This happens to be the most important subject that you will cover in auditing. It's not the most important subject in the universe, but it's the most important subject in auditing.

And that is Step 1: Two-way Communication. And this is the relatively advanced procedure of conducting two-way communication.

And someone who would have no concept of the four conditions of existence would not be able to run this process. Therefore, this would not come at the very early part of the course — although Step 1 comes at the early part of the course. This requires (two-way communication) every iron you can throw into the fire. It requires all of your knowledge of Scientology and its theory in order to conduct an adequate two-way communication with a preclear. Because if you conduct an adequate two-way communication with the preclear, you can, just by that and with no further processing, make him entirely well; make him a Theta Clear in relatively short time. Now, that's an interesting thing, isn't it?

So this must be an important process I'm talking to you about.

This process, however, requires all of the knowingness you have of Scientology in order to conduct it. It is done by a clever auditor. It is not a process which is done by a fellow who is going to sit down, as his furthest effort of cognition as far as his preclear is concerned, and read off a series of commands to him. It requires a continuous communication with the preclear — a two-way communication with the preclear.

It requires that you establish it and that you maintain it and that you conduct it in such a fashion that the elements which compose the preclear's difficulty are vanished.

Now, just by carrying on a two-way communication with the preclear, you can cause any difficulty he is having, such as nonexteriorization, such as a failure to take responsibility in other dynamics, and so on — whatever his difficulty — you can conduct a two-way communication in such a way as to make those difficulties vanish.

Now, I say to you this very advisedly, but I say to you that you will have just as much good fortune with this process as you are willing to be a clever auditor and to follow the exact rules of this.

Now, this is the primary difficulty with this process, two-way communication, is that, apparently, it is entirely permissive. It apparently can wander into any field, topic, subject; it apparently could address anything, and therefore and thereby, an individual who is not cognizant of its very, very precise fundamentals would go immediately astray. He would go as far astray as men have gone as far astray with this as a process. It's a process which you can easily get entangled about; it's a process which you can be argued with about.

The Roman Catholic church fully believes that it practices this. And if you were to conduct a session in the presence of a few bishops and a hatful of cardinals, this person would say, "Yes, that's exactly what we have been doing for thousands of years. So, therefore, we have discovered Scientology and it was actually down there in the catacombs all the time, and we just now have decided to give it to the world, because we've been doing this for years." Oh, no, they haven't been doing it for years! They've been making an instinctive gesture, like the cat washing its face, and that's all they've been doing.

A two-way communication could be a very broad field, but it has a particular precision area where you as an auditor can concentrate. If you know the exact mechanics of what you are doing, it becomes the best process you ever used in your life — used cleverly. If you don't know its mechanics and you don't use it cleverly, it becomes the gummiest, most misunderstood, nonadvancing sort of a process you ever ran into. So, again, here's a process that requires judgment, but it's very easy to do.

This part of two-way communication which we are discussing could be given a name all of its own, and we would call that name "Description Processing." It could be given this name, and so on, but it's liable to get entirely lost if we always refer to it by this name, "Description Processing."

In the first place, "Description Processing" would not be the entire descriptive name of this process. It would have to be "Description Right Now Processing." You'd have to call it that. But we had better call it a process known as two-way communication, which is just exactly what it is labeled in Intensive Procedure. And you're learning about it at this distance in the course because it uses every single thing that you know about Scientology.

And the main thing that it uses is this factor: If you establish the as-isness — if you establish the as-isness — of your preclear's condition to his satisfaction, it will vanish.

And you don't establish its as-isness by tracing its consequences, by tracing its basics, by tracing its significances, by discovering what lies under the thing that lies under the thing that lies under the back of beyond the other side of — let's change it all, change it all, change it all, change it all, change it all.

Because what will happen? The process will persist, won't it? This is a tricky one, then. It is a process which actually and overtly processes and achieves alter-isness by using nothing but as-isness.

You can get a change of case with the preclear, very simply, solely by taking his case as it is right now. Right now, we want right now, no place else. We want to know how it is right now.

The key question of this process can be codified; the process is not sloppy, it's not all over the place, it's highly precise. And the key question: "Well, how does it seem to you?"

You could just go on asking this question, "Well, how does that seem to you?" and "How does that seem to you?" "And how does it seem to you now?" "And how does that seem to you?" "And how does it seem to you?" "And how does it seem to you?" "And how do you feel now?" "Now, how is that?" "How does the room look to you now? I mean, actually." "How does it actually seem to you right now?" "Now, what manifestation is going on now?" "Now, how is it?" "Well, how do you feel about that?" "Well, you don't know about that. Well, can you get that — how you don't know about that?" "Well, do you like it or dislike it?" "Well, it seems like you dislike it. Well, all right, now how does it seem to you?"

And the funny part of it is you get change, change, change, change, change, change, change, at a mad rate. By doing what? Asking for nothing but as-isness. What is the condition as it is right this instant?

Now, you see that if you were a very, very clever practitioner, wouldn't it be very, very interesting? All you would have to do is take this basic question, "How does it seem to you?" and couch it in a thousand different guises, always, always pointing straight at this one: that we want this individual to discuss exactly how it is. We want to know about it; we want to know how it is and we don't want any romance, we don't want any embroidery, we don't want any alteration so as to get our sympathy, we don't want any super pressure on us, so that we will do something. All we want to know is how it is.

You don't think that takes a clever auditor? Believe me, that does. Your preclear will sit there and he will say, "Oh, my mother is so terrible, she beat me and so on and so on and so on. And I associate this with the time when my little sister… And my little sister read a book on sex and that associates with it. And I see a piano over there and sa… ssa… sssuh."

And you'll say, "Now, have you ever been psychoanalyzed?" "Well yes, as a matter of fact."

"How does it seem to you now?"

We've gotten that one out of the road. See that?

Now, that's quite an interesting thing, quite a fascinating thing to watch a preclear come into cognition — not recognition, because he probably never knew it before. You see, recognition would be "I knew it but I forgot it."

Conditions exist through him, around him, above him, below him — considerations exist of which he has no cognition. These have come into beingness without any understanding whatsoever on his part. He's never seen them before, and yet they're right there.

And so what we're interested in is cognition, looking at it, and we want the as-isness of any and every condition which this fellow has.

"How does it seem to you?" "Now, exactly how does that seem? "Oh, you want him to repeat it again, huh?" Well, now let's look that over again. Now, you say you have this feeling like there's a tight band around your throat. Well, how is it now?"

"Oh, it's unfeeling. There's no feeling in that area."

"Well, is that the same as it was? Now, how is it? Well, is that the way it generally is?"(You know, you've got to throw the dunnage in to keep up the communication line.)"Well — oh, you say it's rather sharp pains in the vicinity of your throat. Well now, is it like that often? Well now, how are these pains? Do they go around to the back of your neck? Oh, the whole back of your head's numb? Well, how is that? How does that seem? Is it numb right down to your hair roots? Well, you don't know? Well, how does it seem not knowing about it? Well, that's fine. That's fine. Well do you like that? I mean, is it good to have the back of your head completely missing that way? No, you don't like that? Well now, let's take your throat again. You say you've had this condition for some time. All right now, do you get a sort of a continuousness about that throat?"(Get that other as-isness in there. I mean, does it go on and on?)"Oh, you've got it checked. Well, just how are you checking it there? Just how are you checking it, hmm?"

And your preclear, the first thing you know, is saying, "Well, there's nothing wrong with my throat, back of my head is perfectly alive."

If he doesn't know the formula of what you're doing, and he doesn't track with it at all, and he doesn't know any Scientology — if he does know Scientology, by the way, it works like mad; he can't prevent it from working. If he doesn't know anything about this at all, you will not just appear to be a priest, you will appear to be a very, very magical sort of priest indeed. You will already become a priest the first time that you all of a sudden have turned pain running live all over his body. I mean, you're somebody there — you're possibly a witch or something. Lord knows what you are, but you have ceased at that moment to be entirely human as far as he's concerned.

Now, I have run this process on preclears who were intensely resistive to auditors, who knew nothing could happen, who generally finished up sessions saying nothing happened. And I've received the most amazing sort of a result. The person knew something had happened — cognition had occurred. And it had occurred with considerable action. The person knew this very, very well, in other words. He knew this extremely well — that something had happened.

You can't run this on anybody without changing his condition. It's impossible to do so.

Even if you ran it poorly, you'd change his condition.

Now, the basic laws which underlie this — you want to know how it is right now, with this thrown in occasionally (now, if you throw this in often, I'll beat you — so help me — because this will backtrack him): You throw in where and when once in a while — once in a while. Let's not stick him back on the time track; just throw it in once in a while — well recognizing that if he spots this thing even vaguely in the time and place where it started, you're liable to get a whole chain of them blowing. But we're not really interested in that, because where and what is present time?

Time is not just beginningless and endless — it would seem so — but time is a continuing postulate. It's a postulate which continues to postulate. All time is now. What we call the future, which is entirely hypothetical, is what will be. That's not an as-is, is it?

You could have an as-isness about the future, such as "I am worried about the future," but you don't have a future in that preclear. All right. You might have a future if you did enough for him to completely change his life and he was a millionaire and gave you the Roman Catholic church or something to reward you. But as far as the past is concerned, it has no more validity than the future. All that exists of the past is what is in the present. And if it's not in the present, so what? You say," Well, it might come into the present." No it won't. No it won't, not if you've got the present straightened out.

If you have a continuous state of beingness in this present, which is rising and getting better and his cognition is better and better and better, you're turning on his knowingness. And if you turn on his knowingness in the present, his knowingness about the past will increase markedly.

I have had a preclear start out with a statement that "I am a body, I know I am a body, I have heard about this Scientology and I have heard that it pretends that it can do something and people get out of their head. The actual truth of the matter is, that I've heard about this too, that the people who actually exteriorize are really crazy. I read in a psychiatric textbook once upon a time, that people occasionally had the delusion that they were not in their bodies, and that psychiatry used electric shock to move them into their bodies" — which would be more or less the practice of a bunch of monkeys hanging from their tails that shouldn't be fooling around with such things as the spirit.

You think I'm being very cruel on psychiatry? Listen, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, in the last fifty years, have sat in auditing chairs — which is to say practitioner chairs (they could have been auditors, but they weren't) — for I'd say several million, if not several billion, hours, and they didn't notice this? Ha!

Well, they were starting out on the basic premise that man is mud, is mud, is mud, is mud, is mud, and he's a body, and there's nothing you can do about it anyway. And going at it from this angle they weren't liable to find out much of anything but the fact that there does happen to be some mud around.

The as-isness of a preclear was what was in the road of materialistic approaches to the field of healing. And that's what's in the road of the medical doctor and anybody else who shouldn't be in the field. Now, I don't infer that a medical doctor is out of order in practicing on broken bones, obstetrics and things like that. That's definitely mechanical structure and so forth. But when it comes over to his doing something about the mind, he has to deal with the spirit, because there isn't any mind. That was the thing they never learned about, you see? They didn't find out that what they were studying didn't exist. A lump of computing machine made out of neurons and psychotrons or something. This they were studying. Well, they could have studied it forever. And they never found out anything about it, because it has no asisness.

In other words, you could go on describing it forever and of course it'd continue to exist because it's an alter-isness.

Well, don't you make the same mistake with a symptom. Don't you dare, if you're using this Description Processing, make the same mistake with a symptom and consider that this symptom consists of some structural difficulty which has the deep significance of the causation point in the thisa, the thata — in other words, alter-isness, alter-isness, alter-isness — because all you'll do is perpetuate the symptom. Don't make that mistake. What you want to do is quite something else.

You want to know how it seems right now. How it is? Its as-isness. You want to know where the dark area seems to be. You don't even want to turn it white. You know, you don't want any action on the part of this preclear. He's so fixed on the idea to [of] being an observer, let's let him observe. And there's a white area.

And he says, "I don't know. The back of the leg is kind of white and the front of the leg is kind of dark. And there seems to be a shooting pain that's going up through the leg."

"Well, does it seem to continue? Well, how does it seem when you…? Is there any effort there on your part to shut it off? Or anything like that? Well, is the pain bigger than you are?"(Dunnage, you see?)"Are you bigger than the pain or the pain bigger than you? Just how is this?"

"Oh, the pain seems real big."

"Well, how are you estimating that?"

Keep him looking at it, keep him looking at it. Don't fixate him on it. You just want him to describe it and describe it and describe it, and then to communicate and communicate and communicate. And we don't care if we waste a little time. We don't care if we waste some time with this. So what? He goes off into some wild excursion.

And he says, "Well, it seems to me like, I don't know, I can't quite look at the room when that pain is on. I try to look at the room. I wonder why that is. I wonder why that is. I've had a lot of speculation as to why this is."

You can let him talk for a minute. Let him talk. It's just burning time.

But, remember you're preserving a two-way communication. And throughout this process you're preserving a two-way communication and that is its keynote and that's why it continues to work so easily. Your preclear does not seem to be under duress at any time.

Believe me, is he interested in his symptoms! And you simply use that overtly to get him to describe them as they are. But this requires a certain sensitivity on the part of an auditor — a certain sensitivity, believe me. He's got to know when the preclear starts weaving the fancy tales.

Now, how is he going to know this? The condition does not alter. That's an interesting one, isn't it? The condition doesn't alter. He's describing how horrible it is to have his head in a continual migraine. He goes on and describes this and he describes it and he describes it, and he describes it for three, four minutes, and there's no change at all. And he describes it for a couple more minutes and there's no change at all.

Don't shoot him. Just ask him how his feet seem to him. Get him off the subject by pulling his attention off that part of his anatomy, because you hit a lying machine. And if you'll just get his attention off of it, why, maybe you'll get some straight answers.

Now here's where you learn about people. But in what framework are you learning about people? You're going on the very, very basic material of the four conditions of existence. And you will see him run this cycle over and over and over as he does Description Processing.

People become so fantastically patterned, they are so predictable when they start this sort of thing, that they become very easy to process. But as far as it being restimulative is concerned, it isn't, because you're not trying to change the preclear. You're trying to find out how he is. You can do this for hours.

Cognition will turn on, on the part of a preclear that he's actually had a migraine headache for years and he didn't even know it, except all of a sudden it turned on and then stopped. You know, I mean, it was on and then it stopped.

All of a sudden, he says, "Wait a minute. What's happened to this pain? I didn't ever know I had a pain here?"

See? That sort of thing has happened in this type of processing. Well, all right.

Description Right Now Processing — two-way communication — Step 1. That's how you get them into communication, how you keep them into communication, and why you keep them into communication along this particular line.

Now, you could perform 8-C Opening Procedure by just simply maintaining a twoway communication. "How does this room seem to you?"

"Oh, I don't know."

"How does that wall look? Oh, you don't know. How does it seem to you not to know?

What are you not-knowing with there?" Anything.

You're trying to get the exact condition at that moment which he is observing. And of course, it'll just go flick, flick, flick, flick, change, change, change, change, change. You're undoing all the change he has put into it. But it undoes with great rapidity.

So there is some hope after all.