How are you today?

Audience: Good. Fine, thank you.

All right. This is what?

Audience: Twenty August.

Twenty August AD 13. Thank you.

Well, this is a lecture on the itsa line. About time. The itsa line. Why is it called the itsa line? The auditor says, „Whatsit?“ and the pc says, „Itsa.“ It is the pc’s communication line from pc to auditor. And it isn’t necessarily pursuant to the auditor’s whatsit; it is sometimes pursuant to the pc’s whatsit — pc very often puts in his own whatsit.

Okay. There are numerous communication lines between the auditor and the pc and the Aggregate of these make up the — what you call the auditing cycle. The auditing cycle is made up of several communication lines. A communication line is cause-distance-effect. I call your attention to Dianetics 1955! for the full definition of a communication line. What is a communication: intention, attention, duplication at the point of effect, and so forth.

All those are quite important and technically accurate, but what you’re mainly interested in is cause-distance-effect. Cause-distance-effect is a communication line. A communication line is not cause-distance-effect, cause-distance-effect –that’s two communication lines.

Now, a communication line can be very faint, and one of those that you’ll find out routinely on an auditor is the attention line: line 1 minor; line 1 minor, the attention line. And that is just consistently out. But as I say, there are numbers of these and we’re not particularly going into them. That’s the first line. That’s — get the pc’s attention; how do you get the pc’s attention to cause the pc to put his attention on the auditor? And that line is the one that is put in.

Now, that line itself can be complex and become two lines or three lines. Pc sitting there and he’s saying, „Gob-gob, walla-walla,“ something, and the auditor wants to get his attention on him. See, it has to have attention on the auditor. Now, the auditor can’t really give an auditing command or do anything with his command unless he gets his attention line in. Now, that can be done very crudely. You can drop the E-Meter, you can cough loudly in the pc’s face, tip over your chair, get angry. There’s, in essence, numbers of ways to get this line in very, very wrong. And the line has to be put in, however, and very often you find a pc fogging around at the beginning of session and his attention is not on the auditor, it’s really not on his case, it’s not on anything you’re trying to do, and so forth. Well, how do you get it there? Well, one of the ways of getting it there is, having an attention line already extant, you then convert it to an itsa line.

Now, this is the whole trick, because there’s another attention line. There is attention on what, see? And this looks like another attention line — it’s actually 1 minor. It just isn’t putting the attention on the auditor, it’s putting attention on something else. And this is a little trick I used to do that used to baffle everybody in ACCs. They used to get baffled, and everybody would drop his jaw and look at me dully when 1 would try to get them to do this — and it’s been wholly unsuccessful — but by dividing down the auditing cycle into these various communication lines and component parts, I will bravely take another crack at it.

It’s slippy. I know if I give this to you, it’ll become a repetitive-command process, which it isn’t. It’s slippy, that’s all — is you just very adroitly, without really putting the pc’s attention on anything except what his attention should be on, just flick the pc’s attention over to what it should be on. I’ll give you an idea.

Pc is saying, „Oh, I just — just — just can’t stand — can’t stand these — these wild parties. Just can’t stand them. Had one last night and just can’t stand them, and so forth. There’s just too much — too much music and everything. And I’ve got an awful present time problem, because this guy’s — this — this — this girl’s b-b-boyfriend came over and wanted to pop me in the eye because I was getting too familiar … and it’s terrible.“ And present time problem, present time problem, present time problem.

And you know you’re running the GPM „to be sexual,“ see? This you know about the case. This is — this I’m giving you, also, is the itsa line.

Hey, we’re getting a nice storm tape here too, Peter. We’ll cut the storm off of it, and so forth, and sell it. They go great in the Middle West. They love storm tapes. It reminds them of home.

I had a green tornado one time in Kansas — never been back since. Twenty-five-pound blocks of ice were falling out of a pea-soup-green sky, and the visibility had dropped down to about fifteen feet-bright green. Never quite recovered. Was impossible. Couldn’t have happened — but it did.

Now, your pc’s attention being all over the confounded place, the auditor sits back and says he’s going to put in the itsa line. Now, usually by this — unless he is well trained and has this data, and so forth-this means he’s going to sit back and leave the pc’s attention totally uncontrolled. The itsa line, when you first start giving it to people, is just never doing anything but listen. And that’s because people think it is simply a communication line, and it isn’t. But we will go on to this in a moment.

Now, therefore this pc is running on and on and on about this party — and this is slippy auditing. I can sit and do this by the hour. PC never finds out about it, and there’s no command process being run and everything else, and tone arm moves like mad, and so forth. It requires a certain estimation of effort, you understand? And I actually, years and years ago, despaired of getting anybody to control attention that lightly. This is another effort to do so, see?

So, you say — he’s going on and on, „And this guy came over and he almost bopped me, but this was a nice-looking girl, and so forth. And I had a terrible problem because of my wife, you know, and so on, and . . .“ Here we go, see?

Now, the auditor who is not well informed and who is not well skilled just sits back and listens to this whole thing. Now, to do anything about it suddenly is to put line 1 minor in on the auditor. Clank! And boy, the pc will ARC break, see, because it’s a sudden shift of attention. So the whole thing is the skill by which you can take line 1 minor and flick it over onto what you were doing or want to do in the session — the skill with which you can do this. And, believe me, this is a skill maneuver. And when you are really skilled at this, you could almost sit down and run a full auditing session, and even a casual observer would think you were simply listening to the pc, which you weren’t at all; you were actually directing the pc’s attention very closely. The pc was talking exactly about what you wanted that pc to talk about and nothing else, and the pc never realizes that their attention has been grooved on it.

Now, that would be the tremendous difference between psychoanalysis listening and Scientology auditing. You see, these things could look quite alike.

The psychoanalyst (1) did not really know what to direct anybody’s attention to, see? He didn’t know the anatomy of the bank. He thought if he could direct somebody’s attention to sexual incidents in early childhood, he had it made. Well, now, a pc — a pc — actually follows in his case, at any given moment, the least-charged line. A pc will always follow the least-Charged line. Get this. Get this good, because that’s one of those remarks that goes by in the night and you wonder someday — you’re sitting there auditing somebody and you don’t know what to do, and so forth. And it’s one of those things that if you knew that well, you’d know exactly what to do. He always follows the least-charged line with his tone arm action. If you’re going to get tone arm action, it is on the least-charged aberrative line — not the least-charged thing he could talk about, but the least-charged aberrative line. The tone arm action exists on the least-charged aberrative line at any given moment in a case progress — always the least-charged aberrative line.

Now, give you what I mean by that. Let’s take dynamics. You’ve got eight dynamics you could audit on the pc. The third dynamic is what the pc is always coming up with. Well, if you kept the pc on the third dynamic, you know, you would get tone arm action because this happens with the pc to be the least-charged line. You got it?

Now, the other lines do not give tone arm action, and this does not mean they are not charged; it means they are overcharged. There is too much charge on them. Got that? So you’re always trying to snake through the minefield on the least-popping firecrackers to get your tone arm action. You got that? You want little ones that’ll just tingle his feet; you don’t want those that’ll blow his legs off You understand?

Well, the mind is so regulated and safety-valved that it will not release charges which the pc considers over his ability to tolerate. Now, an auditor can actually punch these charges into view; he’s got all the materials in his hand. And therefore he could actually throw the pc into areas which are overcharged areas to be run — the areas are overcharged.

The result of an overcharged area is a stuck tone arm. Stuck tone arms have many peculiarities and particularities. You can say that if you want to really get tone arms moving you have to get the GPMs on a case run; that’s the most likely to give you tone arm action. Because it’s the most aberrative in terms of time. You can say a lot of things about tone arm action. You say tone arm action sticks because of time — these things are all true. But with regard to charge, what you really want to know with regard to charge is that in the presence of too much charge, too much charge, the TA ceases to operate. TA action ceases when you have too much charge.

That doesn’t say that you couldn’t bleed it, that you couldn’t work your way around it, that there aren’t means of getting off the charge anyhow, and all that sort of thing. But when you see a TA ceasing to operate, and ceasing to act, then you have entered an area of too much charge — particularly on an extremely high or an extremely low TA. Do you follow that, now? Too much charge.

It’s not because there’s nothing there to run; it’s because there’s too cockeyed much there. See that? And if you don’t get tone arm action, then the charge that holds the significances and ideas, postulates, cognitions, and that sort of thing, in place — just the corny electrical charge, you understand, no other significance connected with it — this thing packed up and held in facsimiles, masses, all of this sort of thing, won’t then let the case advance. And you get no case advance in the absence of tone arm action. That is — that’s it! I mean, there aren’t any ands, ifs, ares or buts about it. No tone arm action: no case advance!

I don’t care if you erased a somatic, I don’t care if the pc has ceased to have lumbosis, I don’t care about any of these things — because you’re not auditing a body. As far as this pc is concerned — no tone arm action: no case advance.

Now, can you worsen no tone arm action? Yes. You can bring about no needle action on top of no tone arm action. Hu-hu-hu-hu. And if you insist on running a pc without tone arm action, you soon will begin to see it expressed over here in the needle, which will get tighter and tighter and tighter. And after a while everything locks up. And then if you use real desperate measures, why, you can just freeze the pc into something that’ll feel to him like solid rock.

The longer you run a case without tone arm action, the more you will freeze the case into no tone arm action. And the more the case is frozen into no tone arm action, the less chance you have of getting charge off by any means. You see this? I mean, you’re walking away from the point of resolution. The further you go with no tone arm action, the less likely you are to fortuitously produce some. So it’s not just „Well, he’s running without tone arm action,“ and brush it off, you see? It’s „Oh, my God! He’s running without tone arm action! Whew. Huh. Hey, hey, hey! Bo-bo-bo-bo! No tone arm action! Hey, hey, hey, hey! No tone arm action. Get some tone arm action. Ha-ha.“ You know? It gets that type of emotional response, you know? Not „Well, he’s running without tone arm action, so he isn’t getting any better,“ and so on, see?

Guy being run without tone arm action is somebody you’re watching go down the big toboggan. And the longer this goes on, the harder it’s going to get to get tone arm action.

Now, the most likely way to get tone arm action on any Condition, any case or any anything, is getting in the itsa line. This has processes connected with it. These processes are designated Routine 1C (C for communication). Routine 1C: this is the soft-touch process. This is the process that will be given to Scientology One Auditors, and after you’ve studied it and used it a year or two, you’ll find out that there’s a lot more to know about it.

It is at once the clumsiest use — it’s the workhorse, you see? You say, „Well, you’ve got two processes to make an OT. You’ve got 3N, you got R3R.“ No, you’ve always got three processes. See, if you’ve got two like that, then you’ve always got one more, and that’ll always be the itsa line, or 1C, see? This is the workhorse. This is the workhorse.

And, yeah, somebody in a co-audit; yes, sure, somebody in a — doing a book-auditing job; yeah, somebody, some student in the Academy; yeah, these people, oh, yes, these guys will be able to make progress with this thing. But before he’s gone very long in the Academy and before he’s done very much auditing, he’ll all of a sudden begin to believe — he’ll do one of two things: either, „Well, I just get tired of just sitting there listening to him talk and talk and talk and talk, you know? I just get tired of this. So this itsa line isn’t so good.“ See? He didn’t even know what it was in the first place, see? Or he will all of a sudden begin to realize that there is a certain deftness required here or one will just continue to sit and listen and listen, and the pc goes on and talks and talks.

Well, look, they talked for five years in psychoanalysis without getting anyplace. See, we don’t know that they had tone arm action, but we sure know they didn’t get anyplace. They did. They did — pardon me, pardon me. That — I’m maligning the boys. I’m maligning them. They got careful. They did get someplace.

Well, look-a-here. You learn, then, that an overcharged case can most easily be bled down by the itsa line, and you’ll restore tone arm action. So the best way to restore tone arm action to any ease that has become overcharged through being run in the wrong departments is getting in the itsa line. Now, that’s your base process. You can restore tone arm action, no matter how badly the case has been jammed up, if you are clever in handling the itsa line.

Now, when I say „itsa line,“ and when I say „clever,“ yes, they’re very definitely joined together. Clever. It is not a process; it’s a cleverness. And the biggest trouble you have anything with is (as we’ll come back to this) line 1 minor. Why put the attention on the auditor when all you’ve got to do is shift it slightly in the pc?

This guy is saying, „Well, and so forth, and we had this big — big hassle at this party and I-this-my wife bawled me out, and everybody bawled me out and so forth. And I’ve got this terrible present time problem. I got this awful hangover and I’m having an awful time in this session,“ and so on and so on and so on. Yeah, under a long series of runs you could probably take apart this present time problem, but you were running on the pc the goal „to be sexual.“ The pc is having trouble with being sexual, that’s for sure.

Well, that’s where the cleverness is, is was there anything that happened — you know, is what the pc’s talking about got anything to do with what you were doing, see? So, of course, the adroit question practically walks up and hits you in the head. The adroit question is — pc takes a long breath and momentarily he isn’t going on any further. Just momentarily, see? He actually hasn’t run his communication line out terribly, but he’s just been floundering, you’re getting minimum tone arm action. And you say, „Did our last session have anything to do with this?“

„Oh. Let’s see, what the hell were we doing in the last session?“

„Well, I don’t know. Just review what we were doing.“

„Well, let’s see, so and so on, so on, then we had an ARC break and we were doing something or other and so on. We were running out some kind of items; there’s this backtrack and there’s this stairs or something there. Let me see, now. I — I’ll — I’m gettin’ it now,“ and so forth. „Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we were running — you see, I — I really can’t get anywhere near this, I’m so worried about my present time problem — but we were — we were running some goal, some goal, some goal, some goal, something along this line and so on. Oh, yes, ‘to be sex — ’ say, what do you know! Yeah, I sure do have a lot of trouble with — with this thing ‘to be sexual.’ I ha — . Yeah, I sure do. Yeah, I — 1 have a lot of trouble with that.“

„Well“ you say, „well, what items did we have there, right toward the last?“

„Well, I think we arrived at this point on the line plot, and I think it was — I think it was — ’absolutably’ no, it was ‘nix’ — yeah. Well, all right. There we are.“ And you’re starting to see your tone arm move and your needle start to twitch.

And he never knew what happened. Magic, man, magic! It’s gently taking line 1 minor, without actually putting it on the auditor, and putting it back to the subject of the auditing. And, you see, there’s no process that you could announce that will do this, because the auditing is tremendously variable and the pc’s worries and concerns are fantastically agglomerate.

Now, sometimes, the pc has legitimately had a present time problem and something catastrophic has occurred between sessions, something like this — this is just using this factor for just a present time problem — and it’s something way off. And the only thing you can do is to keep flicking that attention line. Flick. It’s really not a whatsit line; your whatsit’s already in, you see? And you just keep moving it around till the pc will ventilate the PTP that he’s worrying about.

Now, the crudest, but still acceptable example of this is simply „Tell me about it.“ See, that’s crude. See, that’s something like we’re going to build a house so we pile up some bricks. That’s crude. That’s about as adroit as the cow doing the twist, see? But nevertheless, it’s functional. You do get some motion. I couldn’t forbear to milk that gag.

Now, so there’s the pc, see? And the pc can’t get his mind on what you’re doing because something else has happened. And this something else is real worried, and maybe it’s worried down to the level of grief charge, or something like this, see? Well, all you can do is move the — move this little attention line around onto things that’ll give him itsas. And you can cut it down from — well, actually, failing to relieve the situation, that’s how bad it can be, see? You just didn’t really relieve his problem, or you relieved it somewhat, or you — next grade is you spent the session making him feel better about that present time problem. See, we’re well into the acceptable band, if we’ve got to be. Or, we handled it in the first two hours of the session, or we handled it in the first hour of the session, or we handled it in the first fifteen minutes of the session. And that difference of time has very little to do with the seriousness of the problem; it has everything to do with the cleverness of the auditor — without putting the attention line on himself, without cutting the itsa line — adroitly shifting that little attention line there to this and that.

„Well,“ the person says, „but this — but I don’t see — I don’t see why we had to fight half the night after we got home. I told her I just was attracted by blondes, and so forth, and she just wouldn’t listen,“ and so forth.

And the auditor says, „What have you found out about arguments like that with your wife?“

„Well, itsa, itsa, itsa, itsa, itsa, itsa, itsa.“

„Well, that’s — that’s fine. All right. Now, how do you feel about this problem now?“

„Well, the problem is all right.“

Well, he’s still a little bit fluttery, so, „Well, let’s review now what we were doing on something or other.“ Got the idea?

„Well, we were doing so-and-so and, well, you know what we were doing as well as I do.“

„Well, all right, yeah, probably. But I may not have full records here of this. There might have been something that came up during the session, or something like this, or between sessions you might have thought of something else.“

„Oh, yes! I did, as a matter of fact.“

You’re away, see? Got the idea?

Actually, it’s just about as skilled as building a watch, but because there is no apparent skill there, don’t you see, it gets slightly into disrepute. People can watch a session in which this is occurring, and they really never even hear the auditor say anything, see? And the pc never really hears the auditor say anything, because the attention line isn’t „All right, now. All right. Okay. All right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I — I got all that you’re talking about. Now, all right. Now we’re going to give you — going to give you the next — the next — next auditing command — the next — the next — the — the next auditing command. You got that now? Got that now. All right. Here we are, now. All right. Do birds suffocate? Okay? Got that now? Do birds suffocate?“

Now, you’ve restimulated some charge. I won’t say what charge you’ve restimulated.

See, now that can grade on down from just too much, you see. That can grade on down to „Do suffocating birds have anything to do with this?“ „Were there any birds suffocating in that?“ See? To „Well, do you think your processing has bettered this situation?“ Now we’re really getting feather-light, aren’t we? Pc hardly heard you say it and neither would anybody else, you see?

„Well, let’s see. Let’s go over what we’ve covered so far in auditing. Well now, you had a couple of cognitions in the last session there that had something to do with this. Have you had any other cognitions with regard to goals, and so forth — these implanted goals?“ This is getting awful adroit, see? You’ve actually got something he’s already been talking about, and you put it in by the duplication factor. You duplicate what he has been talking about and you just pull his itsa line a little bit further and put it on something, see?

I’ll give you an idea of doing this. He says, „Well, auditing, auditing. I get these awful headaches in auditing and that sort of thing.“

„Well, have you particularly gotten them while we’ve been running goals?“

Few sessions later — he’s forgotten all about these headaches, and so forth — we’re having a hard time getting his itsa line handled: „How about these headaches? Are they troubling you as much now? When we run these goals and that sort of thing, how are these headaches?“ Sounds merely solicitous. It isn’t; it’s a itsa line, see? See, you’ve taken a dead-ended communication line someplace back down the line and you’ve repeated its subject, so therefore you have made a duplication, so you’ve created a communication line. It’s all very technical. And the person’s attention goes back on to this and he has to make a comparison. He has to say his headaches are better or worse or there’s no change, and while he’s doing this he has to put his attention on GPMs, or whatever you’re trying to run on it.

And you say, „Well, with this last one that we were running in the last session — the last one, ‘to be nutty,’ ‘to be crazy in the head,“’ so forth, something like that, „how were the somatics in the head getting along there? Were they turning on and off, and so forth, while we’ve been running that?“

„Oh, well, you shouldn’t really remark on this, because I had them pretty well off.“

„Well, what item did they go off on?“ „Well, they went off on — Well, I really don’t know. Someplace in the first part of it. Um-um-um — I had an item in there — is — ’idiotably…’I think it was ‘idiotably nutty.’ Yeah. Yeah, that was the one. Hey, I got that headache again, you know?“

You say, „Well, give me ‘nix idiotably nutty.’ „ You’re away, see? See? He doesn’t know what hit him, see?

It’s moving that attention line adroitly, adroitly, see? Adroit. With the little pinky — the little finger, you know — raised just right on the teacup, See?

Now, you’ll see an auditor who really hasn’t got much feeling for it, and no tools and so forth, why, he’s got this teacup with both paws wrapped around it, you see? And you’ll see somebody else has poured the tea into the saucer with both paws wrapped around the saucer and inhaling at a very large number of decibels. See? So, that you’ll see this in all of its shades of gray, you see, down to outright black.

But before you understand anything much about the itsa line, you have to understand that there is such a thing as an attention line — line 1 minor — and unless you can handle that attention line slightly, adroitly, greatly, smoothly — you’ll curse yourself sometimes. Even the best of an auditor will say, „Well, let’s get to running this GPM now,“ or something like that. Cut your throat, you see? You spend the next fifteen minutes getting out of this hole. See, it was just too much in the wrong place, see, and it just smashed everything up and the pc is busy explaining to you that he is eight thousand light-years from that GPM and his attention wasn’t on it, you know?

You find yourself making these mistakes. Don’t knock yourself in the head and say „Well, I’m terrible at this“ and run a big make-guilty on self because you don’t handle this well always. Just, those times you have been clever, pat yourself on the back. That’s the one to pay attention to. I’m not kidding you, because … Well, I gave a session last night and I dropped — three times. Once I dropped a handful of anvils on the floor-shook up the session most interestingly — and another time I put off a whole chain of firecrackers in the middle of the auditing table, and another time practically ran the mains voltage through the cans, see? But that was three, see? That was three. But there was two hours’ worth, and probably something on the order of 150 that were handled, you know, with such aplomb, man, that nobody ever found out anything about it, and it got the pc out of the woods gorgeously. See? Quantitatively, see? ‘Course what you put your attention on are those three that had to be patched up, see?

„Oh, oh. Well, your attention wasn’t on it. Well, I’m very sorry, and so on. Have I cut your communication?“ You know, „Sorry,“ and so forth. „Well, what would you have said if I hadn’t have interrupted that?“ See? Good recovery, see, level, and so forth. Nevertheless, if you really were self-critical to a vast degree, you would have been practically kicking your brains out for having pulled any one of these three.

Pc is going on and saying, „Well, I think I have blown that last GPM. I think I have blown that.“

„Well, all right. All right. Good. Let’s check some of its items.“ Oh-oh, cut your throat, man, see? Just put the pc’s attention on the wrong thing, the wrong place, it’s all going crash, the pc’s needle goes dirty. Get the idea?

You see, you’re split between wanting the pc to think well of you, and getting your job done. And these two things are very often at — they’re dipolar phenomena. You try and get your job done sometimes uphill against something and in the final analysis it just merely depends on, did you get your job don , see? That’s what it really depends on in the final analysis. But in the process of getting your job done, you happen to have ARC broke the pc and cut the pc’s communication line several times. Well, the difference between a good and a bad auditor is not whether the auditor always audits smoothly with never cutting an itsa line, but whether or not he attains his eventual objective without creating so many ARC breaks that the pc’s case has not improved. That’s the test!

If you go around training people on the basis of „You must never cut an itsa line; you must never create an ARC break; you must never upset the pc“ — all of these things, you see — it’s something like laying in a GPM, you know? Oh, in the first place, it’s an impossible attainment. Always train them with „Be as clever and adroit as you can,“ and „You can be a little more adroit than that.“ He dropped his E-Meter in the pc’s lap halfway through the session. Poor handling of the attention line. Why? Pc’s attention went on meter, not on own case.

All right. Now, how many dozen ways are there to shift the pc’s attention? I don’t know — dozens, thousands. Thousands. I’ll give you an idea. You got an alcoholic. You’re trying to process this alcoholic, see? Alcoholic’s drunk most sessions and you know you’re not supposed to audit somebody who’s drunk. All the alcoholic’d do is sit there and say, „Well, Alcoholics Anonymous will tell you you can’t cure anybody of alcoholism.“ That’s all he’s going to say, see? He knows you can’t help him. He’s saying, well, it’s impossible, see? And you say, „Well, the case is unauditable.“

Yes, the case is unauditable to everybody except those who are surpassingly skilled with the attention line and the itsa line, see? The whatsit line is practically missing.

„Now, what have you learned about Alcoholics Anonymous?“

„Oh, well, that’s something else. Well, I met this fella down the street, this fella, and so forth, and he gave me this book, see? And I read this book and I threw it in a garbage pail. Couldn’t teach me anything. But I learned better after a while.“

„When was that?“

„Oh, in about a few days later I learned better, see? I had this awful hangover, and I just got fired and I was being sued for divorce, and I found out they were your friends. That’s what I found out then.“ You’re going to see that tone arm starting to move, man.

He has just told you that you can’t possibly audit him. He has just told you that you can’t possibly help him. So you just — Hhh-hhh — polish up the fingernails, audit him, help him, and somewhere up the line he finds out about it as a major cognition.

But all the way up the line he’s improving. Because if you can get tone arm motion and get the guy with the session, see, by flicking that little old attention line right where it lives, parallel what the mind is doing, and it will do everything you want it to. Nothing new — that’s the beginning lines, I think, of one of the first-book things. But nevertheless, this gives you the anatomy of how that’s done. You just find out about what this guy’s mind is on, see? And if you can produce tone arm action by having him locate things about it, then he will recover from any obsessive or compulsive tendencies about it or toward it. It’s the tone arm motion that takes off the compulsion, not the significance of what he digs up. Given enough tone arm motion on any given subject, and that subject will right itself in the head of the pc. And man, I’m talking from hard-won experience. I’d say, if we’ve learned anything in the last thirteen years, man, we’ve learned that. ‘Tisn’t the significance alone.

It’s the tone arm motion that can be obtained in relation to the significance that brings about the recovery.

Now, that’s, the fastest recovery is, of course, the tone arm motion plus the right significance to be run. Now, that’s your fastest recovery. But your recovery takes place somewhat and eventually if you just produce tone arm motion. That’s all you have to do, is produce tone arm motion on the case, regardless of what’s run, and eventually — at some vast distance — why, this pc is going to recover from these various targets and so forth in the case. He’s going to recover from them. That’s for sure. But if you audit the right significance and get no tone arm action, the pc will never recover. See, those are terribly important data.

Well now, the most overcharged areas of the case are the case’s — parts of the case that give the high TA. The high TA and the overcharged area compare. The least-charged aberrative area gives tone arm action.

You very often will find some alcoholic that gets no tone arm action on the subject of alcoholism, but he’s got corns. You can get tone arm action on the subject of corns, you see? In other words, he can’t face that highly a charged approach. So that sometimes the absolute direct approach to a compulsion or obsession of some kind or another will get you nowhere at all, because it’s such a highly charged area that it’s over the pc’s head, and you get no tone arm action on that.

Well, the answer to that is don’t abandon it; just get tone arm action! See? That’s the thing to do. Just get tone arm action! Very remarkable. Because the mind is stacked up the way it is, if you continue to get tone arm action, he’ll all of a sudden walk up on that thing, do you see?

Now, undirectedly — that’s just not directing him toward any specific target or goal or aberration or anything else, or any reason he’s not able or anything at all, anything — you get tone arm action and he’ll eventually collide with something. And he will know processing is helping him!

You’ll be utterly flabbergasted sometime. You have this surprise in store for you, if you haven’t collided it already. Knowing the idea about tone arm action, you sit there and this pc babbles on and on and on, and it doesn’t have anything to do with anything you can see, but my God, that tone arm is moving. You’re getting up and down motions on that thing — not a quarterdivision every twenty minutes, man. You’re getting — it’s got to be a bit healthier than that for a pc to know something about it — but it’s certainly getting a whole tone arm division every ten minutes, and that’s pretty fair tone arm motion, see? And that’s acceptable. I wouldn’t buy much less than that myself — tone arm division every ten minutes. And that would say only down, but you realize that it also has to rise in order to go back down again. So if you added the plus and minus, that’d be two tone arm divisions, you see — one up and one down — in ten minutes. Well, that’s — that’s just barely, marginally acceptable, see, to produce this phenomena.

You get that?

All right. Pc talking about his grandmother’s jam making. Well, cripes, you know? This is about as aberrative, don’t you see, as petting the pup. But, my heavens, you’re getting tone arm motion on it, man. Well, you can’t do anything else much. You’ve tried something else and gotten a stuck tone arm, so let’s let him go on, see? And just completely neglect your attention line. If you were very skilled, you would be unable to totally neglect it. You would punch it around a little bit and increase your tone arm motion, see?

Pc leaves the session feeling fine-feeling fine, wonderful. Pc always makes gains if they have tone arm motion, see? If they have real tone arm motion, they always make gains. If they don’t have tone arm motion, they don’t make gains.

Now, I can tell you at the three-quarter point of a session whether or not the pc will have anything to say decent in the goals and gains. It’s just how much tone arm motion has there been during that session. That’s all; it’s a direct monitoring factor, see?

So this becomes burningly necessary to produce tone arm motion. At any cost, produce tone arm motion. And now you come into your own about the itsa line, because tone arm motion only occurs when the itsa line is in, and tone arm motion does not occur with the itsa line out.

Now, a lot of you think the itsa line is a communication line. It’s not. That’s a surprise, isn’t it? Just because it’s labeled C-distance-E and because it is a communication line, well, why don’t we just call it the preclear’s line to auditor? That would make it a communication line. But we don’t. We call it the itsa line. Why the itsa? Why? Why?.

Well, one of the ways to get this across is to give the student a drill. Just imagine a thetan in various circumstances, you know, like a guy in jail. All right, now how is his itsa line cut? See, it isn’t just on the graph. That isn’t the only way you can show how the itsa line is cut — in an auditing session. Let’s just take it out in life. And we say, „All right, this guy is in jail. Give me a number of ways this fellow’s itsa line is cut.“ And you may get some awful comm lags on the part of the student, but he’ll eventually dig it up, see? How’s his itsa line cut? Well, let me give you some notions, then, for definition of the itsa line. Well, he can’t go anyplace else to see if „itsa.“ He can’t go anyplace else to itsa. He’s right there in jail, isn’t he? Let’s say he was up in London in jail. All right. Well, he couldn’t go down and itsa the coast, could he? He couldn’t say „Itsa water, and itsa beach, and itsa resort, and itsa Brighton,“ could he? He can’t get there. How the hell can he itsa it?

Well, he can itsa it on a via, if somebody’d give him a map or a book or a novel that’s about the coast, or something like that. That’s itsa on a via — substitute. Itsa by substitutes. So it’s a kind of an itsa. Well, itsa by facsimiles is an itsa by substitutes, too. So this is not ineffective. But his itsa line — direct itsa line — is sure cut.

Now, there are other ways his itsa line can be cut by reason of being in jail. I won’t go into those particularly.

We have a fellow sitting at a table. We put a blindfold on him. How is his itsa line cut? Do you see how his itsa line is cut? He can’t itsa! That’s what an itsa line is.

What’s a nightmare? What’s a nightmare? A nightmare is the inability to itsa, followed by mocking up something that can be itsa’d that’s wrong.

A thetan likes to be oriented. He orients himself. How does he orient himself? Itsa. „Itsa ceiling, itsa floor, itsa wall itsa … Therefore, I’m a . . .“

You hide somebody. You hide somebody — The itsa line is cut on himself. Nobody else can say itsa. Nobody can say itsa. Do you see that?

Disassociate somebody from his identity. How’s his itsa line Cut? He can’t say „Itsa me. Itsa me, Joe Jones,“ see? Can’t be done. He hasn’t got an identity now.

Well, we get into a whole tangled web of aberration and we find out that that’s the basic aberration: inability to orient or declare or identify or recognize. Not just solve, you understand. It isn’t cure versus cure versus cure. That’s also itsas, but that’s only part of the picture. How do you know you’re here? Well, that’s easy. That’s easy. You say, „Itsa chapel, itsa chair, itsa notebook.“ Where you are, „Itsa body.“ Up here, „Itsa Ron,“ see? You know where you are. Your itsa line is in. You’re oriented, so you feel happy about the whole thing, see? Fine. You know where you are.

It isn’t necessarily how dangerous the environment is. You could be out in the jungle, and you’d be surprised how happy some hunter looked when he says „Itsa lion!“ Hasn’t really anything to do with safety, security, and — none of these. These are just extra considerations, see? So you just shred all these extra considerations off and itsa. See? „Itsa jungle, itsa me, itsa gun, itsa lion, itsa bearer up a tree. Well, at least I know I was killed by a lion. My itsa line is in on the subject of that death.“

Well, look, if this is so important to power, and it is; and if this is so important to sanity, and it is; and if this is so important to memory, and it is; and if this is so important to ability, and it is — then we would expect the major tricks on the track to comprise of cutting itsa lines one way or the other.

So, you’re standing up there loud and clear on the parapet, gripping dramatically the flag of the lilies of France, being shot at in shot and shell, and all of a sudden there’s a snick, and you is disconnected. Well, you at least know how you died. You got some idea that it was a flying object, unfriendily directed. And by God, in the next half an hour or something like that, they’re telling you you died some other way. Correct? Spoils your itsa line.

And then in the ensuing actions that take place on it, why, they give you a completely false position as far as you’re concerned and a false situation and a false here and a false there and they throw your itsa out on time and they give you a little GPM to carry home with you very happily, give you some nice somatics to go along with it. You’re an idiot to ever go back, you know?

I mean, you move right around the corner of the thing, and itsa where? If it’s 70.6 trillion-seven years ago, which is right now, that itsa is certainly for the birds, isn’t it? You understand, they’ve misdated a somatic on you, because they say, „Now we’re going to give you your future,“ and somehow or another restimulate your facsimiles of the past and say they’re in the future and …

What’s happening here? Well, enough happened so that everybody on this planet believed they lived only once. And that’s how serious the cutting of an itsa line can be. You combine this with plenty of force and you got it made, man!

I can see it now, the development of a new psychiatry. A new medical psychiatry can be developed out of this. You can get people so mixed up that they’d report back to the medical doctor every time. They do. Insane patients are always reporting back for their shocks, and so forth, see? Well-known fact. The report-back mechanism is just used and used and used and used and used by these nuts.

By the way, I thought of a difference between a Scientologist and the world at large on this particular planet. The people think that what we’re doing is unreal, but we know the substance of their unreality, which of course makes us top dog every time. We know the substance of their unreality.

In other words, we know where their itsa line is out. See, they know what — they’re not identifying. See? Their itsas are just for the birds, you know? „Man is an animal. He is a biochemical protoplasm which goes no place. At death there is a cessation of cellular commotion.“ That’s a good itsa, isn’t it? That just immediately makes nothing out of everybody.

Ah, so there’s a formula. There’s a formula involved here. And that is, your itsa line can be out on ARC and KUCDEIO and F. How many ways can an itsa line be? Well, it’s that whole scale I gave you for R2H. Known, unknown, curious, desired, enforced, inhibited, none of it and false — absent and false. This is how many itsa aberrations there can be, see?

Well, false, that’s the easiest one of all. You hold up somebody — you say, „Here, have a piece of candy, sonny.“ Give him a piece of chalk, see? He bites it. His itsa line is out, man. Got the idea?

You say, „There is nothing here, boys. There is nothing haunting this planet; there is nobody after you; nothing happens. I mean, you’re just here and just natural and there’s nobody after you, see?“ That itsa line is for the birds, see? „You’re paranoid! You think people are pursuing you!“ Of course, nobody is pursuing us — they don’t have to. They got us, man!

So they say something isn’t, which is. Well, of course you can get the reverse of that. They say something is which isn’t, such as the Darwinian theory, which is just an old implant.

Inhibited. Inhibited: Give a guy a pair of distorting glasses or make him look at things in a twisted mirror, like a fun-house mirror. His itsa line is inhibited. Tell him he must not examine such-and-so and so-and-so because it is very dangerous, and of course his itsa line is inhibited at once.

And of course, enforced itsa: „You better damn well know about this or you will be shot tomorrow morning without cigarette or blindfold.“ Enforced itsa.

Desired itsa — see, that’s a „want to know“ sort of itsa: Somebody is very happy to know that you’re all right. You see? That’s a desirable itsa.

And the itsa of curiosity is not just being curious about what is; it’s an itsa which is curiosity. It’s a curiosity itsa, don’t you see?

Now, you go up higher than that and you get an unknown itsa. Hey, you know, there is an unknown itsa. I just gave you an example of one. You have a complete reality on the unreality of people on this planet. See, the itsa is their unknownness, see? You recognize they don’t know! Well, that is an itsa. And it’s pretty high-scale stuff for a thetan to be able to recognize that it is an unknown. This thing really boxes him around, because, of course, it mixes in with the actual desire to make something known which can be known. And amongst that, you get the accumulations of unknownnesses that are just unknown and will always be unknown, will never be anything else, because they’re tailored to be unknown. And if you don’t think that can’t be, look at the word unknown. See, there’s a perfect example. Yes, there is such a thing as an unknown. There’s a word, there’s the concept that you back it up, u-n-k-n-o-w-n, unknown, and that is a something which is unknown, isn’t it? I mean, this is getting idiotic.

There’s many a religion, man, which is built 100 percent on a beautiful building which houses a non-existence. And they have created an unknown. That’s what they have created! See, it is something that can be created. And a thetan’s tolerance, as it rises, eventually gets up to a point where he can actually confront an unknown without doing a thing about it. He can recognize that it is unknown; it’s a manufactured unknown.

Like x, in algebra. There’s another example. Somebody writes x. All right, he can confront the fact that x is unknown. Of course, if he’s nowhere near an algebra teacher he probably won’t even be forced to find out a known for that unknown, either. He probably won’t even do the equation x + y — z = 0. Of course, you don’t even know what the equation applies to and neither does anybody else. A mathematician is somebody who’s gone overboard on the Subject of unknownnesses and he has to solve all of these unknownnesses.

Now, if you don’t think that isn’t prevalent — if you don’t think that isn’t prevalent — there is one of the things that holds up auditors in auditing, is they get so upset about the pc being in an unknown while he’s trying to itsa that they eventually grab hold of the meter and they say, „Oh, well, let’s see. Is it twenty years ago? thirty years ago? It’s thirty years ago. Yeah, well, we know about that now.“ They say they’re just helping the pc. It’s just they can’t confront that „Well, and so, and so, za-za-za, za-za, za-za-za I don’t know. I just don’t know. It couldn’t have been so.“ And they think, „Oh, my God, if this goes on a minute longer,“ you know? And they get the itsa line in for themselves.

And then, of course, an itsa line can be too known. Every once in a while some murder-mystery characters … The thing is out because it is known. Every once in a while, some murder-mystery writer has the postman do it, because nobody ever sees a postman. See? It’s too known. I bet there’s crime after crime on the books down here that remains unsolvable because it was committed in too known a fashion. See? It’s a known itsa. Itsa of knownnesses.

Every once in a while you’re doing an ARC break on some pc on R2H and can’t quite find out what it is, and you eventually will hit „known communication,“ you know? Known. Well, of course he knows it. He thought it was something else. Why? Because he knew it. So you get how slippy that can be, see? That’s this „everybody knows“ that is talked about in Dianetics: Evolution of a Science, you see? Everybody knows these things — that’s known itsas — so you never examine them. That’s another way of having a known itsa.

But the pc’s attention with his itsas rise up and down this whole new version of the CDEI Scale, see? — goes up and down, each one in those various stages. And he picks out this and he picks out that and he picks out something else, and all he’s doing is saying „It is a. . .“ He is identifying, in other words. He’s identifying something. And when he cannot identify something, then he identifies by classification — identification by classification. „This is a type of. . .“

Psychiatry does this all the time. They say, „This is dementia praecox case. . .“ They’ve gotten so idiotic with it now that if somebody goes to that Chestnut Lodge, where Graham — that publisher of Newsweek and the Post that was so against Scientology — where he went, and went home on vacation and killed himself He went home for a day; he was supposed to come back. Up there at Chestnut Lodge … I’ve told you about it before. That’s actually the name of the joint; it’s up around …

And it’s very remarkable. But it’s very remarkable up there. But if a person is transferred to Chestnut Lodge, regardless of their symptoms before, they now have schizophrenia. And I have asked this several times, trying to get the answer. And I finally did get the answer and understood it was the answer, and after that it didn’t plague me. But it’s a very interesting example of an interesting Variation of itsa, see? And that is, they are a schizophrenic because they were transferred to Chestnut Lodge, because that’s all there are at Chestnut Lodge!

Well now, that’s by classification plus idiocy, see?

When you say „It is a cupboard,“ you have a pleasant sensation of familiarity and knowingness. You seldom stop to think that you have classified something. You know something because you know of a similar something, and so you get your gradients. Your gradients of classification establish familiarity in that particular direction.

Every once in a while this familiarity gets betrayed or something like that and you get an ARC break with it. You say, „It is a cupboard,“ and you open it up and find out that it’s a mouse home, or something, see? Somebody’s using it to breed white mice for something, or something. Or „It is an automobile,“ and you get into it and find out it’s a stage prop. A little minor ARC break there of false itsa, don’t you see?

That’s quite common in GPMs. Pc goes halfway through the GPM and all of a sudden does the right itsa. „Ha-ha, ha! These are just railroad carriages with a painted backdrop of a train going off in the distance. They’re not trains.“ See? Identified the character of the itsa.

This is all, then, on the subject of identification; it’s all on the subject of familiarity; it’s all on the subject of finding out; it’s all on the subject of — of making oneself comfortable with what he is looking at — , it’s all on the subject of straightening out one’s various grades of ARC with the universe. Now, what gives a thetan such a passion for this, this is something else and not the subject of this lecture, nor, actually, the subject of cases at the present moment. But it opens up a very interesting channel of research. What’s this passion to itsa? See, that’s an interesting question.

But, that you do get tone arm action when you itsa and the case does improve, this is well established. And this is germane to all cases. So getting the itsa line in has nothing to do with getting the pc’s communication in. I say „nothing to do,“ that’s another action. That’s more apt to be the attention line — to you, or something of this sort. Don’t you see? That’s getting his communication in. That’s not the itsa line. No, getting the itsa line in is getting the pc to identify, separate, compartment, differentiate, inspect, decide about, things in his bank — or, in an objective process, in the room.

You want to see a tone arm fall, you could probably produce it normally by saying „What’s that? What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?“ and have the pc itsa.

You say, „What’s that?“ pointing at the fireplace.

Pc says, „It’s a fireplace.“

Actually, you run it for a very little while … This is not a broad, general thing, because there are other factors involved here. Pc is so introverted that it’s painful for him to extrovert his attention, and he can only extrovert his attention on a broad via. And other special conditions arise here that doesn’t make this a pat process, you understand? It’s a pat process, though, as far as his bank is concerned, always — not necessarily objectively. But I’m giving you the objective version here, which is a limited version of it.

And you say, „What’s that? What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?“ See? Every time the pc says „Itsa.“ Normally, if a pc is not having too bad a time and he isn’t fouled up and you haven’t got him stuck on the track someplace and interested in something else, you’ll see your tone arm fall.

You can also see a pc getting very interested. All of a sudden, he — „What is it? Yeah, it’s a fireplace, but — but . . .“ And he’ll want to go over and take a closer look at the thing to make sure it’s a fireplace built out of a certain kind of brick, see? His itsa’s getting sharper. You will see his identification rise.

Now, this is so good that a Touch Assist works. Familiarization processes permit people to get driver’s licenses who couldn’t, by just touching cars — you know, „Itsa, itsa, itsa car“ is all he’s running, you know? He thought it was a buffalo for a while or something. Well, listen, if he couldn’t drive the thing, he must have thought something weird — that I assure you.

So itsa, itsa, itsa, itsa — that’s familiarization.

You want to teach some girl to type. Well, just have her familiarize herself with the tools of the trade. Very funny. She can get up to an itsa, itsa, itsa to a point, and her ability will rise, rise, rise along with it, which is very peculiar. But then this has something to do with charge. The change of case has to do with the release of charge because of the itsa. There’s two things happen: The individual who is really itsaing things is also blowing off encysted charge caused by former confusions about them. And that charge is encysted, and that is a force aspect and a mass aspect with regard to this.

Here’s the phenomenon, see? Here’s this encysted little thing here, see? And you said, „What’s in there?“ see?

And he says, „Oh, sfoo-uh-zoo, and zoo-oo, zoo-oo, zoo-oo.“ Tone arm is moving, see? Picking up those fingers one by one off the clasped hands, you see? And „Well, that’s off. Well, that’s off also. I don’t know. Let’s see, see what — what it is, what it is … Oh! Palms!“

You didn’t think anything was in there, did you?

That’s just charge. And you see that tone arm start moving; well, that’s charge coming off of one of these bundles, and the guy is looking and it’s just a method of as-ising.

Now, while he’s doing this, what drives some auditors around the bend is he puts in a lot of additional itsas. Why, that’s of no great harm, see?

He says, „Itsa house. No, itsa car. No, itsa. . .“ See? „Itsa fingernail — no, oh, no. No, no. Oh, I know what this is! I — I know what this is. I know what this is. A watermelon!“ And then (as an auditor said to me last night) we get all set and we’ve both got a watermelon and then all of a sudden he says, „No, it isn’t a watermelon, it’s a diamond ring.“

And the auditor starts feeling kind of confused, because, you see, his itsa line is being thrown around by the pc. But only, only if the auditor doesn’t completely understand what he is doing. He’s trying to find something and then be content with it. Well, that isn’t auditing, man. An auditor’s superior knowledge should be that if the guy says it’s a watermelon, he for sure is going to call it a diamond ring shortly. And if it really is a diamond ring, he’ll never mention it thereafter, because it’s itsa’d.

But until it is itsa’d, he’s going to call it all sorts of things. It’s going to be at a billion years, and it’s going to be 5 years into the future, and it’s going to be back trillions-five years, and it’s going to be 465 years ago, and it’s going to be yesterday, and it’s going to be now, and it’s going to be fifteen minutes ago, and it’s going to be trillions-ten ago, and it’s going to be 18 trillion years ago, and then all of a sudden it settles down to 125 billion trillion years ago. Period. Bang — that’s it.

You don’t hear about it anymore than that, because he got it, see? It’s itsa’d.

So, a lot of apparent itsas come off in the process of obtaining an itsa. And you almost could say that all the running of a ease, from the first moment of its processing on through to the final cognition of the case, consists of conditional itsas. Conditional itsas. That’s the way it is for that circumstance and that certain place, you see? An auditor should never have any thought that he’s got to get nothing but permanent itsas. Naturally, you go through a GPM, you tear off the items according to a plot. Well, that’s the itsa of it!

Reason I don’t have any trouble running a GPM is I have no doubt about the itsa of a GPM, see? That’s it. It just is what it is. There was nothing there to understand. It was put there to louse you up and immobilize you and cut down your power and ability, you see, and it’s a bunch of electronic circuits which go into a couple of boxes, and they have a couple of things that fire on both sides of the thing, and they start you in the top, turn you upside down at the bottom, and that’s all there is to it. And you go through and you say, „Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow,“ and that’s the end of the GPM. No false itsa, see? Actually, in most cases, not even much of a protest. You know, not saying „It should be some other way.“ Once in a while a spotted intention with a false idea of the intention will hang it up for a moment. But that’s an itsa, see?

You don’t have the immediate and direct itsa of „How come I got into a situation where I started getting these things in the first place?“ you see? Well, that’s one of these big itsas, see? This finally starts dawning on the pc. „What the hell was I doing delivering myself up to a comedy like this,“ you see, „every few trillion years?“ You know? „What’s the matter with me? What’d I do? What happened to me? Well, what’s wrong with me ‘ead? How come?“

And you’ll find most pcs will start chewing on this after a while, and they chew on it and chew on it and chew on it and chew on it and chew on it and — they sometimes chew on it for two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight hundred hours, see? How come? There’s no reason to blow your brains out about it or stretch your medulla oblongata all out of shape. It all of a sudden will rise up in your midst and there it will be: the itsa of „It is . . .“ See? „Oh, that’s why!“ you see?

Now, the adroitness with which an auditor can use the little attention line to put the pc’s attention into areas that can be explored, that are easy enough for the pc to see into, that will produce tone arm action … is a very skilled auditor. And that is what is known as getting in the itsa line. Getting in the itsa line does not consist of sitting back and letting the pc talk for hours about nothing. You understand, we do not frown on that if you can’t do anything else. You understand? But there is a much more adroit level by which you put his attention on things that can be identified by him, and which he will therefore unsnarl the thing called a problem or the bank or that aberrated area.

And it’s the degree that you can obtain tone arm action — that you can do that — that marks the skill of the auditor. That is the most skilled center and zone of auditing. It’s almost so skilled that I hesitate to mention it again, because I’ve had loses along this line.

Now, if you can do that, there is its anatomy. If you can do that, you would be known as this fantastic thing called „the touch,“ „intuition“ — all these other things would mount up back of this. It’s quite awesome. So getting in the itsa line isn’t just sitting there. It’s actually doing something else.

Now, letting the itsa line exist is descriptive of the lowest level of auditing on this, you see — just letting the itsa line exist. We’ll get somewhere, see? We’ll get somewhere if we just do that. But don’t go speaking carelessly of getting the itsa line in unless you’re doing just that. You’re taking the pc-to-auditor communication line, and you are putting it right into zones and areas where it will find itsas. You’re putting the pc’s attention in there to where that line will be „itsa a . . .“ and a „itsa a . . .“ and „Rur-rurrumdaummmmm. Well, itsa a…“ you see, and „rrrrr ra-ra-ra-rm, and so on, and so on, and so on. Well, I guess — I guess it was my complacence in college. That’s what got — Yes, that’s right. That’s what really got me in trouble. I was complacent about everything. I was — that’s it!“ Bang! You will all of a sudden see your tone arm go right on down, see? You see the charge come off of the case in the bucketloads.

This is actually so skilled that it’s the production of cognitions. You can produce cognitions if you want to. You can be that skilled. This is something that takes some familiarization with yourself You should know what the tools are: The tools is the line 1 minor, and that is used to produce a searching attention on the part of the pc; your whatsit line is left there more or less alone, to produce this kind of phenomena. Why? Because the universe is full of whatsit lines. The pc is suffering from too much whatsit and too little itsa. And the net result of this is of course to jam his itsa line. And you, the auditor, by letting it flow, pull him out of the soup.

Of course, the direction of significances as powerful as a GPM, as powerful as a super-duper engram, as powerful as this sort of thing on the way backtrack, God ‘elp us, and so forth — man, that’s putting in the itsa line on a significance with magnitude. And that thing actually requires considerable skill. You’ve got to have line plots and the idea of cross listing, and the doingness of the auditor is considerable. The skill is considerable, his drills are considerable, and so forth. Nevertheless, even those fail if you don’t let the itsa line exist. You got to leave that itsa line alone and let it rove.

Now, it also consists of not cutting it, and there are numerous ways the itsa line can be cut in auditing. It’s a good drill to get somebody to come around and show you that August 4 plot. Have him find the number of ways you can cut that pc’s itsa line. Then make him pass the drill: How many ways could you aberrate somebody by cutting the itsa line? And then he has to find out what the itsa line is. That’s an awfully good drill, and that drives it home with a thud.

All right?

Audience: Mm-hm.

I hope you get a good grip on this one, because it’s a slippy one. And of course it’s — trouble with it is, it’s so known, see? It’s an „everybody knows,“ you know? Itsa line — obviously it’s the pc’s communication line. Even though we went on saying „itsa“ and calling it an itsa line — well, why is it called an itsa line, and so forth? And you’ll see this one drift on through Scientology and always, forever, in some part of Scientology, this one will be too known. That I know, for sure.

But the very skilled auditor and the very well reputed auditor and the auditor who gets terrific results will be the auditor who has this one down cold. He knows an itsa line backwards and forwards. Pc sits down with a present time problem — it isn’t necessarily a speed factor involved — but the pc talks to him for a while and mysteriously this present time problem blows up and the pc is sitting right exactly in the middle of exactly what the auditor wanted him to be in, and the pc is running on exactly what they ought to be running, zippety-bop. And the pc is happy and the auditor is happy and everything is going as smooth as glass.

Naturally, there will be some jolts on the line. Every once in a while you’ll wish you had never opened your big mouth. And I hope you don’t get into as many of those as I have in the last thirteen years.

Thank you very much.