himself, forces people to believe that the child is lying, and then right in the same concatenation of events forces the child to admit that he is lying. By this time you have the child pretty frantic. In fact, he will go immediately into an apathy if that second step is added. That is a communication engram. It is also an invalidation engram, but it shouldn’t be considered separately. The two engrams have intermingled, but they are both engrams.
Naturally, if somebody has also broken affinity with this child by forcing him to admit he was lying, you have got all three of them together. And this one happens to be a very severe and serious engram, the likes of which you will find every few cases. As a matter of fact, on cases where the reality is low, where there is a lot of dub-in and the preclear tells you lies, doesn’t believe himself, doesn’t like people, and so forth, if you look down the line you will find several of these triple engrams. And you had better clear them up because these cases are not going to improve much until you do.
The context, perceptics, personnel and so forth in these engrams generally match up to the physical pain engrams underlying them, which is why you have a serious situation on invalidating the reality and reversing the affinity of a small child — it is generally done by the same personnel who are in the physical pain engram. These are highly specialized locks, but they are of such super power that you have to call them engrams or people won’t run them.
By handling a grief or a terror engram lightly and not as an engram, you can spin the whole case so that somebody has to unsnarl the thing before the case will go forward again.
So, regarding the Auditor’s Code, you as an auditor have to make it your business to come into an affinity with the preclear Otherwise, you will not get anything done.
You are communicating with him and you are trying to get him to communicate, in a very intimate state, between himself and his own past, which is rather difficult for some people to do. At the same time you are trying to help him out on the subject of building up his reality. You start building up considerable force with this preclear on the three lines of affinity, communication and reality, and if you have built them up well, or if they exist and you have worked with them, you are going to have something pretty strong at work there.
Then if you suddenly invalidate his data, it will break all three abruptly. When this happens it is usually done to a person who is not completely analytically aware, who is back down the time track and can’t defend himself ably. He is depending much more thoroughly upon his auditor than the auditor usually suspects. An auditor is prone to overlook this, even when he himself, on the couch as a preclear is depending upon his own auditor.
A person is very badly startled, for instance, by noises which happen in his vicinity while he is in reverie. This is because he cannot marshal his forces immediately in order to combat the situation. His defenses are down at this point. He is counting upon another human being to safeguard him from anything that happens in the environment so he can go back and find out what happened in his past life. And part of that trust is, of course, safeguarding the various life forces of the preclear himself, which can be interrupted.
I want you to understand this clearly so that you will deal very severely with the next invalidation or the next Auditor Code break that you run into.
I had a case one time who was in the basic area and was erasing. It had been a horrible struggle to get there, and then suddenly somebody very close to this person waltzed in and invalidated practically all of his reality! The preclear went into a state of apathy and seven months later was still not back into the basic area. So don’t underestimate the force of these vectors, or the trouble which can be caused by opposing them.
You are dealing with thought, and thought combined with MEST in an orderly and harmonic way is life. Thought communicates itself and goes into, handles and works with and around MEST along these three vectors. You are handling a person’s life.
I studied quite a few civilizations before Dianetics came into being, and I found out that this hard-boiled Anglo-Saxon civilization probably has cards in spades over any other I ever ran into on the subject of just common, ordinary, mean discourtesy where another person’s brains or rights are concerned, which is interesting, especially as we do a lot of talking about human rights.
I am reminded of the early days of the Puritans and the laws and codes on which those people operated. The blue laws, for instance, of an early Puritan town are something to behold. They prohibit people from rushing out naked into the middle of the street. They prohibit this, they prohibit that. And people say, “My, those were certainly moral people. Yes, sir!” But you wouldn’t hold with that too far if you saw what kind of a society they were really trying to get along in. This society was so bad that it had to have laws like that.
Every time you see a stringent law code, you are usually looking straight at a society which has something basically wrong with it which has to be corrected by that punitive code. Hence the Puritans. These people were trying to combat tavern brawling of the magnitude of a couple of people getting killed every night! Hopalong Cassidy never faced anything like one of the taverns of an early Puritan town!
They needed law and order, and the Puritans tried to bring it into the society. They made pretty good inroads on it. But the society in which Puritanism existed was the maddest, wildest, brawlingest society imaginable.
This was also the period when piracy was very high. Have you got any idea how bad societies have to be to support such a thing as the terrors of piracy, where suddenly a bunch of men from one ship swarm aboard another ship, kill everybody on board and tie the captain to a mast, string gunpowder around him, then laugh heartily and get onto another ship and sail off someplace? It sounds very romantic in the movies, but that interrupts commerce!
This society does a lot of talking about safeguarding human rights. But on close inspection one finds out that we don’t have very good rights, because these laws have to exist to enforce them. And these rights are fast deteriorating at the present time. There are the amendments to the Constitution — freedom of speech, freedom of the press — and now we have such things as “freedom from want” and “freedom from liberty”!
What are all these things? They are a complete redefinition of democracy. We must have had a bad time regarding personal rights in the society to have laid so much stress on them in the English-American groups.
Listen to children in the street and what do you hear? “You’re a liar!” “I am not!”
“You are too!” Polite little devils. “That’s mine!”
“Willie, you let him have that!” and so on. This society is impolite!
Or go down around the long shore district where this kind of thing starts to run in the raw, and you will hear such comments as “You dumb fool, you’re stupid!” passing for “Good morning.”
People in this society, which is a highly vital and virile one, are going forward on these vectors with such rapidity that they keep superimposing controls over things that should not be controlled, and part of this effort to control latches on to other people.
It’s like Christianity back in slave days. They said, “The way you get lots of slaves is to take them rum and Christianity.” So they took them rum and Christianity and they managed to fix them up pretty well! Of course, their brand of Christianity was a very strange one, but it was nevertheless very much to the point of people trying to control other people with something which was supposed to make people more or less free. So they used Christianity to try to control people.
Naturally, if some point in the society uses Christianity to control another point and another point and another and another, this will go along just so long before these points will counteract by trying to control the original point, and soon the whole thing will sink down and become more and more reactively controlled. A tries to control B. If he tries long enough, B pretty soon will try to control A, and that is the start of a dwindling spiral.
This business of human rights becomes a dwindling spiral. People try to defend these rights and they try to set it up so people will continue with these rights. Actually, there must be a tremendous amount of reactive activity in the society trying to deny to people these rights.
A tells B he has no rights. B then begins to tell A he has no rights, and the first thing you know, this declines to where you get a police state. There is nothing in it but force. The universe of thought merges and becomes more and more a material universe until at last there is just a material universe with a flock of cemeteries around, and that’s all. Thought has backed out. Too much force has been added into the equation.
The postulation of human rights is actually an effort to keep these three vectors from being interrupted so seriously as to undermine and cause an individual or group to deteriorate. That is actually, fumblingly felt, the aim of laws which safeguard human rights: the protection of these three vectors. Now that it is known what they are protecting, I hope they can codify it better, because a serious crime in such a society would be to walk up to somebody who has just lost a friend and say abruptly, “Bill died.”
Rights. The right to do what? The right to live, the right to talk, the right to communicate and the right to investigate — all of these things are very important. Any one of them interrupted too badly will leave a highly charged lock that, up the track, can be called an engram.
In processing you should go back and try to find these-things and try to get them off the case. Unstop each one of these three lines as nearly as you can and you are going to have a much better acting case.
You wouldn’t, for instance, try to educate a person to love children who has engrams which tell him to hate children. Pain is telling him to hate children, and now you are going to educate him? That is not possible. You would have to introduce more pain on one side than is on the other, and you would get the kind of equation which is practically the world of law in operation. Engrams force an individual in a certain direction and something has to happen to keep him from going in that direction, so social force is applied in the opposite direction. But of course the more social force that is applied to the individual, the more engrams get implanted; so more pain drives him in the original direction, and more pain has to be applied in the opposite direction again, which makes more pain in both directions. And in dealing with this sort of thing you are dealing of course with force, which is native only to MEST, and the type of force used, physical pain, is native only to MEST, So the end product is MEST — matter and energy existing in time and space.
But these things are antipathetic to thought. They are the things that thought is trying to combat, so they force thought out. That is death.
It is interesting that when there is an attempt to regulate a society by the infliction of pain, it goes into a dwindling spiral.
The navy in Napoleon’s day had gone into a dwindling spiral of having to increase the magnitude of punishment, up to a point where they had such interesting things as keelhauling, yard hauling, flogging through the fleet, and the most weird inhumanities in the name of keeping things right.
It was also very interesting that they would punish a man up to a point where he would finally tell the crew that he had done wrong. They would beat him into a statement. That these people, just before they were hanged from the yardarm (which could practically be ordered by the second mate, it had gotten that bad), would come out and confess demonstrates that they must have been pretty badly beaten down. They must have been dwelling on the brink of going into a spin in the first place, to be forced into one in that fashion. It didn’t take much to tumble them over.
There was a society which had gone on this basis of having more force this way to more force that way, back and forth.
A society can be pretty well forecast as to what will happen. It will either suddenly recognize that it has got to interrupt the existing code, just reorganize the entire code and throw out everything that has to do with punishment completely, or the society will blow up totally.
People come into a society sometimes and are roundly cursed for trying to reform it. Up in Montana, for instance, in the old days, the cowboys very badly objected to people coming in and reforming the area. This was because most of the people who came in to “reform” the area actually came in to get a little more money out of it by getting rid of the boys who had a monopoly on the crime before they got there. That was the way they were doing a lot of the reforming. This then spread around that it was a very bad thing to reform the society, and they invented this horrible epithet reformer. So there was a terrific antipathy to anything labeled “reform.”
Actually, that society if just left to itself would have simply killed itself off and ceased to exist.
Here was a society thoroughly engaged upon the application of force to prevent force from happening on an individual level. Bill says that Gus should not exert force against Bill, and the final argument is a slug from a .45. There you have really got a society on the skids. They talk about it being young and virile — it was suicidal! It had a civilized world on its borders — that is to say, the East. But nobody modified that society itself. It actually died and passed away and was supplanted by people from the East.
That is what happens in a social order by just the interruption of affinity, communication and reality, and it certainly happens in an individual. The more interruptions you get along these three lines of communication, affinity and reality, the more you inhibit thought from acting smoothly within the organism, and the less thought is actually available to the organism in the business of living. It gets to a point rather rapidly where a person grows old and looks it.
The society as a whole does this, and the individual does it in the same way. He puts forward force in order to live; he gets force back. He puts out force; he gets force back again, and that is his normal business of living.
It’s bad enough just in terms of wear and tear, without any engrams being entered into it. But then engrams start getting entered into it, and it’s no wonder that in this society people of sixty-five can’t play baseball!
My main concern here is to give you the picture of the seriousness of breaking affinity, communication and reality with your preclear, to show you how to rehabilitate the affinity, communication and reality of your preclear and to show you also that there are actually three types of high-powered locks that you can call engrams — not just painful emotion.