Thank you.
All right. What have we got here? Have we got a date?
Audience: 2nd of July.
2nd of July. There is a date. All right.
▼ And you … Actually, you know there was two new students came in and I was not apprised of them - the week before.
▼ The two students - (unintelligible voices) I want the two students.
▼ We'll get this list straight yet.
▼ There we go. I'd like to introduce two new students, stand up and take a bow! Leon Steinburg and John Wotten.
▼ All right. That's various methods of discipline. (laughter)
▼ Now having comitted an overt, I'm going to talk to you today about overts.
And this is the subject of O/W, modernized and reviewed.
Now, this lecture is given into the teeth of the fact that it is notorious that very few Scientologists would ever inquire very deeply as to just exactly what was did. This is given into the teeth of that knowledge. And there's a good reason for that: In order to do something for somebody, you have to have a communication line to that person.
Communication lines depend upon reality and communication and affinity. And where an individual is too demanding, the affinity tends to break down slightly. And the Scientologist is very afraid of breaking that affinity line with his pc. And so he doesn't want to break that affinity line with his pc, so he never, then, gets to the second stage of processing.
Processing goes in two stages: one is to get into communication with that or which you are trying to process - that's number one. And number two is do something for them. And many a pc will go around raving about his auditor, whose auditor has not done anything for the pc. All that has happened is a tremendous communication line has been established with the pc. And this is so new and so novel and so strange to the pc that he then considers that something miraculous has occurred. Well yes, something miraculous has occurred, but in this particular instance the auditor has totally neglected why he formed that communication line in the first place.
He formed the communication line in the first place to do something for the pc. And he very often mistakes the fact that he has formed a communication line - and the reaction on the pc for having formed one - with having done something for the pc.
There are two stages here: is (1) form a communication line, and (2) do something for the pc. Those are two distinct stages. That is something like walking up to the bus and driving off. Do you see? There's two stages: You walk up to the bus, and then you drive off. If you don't drive off, you never go anyplace.
So many an auditor bogs down at this one point of walking up to the bus, which is putting in a communication line with the pc, and then they never go anyplace. Do you see that? And where auditing broadly breaks down, and you say, "Well, Mamie Glutz had lumbosis and …" (We're going to have to make a list of Scientology diseases. That's one of them.) "Mamie Glutz has lumbosis and she loves her auditor, but she's still got lumbosis."
Now, exactly what has happened is the auditor has formed his communication line to the pc - has actually done this heroic thing of getting in communication with the pc - and that is very tricky and that is no small shakes. That's something, to be able to communicate to a human being who has never been communicated to before. This is quite remarkable. And that is such a remarkable feat that it appears to be the end-all of Scientology to some. But you see, that's just walking up to the bus. Now we've got to go someplace.
Now, how do we go someplace? Well, actually, any upset that the individual has is so poised, it is so delicately balanced, it is so difficult to maintain. You know, you look at this fellow. He's in a wheelchair, you know? And you say to yourself, "How is he keeping himself in a wheelchair?" And you think, "Well, it'd be very difficult to get him out of that wheelchair." Oh, no, no! It's very difficult to stay in that wheelchair. That is what's difficult. Unless you learn this reverse look, you'll have trouble with psychosomatics and things like this - particularly battinesses, more than psychosomatics. Psychosomatics are not a good example. A battiness of some kind or another is a much better example, because they surrender so easily.
This individual is very sure that horses sleep in beds. Now, you don't look at what it takes to maintain that. That is based on such slippery logic that the least little cogwheel goes adrift in it, it'll collapse. In other words, it's very hard to remain batty. It's not difficult to get well, but it's hard to remain batty. A fellow has to work at it. You'll see an odd look coming into somebody's eye sometime or another, when you're getting right close to. And you'll see a pc suddenly start veering sideways from you when you start approaching too closely to a piece of battiness.
Let's - supposing that having formed a communication line, we merely and only did this (we just did this and we didn't worry about these vast complications in this terrific sea of aberration) - we didn't do any of that: we just said, "Now, what are you doing that's sensible? And why is it sensible?" And you know, a guy's case will just fall to pieces right in front of your eyes. This is a zone to which I invite your attention, because it's untrodden; it's virgin; it's native; it's the bush in a completely unspoiled condition.
You see, this communication line is only valuable to the degree that you can walk around in your big muddy feet in the midst of all this morass. And if your communication line is very good and very smooth, and if your auditing discipline is perfect - so that, you see, your auditing discipline is perfect so you don't upset this communication line - then you can walk around in this wild jungle that he calls his ideas. And if you just made a foray of no more importance and no more breadth than "What are you doing that's sensible?" and "Why is it sensible?" and kept your communication line up the while and kept your affinity up with the pc the while, did it with perfect discipline, you would see more aberration fall to pieces per square inch than you ever thought could exist. See? Now, that's what I mean when I'm saying to you "do something for the pc."
See, I tell you, "Audit well. Get perfect discipline. Get your comm cycle in. Don't ARC break the pc. Let the cycles of action complete." Don't you see? All of that. Well, that is simply an entrance to the … You see, the discipline of Scientology makes it possible to do this. And one of the reasons why other fields of the mind never got anyplace: they never could get near anybody because they couldn't communicate to anybody, see?
So that discipline is important. That is the ladder which goes up to the door. And if you can't get to the door, you can't do anything. You see? So there's two stages here - two stages. And you're busy completing communication cycles and so forth. And I will admit sometimes I get impatient with you, you see, because I'm merely trying to teach you how to communicate to somebody so that you can do something for him, you see? And I sometimes believe that your whole attention gets tremendously absorbed in merely communicating with somebody. And you use that as an end-all, see, and I get a little upset.
Because it's something on the order of, well, let's say you're trying to make an actor, you see, something like this, and you get him all set on the subject of makeup, you know, but he keeps standing in the wings, made up, and thinks he's acting and he isn't. He's standing in the wings, see?
So this perfect discipline of which we speak: the perfect communication cycle, the perfect auditor presence, perfect meter reading - all of these various things - are just to get you in a state where you can do something for somebody. And because this is so new, strange and novel, and is so unheard of in this universe, it looks so startling that you can say, "Well, that's auditing, that's processing. That's it. That's the end product."
Man, that's no more the end product than a can of dog food, see? I mean, it's still there in the can. It's supposed to be eaten. You know? It's the difference between reading a recipe book and dining.
So when you're real slow picking up the discipline, when you're real slow picking up keeping in a communication cycle - when you're pokey on this subject and so forth - you see, you're just still nine miles from the ball, you know? You're not even attending yet. See?
So what you want to be able to do is audit perfectly. By that we mean keep in a communication cycle, be able to approach the pc, be able to talk to the pc, be able to maintain the ARC, get the pc to give you answers to your questions, be able to read a meter, get the reactions, be able to do this, be able to do that - all of those little things, you see? They've all got to be awfully good, because it's very difficult to get a communication line in to somebody anyway. And they all have to be present and they all have to be perfect. But if they're all present and they're all perfect, then we can start to process somebody! Then we could start to process somebody! And all of that looks so beneficial that you can mistake it for processing.
Now, I'm giving you some kind of an entrance point here of if all of your cycles were perfect, if you were able to sit there and confront that pc and meter that pc and keep your auditing reports and do all these other multiple various things and keep a pleasant smile on your face and not chop his communication, and if you can do those various things, now let's find out what do you do. Because there is something you do with those things.
Well, at Level VI this is very easy: You run GPMs. But that's doing something for somebody. And try to run GPMs sometimes without all these other factors near-perfect. It's not possible. But let's take it down to a lower level. What could you do for somebody if you were a perfect auditor from the basis of your auditing technique and presence and handling somebody? Now, what could you do? That's the burning question: What could you do?
Now, we used to have this all on backwards. We used to try to teach people what they could do for somebody, but they could never get in communication with him to do it. See, so therefore you had failures in processing. Well, the most elementary procedure, the most elementary procedure: "What are you doing that you think is sensible?" and "Why is it sensible?" - that's a perfectly elementary procedure, and the guy would all of a sudden gawp at you.
So he'd say, "Oh, no!" you know? Because these things are very difficult to maintain as an insensibility. You have to work hard to have something in crosswise. "Horses sleep in beds."
All right. You say, "Well, what do you think is sensible?" or "What are you doing that's sensible?" or anything of this sort.
And the fellow says, "Well, I think horses sleep in beds. That's sensible."
"All right, now why is that sensible?"
"Well … That's nuts!"
You actually wouldn't have to do anything more than that, see? See? Now, one of the things that's horrible about all this, it's so easy to do that you keep looking for some magic. Well, your magic was getting into communication with the person. The rest of it is very easy to do. All you had to do was remain in communication with the person while you're doing this, and realize that these huge boulders that he's got in his skull are poised with the most fantastically delicate balance on little pinheads, see - little pinpoint balance. And all you have to do is go whooh, like that, and this thing goes brrroomm, crash!
Now, if you're not in communication with this person, he takes it as an accusative action; he tries to justify thinking that way; he tries to make himself look good to you; he tries to put on a public front of some kind or another sitting in the pc's chair; he tries to hold up his status. And any time I see a bunch of pcs around jumping happily to something else because it's "Only sane people can run on that, you see, and crazy ones run on something else" - well, everybody immediately will have the "sane" computation, so they never have to be run on the crazy one - I right away know their auditors are not in communication with them and that auditing discipline itself has broken down, because the pc is trying to justify himself and trying to uphold his own status. So he must be defending himself against the auditor. So the auditor couldn't possibly be in communication with him, could he?
So we're right back to the fundamental of why didn't the auditor get into communication with the pc in the first place? Well, you get into communication with the pc in the first place by doing the proper Scientology discipline. That is not any trick. It goes off one, two, three, four. You sit down, you start the session, you start talking to somebody and you start handling the pc and you start handling his problems and that sort of thing, and you do it by completing your communication cycles and not cutting his communication and by this and by that - the very things you're taught in the TRs - and you'll find you're in communication with the person. And where you fail, and why he maintains his status, is you've gotten into communication with the person and then you've never done anything for the person.
Unless, having gotten into communication, you now do something for the person, you lose, of course, your communication line, because the R-factor breaks down. He doesn't think you're so good and you go out of communication with the person. You understand? You can get into communication with the person, then not do anything for the person; the R-factor of why you're in communication with the person can break down and break down with you. You say, "Well, here I am, in communication with the person. What am I supposed to do now?" You'll go out of communication with the person, and you've somehow taken a little circular trip which was in toward the person and then away from the person, see?
All right. That having happened, now the person will be sort of defensive in status and wonder why he's being processed, and … You see, he could wonder all these questions.
It takes a process now. Now you've got to do something for the person, and it takes a process. But it takes an understanding of what a process is. And a process is simply a combination of mental mechanisms which when inspected will pass away. All auditing is negative gain; you never add anything to the case. All auditing is subtractive; you're as-ising things on the case and that's all you're doing.
So you say, "All right, what do you think is sensible?"
The guy says, "Horses sleep in beds. Ah! Hey, that isn't sensible." Cognition. Total duration of process, see, was that.
You actually will get a - probably get a big blowdown or something like that on your E-Meter - be a huge blowdown on your E-Meter. Now you try to get more tone arm action out of the fact that "horses sleep in beds"; you don't get there. You flattened the process.
So it requires a sensitivity to know when the process is flat. You can over-audit and under-audit. You can try to run the tone arm action out of things which have no tone arm action left in them and you can walk off and leave things which have a ton of tone arm action left in them. You can do one or the other of these things. But this requires observation of the pc, and it only answers this question: Have you done anything for the pc? Once more, you only have to answer that question: Have you done something for the pc?
Well, if you've done something for the pc, you are not likely to get any more tone arm action out of it. This becomes elementary, you see? We're breaking this down into (1), (2). So, (1) there's the auditing discipline, and (2) there's doing something for the pc. If you've done something for the pc, you've gotten the tone arm action out of it. It isn't that you really even do anything for the pc by having the tone - getting the tone arm action out of it. You see, that's simply an indicator of whether you're doing anything or not.
I'm beating a dead horse to death now, don't you see, because this is not - it's not that complicated. It's less complicated than anybody imagines.
You say to the pc, "What's sensible?"
"Well," he says, "Oh well, uh … so … oh well, uh … yes. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis and congressmen and elections and governments. They're all sensible and something is sensible, and something else is sensible, and so on and so on, and they're all sensible."
Well, let's observe the pc. Have you done anything for the pc yet?
Well, the funny part of it is that your tone arm is going to be moving during this period. See, you really haven't done anything, really, for the pc yet. And he goes on and he says, "Well, my old teacher was sensible. My old teacher used to tell me, well, I'd never succeed in the world, and he was right. And he was sensible." (And you're still getting tone arm action, see?) "And he was … I don't know."
"Was he sensible or wasn't he sensible?
"I don't know. You know, I have done some things in life. You don't suppose I could be failing all the time because he was so sure I would? Uhh … this doesn't make any sense. You know, I think that man was a blitherin' ass! I think he's a complete fool. How would he know that I would never succeed in life? He's silly. I don't think he was sensible. No, we'll forget about that being sensible. That .. that wasn't sensible. Uh … that … heh … You know, that's why I failed in life! Because he was so sure I would and I always thought he was so se - Well, I'll be a son of a gun!"
Right about that moment your TA action go bzzp, bzw, bzp, thup-bu - there's no more TA action, see?
Now, you, knucklehead, not having noticed - I should be polite. I laid down a maxim "Always be polite to somebody who is trying to learn something," you see? You don't notice this one answer has come your way. You have done something for him. So now you start beating up the brush to do something for him. This is very bad timing, don't you see?
Now, you could go on with the process in some other way, in some other field or some other channel, but you've handled something and you've done something. And if you keep him working on that one thing that you've now done something for him on, your TA action will disappear and your pc will get resentful. And not only will your TA action disappear, but you'll lose your comm line.
Now, let's try to press him. "What about this old teacher?" see? He's already had the cognition, see? Wow! See, "What about this old teacher? When did you know him? Did you have any overts against him?" and so forth. Notice your TA. TA is not moving. You're now restimulating the pc. You've gotten your key-out; destimulation factor has occurred right before your eyes. You've done something for the pc.
Now, hear me now, it's just a matter of have you done anything for the pc or not? And on any given subject, when you have done something for the pc, your TA action in that zone and area will cease. If there's any TA action to be gained in that area while you are doing something for the pc, you will get tone arm action. But sooner or later it is going to run up to having done something for the pc, see? Your TA action is "about to do something for the pc," you see? That tells you there's something there that can be done for the pc, and your TA action will go on toward the point where you have done something for the pc, and now this is past tense. Now you're going to get more TA action on his dear old teacher? In a pig's eye you are! That is a "went" proposition now.
So, it requires of the auditor discipline to keep in his communication line. He's got to stay in communication with this pc. Those cycles have got to be perfect. He can't be distracting the pc's attention on to the TA. "I'm not getting any tone arm action now." That's not staying in communication with the pc, see? Has nothing much to do with it. You're distracting the pc from his own zones and areas. So don't keep his attention out of session, you know? Keep him going on this; keep that communication line in. And the next requirement is do something for the pc. Do something productive; use the communication line. Now that you've got the telephone in your hands, for God's sakes, talk! See? There's nothing quite as silly as receiving a transatlantic telephone call where the other person then doesn't talk.
They phoned you - I got one not a month or two ago, and the person actually at the other end of the line stood there with a live phone in their hand with nothing to say. Undoubtedly they had something to say, but they just couldn't think of it, time it finally got through.
And many an auditor who isn't getting a result with a pc is sitting there with the telephone in his hand not saying anything, see? He's got all the lines in.
"Hello, hello. Are you there?"
"Oh yes, I'm here. Bright and cheerful."
"Oohh!"
See? Now, too much astonishment to say anything to the pc, see?
So we go back to putting communication line in, see? Best thing to do is to call back central and find out if we really do have a call to the pc, you see? Find out if it was the correct number after all. Call up the rate operator and find out how much it's costing.
Do you see? Do you see? You can walk right up to this crucial point and then die on the vine. You can start getting tone arm action on the pc and then never press it home. This thing - all of a sudden there's a big drop. You said - well, just take this weird little process, "What's sensible?" see?
And he says, "Well, the most sensible person I ever knew was my old instructor." Wiff.
You know, you've got some tone arm. You make a note over here: "Instructor gave a tone arm action."
And so on and so on, and "What's uh … what's the question again? Sensible. Sensible. What does sensible mean? Is sensible a sensible word?" And so forth. No tone arm action there, you see?
And you say, well look, there was a bit of a tone arm motion there when he said "the old instructor."
"You said something about this old instructor being sensible."
"Uh … oh, yeah! Oh, terrifically sensible man." More TA, see?
"Well, have you adopted any of his views or anything like that?"
"Oh yes, my whole life has been monitored by his views," you see? See, big TA going on. And we'll go on this way and all of a sudden he's - he knew the pc was going to fail. Pc suddenly gets that in crosswise, you see? You'll see a big reaction and then the more reaction, the more reaction, and all of a sudden the pc suddenly cognites, "Maybe that's why I'm failing all the time. I am bluuoooow-bloo," see? "Yeah! That guy is a fool. I … I didn't … He wasn't sensible at all. Ha! What do you know about that!" You see? Big TA action occurs right before that moment. If you're riding right up on your toes, you won't expect another whisper to come out of that old man. You won't ask for another whisper to come out of it, nothing. That's gone. That is dead. That's as dead as yesterday's newspaper.
You see, that's where the tone arm leads you into this. And if I was trying to teach you totally mechanically, I'd say you go ahead and make sure there is nothing flat in there, but actually your communication line is at risk all the time you're trying to find out if anything else is in that. Your communication line is at risk. You're liable to unplug the whole switchboard.
"Well, hell, I told you! I had the cognition, you know? I told you already! I have … How many times do I have to …?"
There goes your communication line, you see? And after a while, you'll get the point. You'll say, "Look, we're pulling switches out of the switchboard here. We're messing things up," and come off of it.
Actually, if you're very, very clever, you'll run a process that cyclically produces this sort of thing by a general question, so that you don't make that particular goof. You don't have to make the piece of judgment which I just gave you all the time, see?
It took me a long time - really, it took me as an auditor a long time to learn when to give up on somebody. You know? Learn when to give up on a subject. And I finally got clever and tuned my antenna up on a Martian wavelength and got it up to a point where that thing was flat, I could see that was flat, see, and where, if I pursued it any further, I would now get into trouble - where I had done something for the pc and trying to do anything further along that particular line would put my communication line at risk. And I got to a point where I could judge that, just like that, you know? - pc happy, tone arm increasing every session, everything going along swingingly. But let me tell you that it is a very interesting point. It'd be something I would be very happy to be able to teach you. But I'm afraid it's something that you learn on the basis of observation.
Now, in Level VI you're learning that: there is nothing deader than a dead item. When it has give up its ghost, there is no more tone arm action there. If there is any more cognition in it, any more read in it, yes, yes, you could get it out. But you develop a sensitivity after a while as an auditor. You know when it has given up its ghost. And you know that just mentioning it or referring to it one more time is practically fatal. Your pc just feels like he's being ground into the dirt.
See, just one more mention of that item and you've had it. See? And you'll start to get a tick-tocky needle, and other undesirable phenomena sets in. And if you keep it up … "You know, well, I'm not sure whether the item has read or not. I didn't have my eye on the meter at the time." (Call a pc's attention to the meter, always, if you want ARC breaks.) "I didn't have my eye on the meter and I don't really know whether it read or not. And of course, I must, I must have seen it read before I can go on, but maybe I missed it." That's one of the most marvelous ARC-breaky situations that I could possibly set up, and yet it's one of the commonest ones.
Now let's take this same situation. There was only so much charge, see, on this old instructor or something like that. See, there's only that much charge on him. You've got it! He wasn't an item. He was a lock of some kind or another. But boy, you blew it! You've seen it blow; you've seen the pc change before your very eyes. Now, that's the time to unload; that's the time to swing off that freight train and hit the gravel and grab another one - not necessarily change the process, but certainly don't press that guy any further in the direction of what has just given TA.
You could now ask him - but there's ways of asking auditing questions that are part of the communication line; there is a way of dismissing everything you have been talking about while asking the same question as you did before. You know? Sort of like "Well, all right, we've taken care of that. You've gotten all of that. Good. Good, I'm glad we've finished off with that. All right, now let's get back to the original process now: What's sensible?"
You get an idea? There is a thing an auditor can do. He doesn't have to say all those things I just said, but that is the way he is building the atmosphere. You know, he acknowledges on the idea, "Oh, that old tutor you had. Yeah. All right. Well, we got that. Good. We got that. Let's …" so on - even do a little business here about crossing it all off, you know? And, "All right, now we're getting back on the original process. Okay."
Here, you see? Now, we say - same auditing question - we say, "What's sensible?" But he obviously knows that it's now being addressed to some entirely different zone of the mind, and as such you shift that. You're still doing something for the pc. Do you follow this?
So there's getting up to the bus, and then there's getting in it and going someplace. And you could become a past master at auditing discipline and motions and so forth (and actually have to be a past master at it anyhow before you can carry on the rest of it), never carry it another sixteenth of an inch, have a lot of pcs that absolutely loved you and swore by you, who went right on having lumbosis. And you would say, "What in the name of heaven has happened to me? What terrible catastrophe am I looking at here?"
Well, everything is fine, except you're not doing anything for the pc. You got right up to there and got in the bus but you never drove off anyplace and you never did anything. That's the whole secret of auditing. It's in two sections.
Of course, Level VI, you do it so fast that you hardly get a chance to … You call this, and boom! it goes, and that's the end of it. And of course, there it's predicted where the charge is going to be, and you know what's going to fire and all that sort of thing. So you say, "Well, this is something different." No, it isn't any different at all. Cleverer auditing is below IV. See, you've got to be clever. There's ways of asking auditing questions, which is the same question, which could make the pc believe implicitly that his answer had not been accepted.
I'm sure we've all had, at one time or another, this trouble: We've repeated the auditing question, and the pc thinks his cognition has been invalidated. So then, to prove to him that his cognition has not been invalidated, we preserve our communication line by wildly changing a process that is not flat as a general process. And that is one of the most flagrant examples, and that is the most general reason why auditors run lots of processes. They haven't mastered the trick of convincing the pc that his cognition has been accepted, and that they're all done with that particular zone or area of the process, and that the process that is being run is now expected to go into some other zone or area.
Direction of attention, this comes under. You can do some pretty wild things with direction of attention. You can exaggerate this up like mad. Pc says, "Oh! Oh yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! You're asking me 'sensible.' Oh, yeah. Textbooks. Yeah. Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho!" Big blowdown, see?
You say, "What's with textbooks?"
"Oh well, God, you know, they pretend they're sensible, and nobody can make any sense out of them at all. Ha-ha!"
Gone - that TA now is gone, man. You understand it; that's as far as you're permitted to pursue it. You've now done something for the pc. It isn't manifested in any degree that you will notice right there at that moment. But how do you now convince the pc that your next same auditing question is not actually going to be addressed to textbooks? Well, there are crude mechanisms for doing it.
"All right. We've taken care of textbooks. Now, in some other zone or area, what's sensible?" That's doing it with an ax. "We got your communication. We consider that that particular zone or area is complete and we're not asking you to do anything more in that zone or area because you've already gotten the tone arm action out of that. Now, asking exactly the same auditing question, but addressing it to some other zone or area of the mind, what's sensible?" See, this is the message which you're putting across in the middle of your communication line.
Now, you can make - you could do some weird, weird, weird things with cases. It's quite unbelievable what you can do with a case, steering him around in this particular zone on some general process. Now, this is not running an alternate process; this is really not running itsa. This is merely a finished method of handing a process to a pc: is run him to cognition, run him to cognition. And that's actually not new. It's running the pc to cognition. But it's on the same thing.
And nearly everybody has understood running to cognition, "change the process when the pc has cognited." Well, that is very far from true. You change the sub-subject of the process on the cognition: you don't change the process.
Your process can be far too specific. It can be a sub-process. "Right around the vicinity of this rug," you see, "have you ever made a footprint?" See? Well, it's so circumscribed as an auditing question that it's really a sub-question anyhow. So what you really want to run on a pc is a broad question which you've already established, and running to cognition is knocking off the sub - cognitions on it. Now, you take something as broad as "What's sensible?" Oooh, that's broad.
Now, of course, "Putting footprints on this rug," see - that's sensible. "I don't know why it's sensible," he suddenly says. "There doesn't seem to be any reason at all why I should put footprints … Do you know, I see a rug of this particular type and I always have to put a footprint on it. That's real crazy. That's real crazy. I think that's Wadsworth or somebody, 'Footprints on the sands of time,' yeah. It already … yeah. Yes, I learned the poem when I had scarlet fever. Yeah. Yeah, there was a rug in the room the same as the rug in this room. Oh, that's what that's all about."
"All right. Good." (And you've had your blowdown.) "All right. That's fine. Now, aside from that and footprints and that sort of thing, which we've got, and so forth, what's sensible?"
See, this is parking it. That's how to really, smartly run by cognition. You can be smarter than a tack if you pursue this particular course. But I'm warning you that that particular approach requires some sensitivity on the part of the auditor. He has to ask himself this question continually: "What have I done for the pc?"
I used to run an auditing session until I had done something for the pc. You take a short-attention pc, particularly: The session was exactly as long as it took me to do something for the pc. And horribly enough, some of those sessions would go four or five hours, and I had thought they would run as long as fifteen minutes. But that's because we never got into the communication cycle necessary to do something for the pc. And it'd take maybe that long to establish a communication line before we could start to ask the pc what's cooking. See?
You'll sometimes start asking an alternate question of a pc, back and forth, and notice that the answers are dodgy. These are dodgy answers. Well, merely and completely recognize out of that dodginess just one thing: that your communication line to the pc has failed in some particular way.
I'll give you an example. You start to process a child; you start to process a child on the idea of "What problems do you have?" You're going to process this child, you see? And the child is sitting there very dodgily answering this question. And they appear to be very reluctant to answer the question. You realize that this reluctance isn't really any withhold or anything, it's just that the child cannot talk to you. Then you suddenly realize that the process you should have started in on was "What could you say to me?"
You maybe process the child on something very fundamental, like "What problems do you have?" and get no place because you aren't doing anything for the pc. So therefore you get minimum tone arm action and so forth. Well, you haven't established a communication line to the pc. You shift your gears and ask something that has nothing to do with … The child has been sick, let us say, and the child feels badly and there's a lot of things wrong with this child. And you shift off onto a process such as "What could you say to me?" and "What would you rather not say to me?" And you say, well, there's lots of mechanisms in this such as withholds coming off and all that sort of thing. But the surprising thing about it is you now have tone arm action, you now have a session running because you're getting in your communication line. At the same time, you're incidentally getting off a few withholds, which is doing something for the pc, too, at the same time you're getting in a communication line.
A process like that tends to confuse you. You see why it'd be confusing? Because it's putting in the communication line and it's doing something for the pc at the same time.
Well, there are a great many of these processes in Scientology which get in the communication line and do something for the pc at the same time.
So therefore, this breakdown of getting into communication with the pc and then doing something for the pc, becomes obscured because you're doing them both at once. And then you begin to become confirmed in the idea that getting in the communication line is what's doing something for the pc. See? So the whole subject now gets lost all over again. Even though you do, then, use a combination that accomplishes both at once, don't lose sight of the fact that there are two actions, and you won't make very many mistakes along this line.
Now, all of this is really a prelude to O/W. Because O/W is just about the greatest, handy-jim-dandy little communication wrecker that an auditor ever had very much to do with. And an auditor loses the ARC he has with the pc a time or two and he becomes very timid. And he starts asking, "Do you have any overts? Have you committed any overts?"
And the pc says, "Uh … yes. Well, I thought people were mean to me, and it was really an overt to think that against myself."
And the auditor says, "Well, he got off a big overt," and so forth. And they will go on this way and on this way and on this way and on this way as sort of a motivatorish, critical think, you know? And the auditor never tags it and never nails it and never does anything about it and never corrects it, and nothing happens with the pc and the communication line doesn't improve because the pc is actually running a falsity. And it just winds up in a pile of garbage. You see, we really never get anyplace.
So we're really adventuring on something that is very, very intricate when we're adventuring on O/W. It's not a simple mechanism. Because although handled rightly, it would put in the communication line at the same time it was doing something for the pc, the auditor protects his communication line to the pc - he protects his communication line to the pc - by not asking anything embarrassing. And he permits his pc to sit there with withholds in the session, half ARC broke, with the communication line flying out the window. And he never presses home to find one of these things out. He can even get a read on the meter that it exists and never really ask for it because he doesn't want to risk his communication lines. So this makes O/W dicey.
Now, another thing that made it dicey in the old days is the fact that withhold occurs in the bank. And you should not use the word withhold.
Of course, withhold is an out-of-ARC condition and it's an out-of - ARC process and actually cannot be run solo. You can take an out-of - ARC process and run it in combinations with an ARC process. You can say, "What have you done? What have you not done?" You could say, "What have you said? What have you not said?" You could say, "What have you thought? What have you not thought?" or something like that. But again, "thought" is a risky one because that also occurs in the bank. But "done," fortunately, really doesn't occur in the bank.
Now, I've told you that O/W is senior to the bank. Now, this might lead you to believe that once you'd got the bank gone you'd still have O/W. No, this is not the case. It is senior in that it will key out the bank.
Now, let's look at this a little more intimately and find why it keys out the bank: because the whole common denominator of the bank would be "done." That's the common denominator of the whole reactive bank. In other words, a high order of lock. Anybody who knows the constituency of the bank could look those things over and he'd certainly say, "Heh-heh! Yeah, that's true." It's just a high order of lock, don't you see?
So it's a lock on all parts of reactivity. Now, when we specify what things have been "done to," we err because we might run into another piece of the bank, you see? So the generalized statement, or a common - or the proper name of somebody, is quite allowable.
We find our pc has a present time problem with Oswald. Perfectly proper to say, "What have you done to Oswald?" We're not running into any bank because he hasn't got Oswald as part of the basic reactive mind. "Men" - that might be different; that might be too close in. But this guy Oswald - what have we done to Oswald?
Now, we'd find, weirdly enough, that the communication line to Oswald would have been interrupted because of an overt to Oswald, so therefore, one couldn't communicate to Oswald.
A present time problem is also produced by failing to complete a communication. There is really one for the book. That's something I don't think I have told you. I've known it for a long time but I just think I've omitted mentioning it. I might have. I might have mentioned it, but I doubt it. A present time problem can be created by a failure to complete a communication cycle. This is so much the case that if your pc, coming into session, were asked - you were to ask your pc coming into session - "Is there any communication you haven't completed?" the pc would rattle off several and the pc would not register on present time problem. This is another method of handling PTPs. They tend to vanish under this.
Now, you're not trying to erase the PTPs anyway. All you're trying to do with these PTPs is get them out of the road so that you can audit somebody. You never erase, in rudiments, anyway. Actually, you never erase in anything below Level VI now. So your action here is a destimulative action and that question all by itself will adequately destimulate the pc so the pc can be audited. You'll find it very seldom that you will fail to get around a present time problem with that question. Of course, the problem can still be there, but the pressure is gone on it.
Now, "I got PTPs," the pc says.
You say, "Well, what communication have you failed to complete?" or haven't you completed with regard to these?"
And the pc says, "Brrop, brrop, brrrop, brrop, brrrop, brrop" and that's the end, and you don't get - none will register on PTP That would be a common experience.
Now, the reason he has PTPs with these people and hasn't completed the communication is because he's got overts. So we get the secondary consideration on PTPs: You never have a PTP with anything you don't have an overt on. Of course, that's primary, really. Your PTPs stem from overts. If you have an overt against a telephone pole, you will have a PTP with a telephone pole - something like this.
Psychosomatics go back to PTPs, which go back to overts. So you can actually run out psychosomatics on this, but it's a rather adventurous undertaking. You're liable to get the pc into more than you can easily get him out of. But you can, in extremis, handle a psychosomatic illness on the basis that it must be a present time problem. See? The guy's got lumbosis. All right. Then, immediately you have two approaches.
The least adventurous of these approaches, and the swiftest one to handle, is the guy has got lumbosis of the blumjum, and you say, "Well, what communication haven't you completed to or about the blumjum?"
"Oh, well, that's simple. I had an appointment at the hospital, and I was aust-auf-hauf-nauv and I had an appointment there. And I was supposed to go to the drugstore and then get some stuff, and uh … so forth. And I … actually, I was telling my aunt Maizie the other day about the blumjum - was a very obstructive mechanism as far as I was concerned. And I didn't finish the letter and … What? The somatic is gone. What happened?" The pc is liable to be very startled at this point because they are apparently not talking about anything that has anything to do with doing something for the blumjum. That's what I mean by it's very, very difficult to keep lumbosis around. It is. It takes a lot of doing.
So we have these two approaches, not just one: the unfinished cycle of communication to or about the "it"; the unfinished cycle of communication to or about the object that you're trying to handle, which is a PTP, Guy has a present time problem with Internal Revenue. Well, we don't much care about wondering and settling this problem but we certainly want him less obsessively concerned with it. So let's do something to get rid of this problem.
All right. The easiest pitch is an unfinished cycle of communication, and the second one is a "done."
And let me call to your attention, you have now followed out the exact one-two that I gave you for the auditor to a pc. See, this is the way the mind stacks up.
Now, it's quite sensational just getting a communication line straightened out to something. This is quite sensational. It doesn't really finish off everything there is to finish off. It is merely sensational. So the best thing to ask a pc who has a PTP - the best thing to ask this pc to get rid of his PTP - is "What cycle of communication have you failed to complete with regard to this?" - to it or about it.
See, he's given you a present time problem: "Present time problem with my wife."
"All right. What cycle of communication have you failed to complete .. or have you not completed" (better wording) "to your wife or about your wife? Hm?" And it all sort of goes bzz-bzz-bzz, and an awful lot of the time this problem evaporates as a problem. But you haven't taken very much care of this problem yet because you've approximated the one-two of the auditor, you see? You've really not done anything about the problem. You've just eased it off. See? You've gotten in there so that you could do something about it.
But you will very often find out quite magically that for the purposes of destimulation and getting on with the session on what you were doing yesterday and so forth, that it's quite adequate. And you very often find that in the field of psychosomatic auditing that it's quite adequate.
The severity of the illness has nothing whatsoever to do with the ease or difficulty of its release. These two things are not comparable. You'll find some guy with some sniveling little sinus condition that merely nags him that takes a thousand hours of itsa before it finally surrenders. And this other bird has got a busted back and can't even move his feet, and you might cure the whole thing up in five minutes. Don't ever measure the length of auditing by the violence of the condition, because they are not necessarily in keeping, one after the other. They're not.
So anyway, there's your first chance. Just with an auditorian auditor can sometimes sit down and audit a pc for a few minutes. He just gets in his communication line, you see? The other fellow finds out there's somebody he can talk to: the auditor with his good discipline and everything. And all of a sudden the guy feels wonderful, see? And he says, "Well, it's all settled now."
And the auditor says, "Wait a minute, that can't be; I didn't do anything, you know?" That's true, but as far as this guy is concerned it's all settled. He's got one human being out of the whole sun, moon, or stars he could talk to, and this was enough to momentarily key him out and make him feel better - perfectly adequate action. And then you go around waiting for this miracle to happen again, don't you see?
Well, the miracle maybe won't happen for many a pc because, of course, what the missing thing was, is you didn't do anything for this first pc and you knew it. So you get lazy and you expect to go on through auditing, not doing anything for people and have them feel marvelous.
I think that's the one-shot Clear and so on. You see, if that existed, we'd all be out of work. So you can bless your stars it doesn't.
But you occasionally get this type of a reaction: You'll get somebody reading - just reading a book on Scientology - and all of a sudden going well all over the place, you see? Well, that's because somebody understands them or somebody knows what it's all about or somebody has put his finger on what the score is with life. And just the fact that this data could exist all of a sudden gives a guy a resurgence and he gets out of his sickbed. This has happened many, many times. That's just the first step, see? That's the communication step.
Now, this other step, when it doesn't occur automatically, you want to be able to do something about it. You don't go around expecting the accident to happen all the time, you see? So you ask this - let me take it up in the most elementary session form possible; terribly elementary session form - and that is, "Do you have a present time problem?"
"Oh, well. Yeah. Oh, yo … oh boy, do I have a … Oh-h-h, man! Ha - a-a. You … you should ask."
"All right. Well, is there any communication you have not completed with regard to those problems?"
"Oh, brr, brrzz, brzzzz, brzzzz, brzzz, brzzz, brzzz, brzzz, brrzzz, brzzz." Problem is all gone. You say, what magic! How marvelous! All right. That's fine. That's fine. But remember what you have just done is the lick and the promise. See, you have not gone any more fundamentally into it than that.
Now supposing you were in the horrible condition of having said "What communication have you failed to complete about those present time problems?"
Pc says, "Oh well, none of that would do any good. Nothing. One couldn't, you know? That's it." Now what do you do? Your favorite card trick has laid an egg. Now where do we go?
Well, there's number two. You see, you should realize that up to this point you haven't done number two. You haven't done anything for the pc; so this second one is "done." You see, "doing something" is mostly "done." See, they rhyme; they go together very nicely.
Now, why? Because it's the highest common lock of the whole reactive mind. If he has a present time problem with something, he has overts against it. And if you really want to do something about these things now, you had better get off those overts. If this has been getting in your way consistently and continuously, you jolly well better get off of those overts. You better get them off of that case, man, because they are big and they are flagrant and they are mad.
If your card trick won't work of "What communication have you failed to complete?" (I keep saying "fail to complete." You should never use "failed" as an auditing command. It's an old habit.) "What communication have you not completed?" or "haven't you completed?" You got the other one - the other one. Now, that's doing something for a pc. And there is such a vast difference between the amount of skill required, between saying [to] somebody "What communication hasn't been completed?" See, brrrrda, da, da. It doesn't upset him; it's not embarrassing; there's no social status challenged here. You're improving his communication so your communication with him improves. It requires nothing of your auditing discipline. See, that's the lazy, long sleep. Why? Because it's really just step 1 again.
Now you're going to have to "done." And man, that takes auditing - that takes some auditing. I know of seventeen different ways that you might have to approach a case in order to get off a series of overts, to actually throw out of existence all of the pc's upset about it. And you might have to use every single one of them.
There are lots of them. There's overts in chains; there is the subject of recurring withholds; there's the subject of the recurring overt; there is the subject of getting the basic-basic of something; the formulation of the proper question to ask so that … This can get pretty complicated. We've had all that technology here over a period of time. A lot of you are here who have been here before, and so forth, have sweat it out. But it's very valuable technology.
Some individual keeps telling you that he threw mud at a car when he was sixteen, and this is an overt. And he gives you this overt and he gives you this overt and he gives you this overt - nothing happens. But he keeps telling you this overt. Well now, you have to know what is happening here and know what to do about it. Otherwise, he'll just keep on giving you the overt. This is part of a chain of overts. This is what's known as a recurring overt.
And the trouble with it is, is you're nowhere near its basic. And now you have to be able to codify the question necessary to get the basic of the chain. And you have to be able to audit this sort of thing by chains. And this can become very interesting indeed. And then you have to be prepared to find no overt as the bottom of the chain. And that is one of the more mysterious things. The guy has always believed that he had an overt there and none was there. There's that phenomenon which can hold a chain in. In other words, there's plenty to know about this.
But man is basically good, despite his reactive bank. The reactive bank is only composed to make a man commit overts, which is against his better nature. If he commits these overts, therefore, he'll trap himself because he won't go on communicating, having committed them. So it's the perfect trap. You do not want to talk to people you have wronged. I'm very shy of letting anybody wrong me, not because they will do me any damage, because they can sure cut themselves up. They commit an overt act, don't you see, and then they will try to withhold and sever the communication line for fear that they will commit another overt act. That actually is the fundamental think of man.
After a while he goes out of control and he just starts dramatizing. And then you have the murderer and the thief and the rest of the fellow who has no responsibility or anything. He's actually left the human race by this time. But along some line, that individual will still have a sensibility; he will still be sensible of his responsibility in some zone or quarter. And, in handling such a person, an auditor has to be terrifically good. He has to find some zone in that person's existence that that person could commit an overt on.
Oh, the person has slain cities full of people, don't you see, and he's done this and he's done that. Put any crime on the book; this person has done this crime without the least qualms. Ah well. The auditor contest there is to find what … You see, he's totally out of communication with everything; that's why he can commit the crimes. He's gone. He's just dramatizing. He's not even there. He's wooef! All right. You've got to find, as an auditor, some zone he can still commit an overt against. What overt would be real to this individual? And you'll find some little corner of his existence is still an overt.
Now, there is other ways to build up overts in an individual. You say, "All right. What have you done? What have you done?" And the individual will give you perhaps something which is a rather banal statement. You can ask him, "Well, why was it all right to do that?" And he will give you a lot of justifications and so forth. There's that approach.
Now, what terrible, vicious, mean thing … This is another thing, you see? Just "done" is just "done." You know, "What have you done?"
"Well, I've eaten breakfast." That's a perfectly adequate answer to the question, see?
But "What mean, vicious thing have you done?" Now, this would be another branch that we call overts. See, just "What have you done?" - that can be used; that can be used all by itself as an auditing question. "What have you done?" But you wouldn't, really, except if you educated your pc into answering the question under some special connotation, you really wouldn't get nothing but overts, you see? But it's perfectly valid to do that, to get such answers and so forth. The only modifications which you require are "What are you absolutely sure you have done?"
Now, let me tell you why that is vitally necessary that you understand these two branches of "done": One of "What have you done that is socially reprehensible that will prevent you from communicating and doing something else?" That's what we call an overt. And the other one is just having taken an action in the direction of. That's just done, see? It means just that. It means having taken an action in the direction of, see? Nothing. No significance with regard to it at all.
Now, if we run just plain "done" on the individual, we could be totally knuckleheaded as an auditor and not guide the individual in any way, and he would immediately start doing something else. Now, what would he start doing? He would start looking for the explanation. He's running a process.... You're running - you're saying, "What have you done? What have you done? What have you done?" and the pc is no longer running that process.
Now, hear me now. This is the big liability of this done: The pc now starts looking for an explanation for what has happened to him. And he's now running the process "Explain what has happened. Uh … uh .. maybe this will explain what has happened to me."
You might as well be asking him, "Explain what has happened to you. Explain what has happened to you. Explain what has happened to you." That's the process he's running. He's running "Explain what has happened to you," but you're running "What have you done?" Now, unless you're aware of the fact that almost any pc under the sun will convert the process "Done" to "Explain what has happened to you," you will never be able to run a pure done on a pc. If you don't know this, then you can't run done on a pc. He'll convert it. He starts looking for the explanation, and he will start inventing things he has not done in order to get rid of the consequences which he is experiencing. He's trying to find a good enough overt to explain what is occurring in his life.
Now there is your considerable difference in these processes. And what an auditor has trouble with there, then - we'll recapitulate very rapidly - an auditor then has trouble differentiating between communicating with a pc and doing something for a pc. And then when he gets into running "done," he doesn't want to sacrifice his communication line in order to press home any nasty personal little facts, you see? So he never really presses home his question. And the next action is, he runs into the square brick wall of the pc doesn't run the process. The pc runs "Explain what has happened."
Well, a fellow is subject to continuous headaches. So he will actually, in a desperate condition, start giving you fictitious deeds - fictitious deeds. He'll very often go onto the far backtrack to give you a fictitious deed. You always want to beware of that because you know at once that this happens that the individual has done this to you. "I shot fifteen Praetorian Guards in Rome." Oh, no, no, no, no, that is not an answer to the auditing question, because the auditing question is, understand, "What do you jolly - well, damn-well know you've done?" But what auditor is going to sacrifice his communication line by cutting off a pc - shooting him down in flames to that degree? No, you'll listen to a couple of these, but all right, steer it back to where it belongs! Because he's looking for an explanation.
He isn't trying to find what he'd done. All you want is "What are you certain you've done, bud?" That's all the answer you want. "What are you real certain - what do you know, absolutely, that you have done?"
You could work a gradient scale up from "I know I've eaten breakfast. In fact, I know that sometime during the last year I've eaten. Uhh … yes, what have I done? What am I absolutely certain I know? I know I've spent some money. I know I must have spent some money in the last few days. I don't really have any exact recollection of any money, but I have less money now than then, so therefore I must have spent some money in the last few days."
"All right. Well, do you know you've spent some money in the last few days?" Well, this is an actual auditing sequence, you see? "Do you know you've spent some money in the last few …?"
"Well, I must have because I have less money now."
"Well, that is to say, you're just computing that you spent some money in the last few days. Do you know that you spent any money in the last few days? Come on. Where did you spend some money in the last few days?"
"Oohh, my God! You ask me a question like that. I … oh-ong-oo-oo - oo. Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mmm. Done. Hm-mmm-mm. Ha-ha-ha. Sixpence. I spent a sixpence for a lolly."
"All right. Good enough. Here's the next question: What have you done?" "Well, well, well, let's see. What have I done? What have I done? Let's see. Let's see." Starts squeezing his head a little bit. "What have I done … done … Well, I was a headsman once that worked up in the Tower and I missed Anne Boleyn's head and hit her in the flat of the head with an ax." You know what he's figured out? He tried to answer the question, he got a headache, so he tried to explain why he had the headache, so he reaches back into the fast [past] and he gets some uncertain piece of something. So he tries to offer you something that is enough overt to give him that much headache. And that's why it's very difficult.
Now, you'll find that people who answer the question that way - the test is do they ever get well? No, they have an awful time. They have a pretty bad time.
No, it isn't, actually, whether they did do it or didn't do it. It's their degree of certainty on having done it! See? I can very easily go five hundred years ago back into France and give you the name, rank and serial number of a lot of things, see? And I can give these things to you, but after I've run a few of them I start running into "Let's see, was her name Mary? Or was it Marie? Or was it …? And did that happen at Agincourt? Or was that at Poitiers?" Next thing you know I'm in a fog. And if I go on this way very long, I'll start wondering whether I even was alive yesterday, because I haven't entered it from a zone of certainty - See? I've entered it from a zone of dim recollection or something like this, you know?
So "done" is built up on a gradient of certainty, not built up on a gradient of explanations of what is happening to the pc or has happened to the pc. You might even convert the question so that it's "What are you quite positive that you have done?" You want to be careful about saying "absolutely certain." (audience laughter) [We assume that "absolutely certain" approximates some implant platen known to the students - Ed.]
See, it's no criticism of the pc or even the pc's memory, but that pc is actually trying to explain something or they wouldn't be shooting back on the backtrack trying to give you an explanation. See, that's the thing you've got to watch; that's the thing you've got to be awful careful of. Because they're going to dig themselves in, in an awful hurry.
So, again, you wouldn't be doing anything for the pc by running "done." So, again, it comes under the heading of doing something for the pc. Well, there's a lot of things you could do with a pc without doing anything for the pc. There's a lot of phenomena that you can achieve without achieving anything for the pc. You can turn on some very, very handsome somatics at one time or another on a pc without turning them off, too.
So anyway, you've got a problem here in doing something for the pc because you're liable to be doing A and the pc is doing B. And then you go on doing A while the pc is doing B, and then somewhere down the line you wind up in a hell of a mess. And you say, "Well, what happened?" Well, the pc never did what you said, so you didn't do anything for the pc. There was in actual fact no barrier to your willingness to do something for the pc but there must have been a tremendous barrier to your understanding of what was going on. That you could ask A and the pc answered B in itself showed the auditor observation was very poor. So therefore the auditor wasn't in communication with the pc, so again the communication factor was out. So once more we weren't doing anything for the pc.
Now, this is where the thing adds up. Now, if you're going to communicate with the pc - if you're going to communicate with the pc - it's to the end of doing something for the pc. Now, if your communication with the pc is good, you will wind up then in a position to do something. But having gotten in a position to do something, for heaven's sakes, now do something. See? Don't halfway do something or partially do something. This isn't difficult, what I'm talking to you about; it's just putting things in their right boxes in their right compartments.
Don't ever think, because the pc likes you and everything is going along fine and you get along together so well, that you're doing something for the pc. No, you're communicating well to the pc. So, in communicating very well to the pc, you now have an opportunity to do something for the pc. But then your own communication channel to the pc could go out, and you could be asking the pc A and be getting answers for B. And then again you wouldn't do anything for the pc, if there was a second place where it can break down.
Now, your gist - the gist of the situation then is that O/W is liable to be the most productive zone or area for big recovery on the part of the pc, providing the auditor knows how to steer it and will steer it and isn't being too tender about it.
There's dozens of ways to run this sort of thing. You can get in there and you can say, "All right. What big overt have you committed in this lifetime?" That was to take O/W from the version of overt, you know, so on.
All right. "What overt have you committed? What big overt have you committed in this lifetime?"
Think, think, think, think, think, think, think, think, think. "Well, I upset Joe. Yes. Yes, that was about the biggest overt in this lifetime. I really upset Joe."
"All right. Fine." You think you've gotten someplace now. Of course you haven't gotten anyplace: your tone arm hasn't moved; there's been no cognition - there's been nothing like this. This thing is in a situation where it can be set up in a dozen different ways. You haven't gotten anyplace yet but you've gotten a "big overt."
Now, you think perhaps that his having told you, now, should somehow or another magically discharge this thing. No, why should it magically discharge it? He hasn't answered the auditing question, for one thing. He doesn't think it was an overt.
"What big overt have you committed in this lifetime?"
"Well, this horrible thing I did to Joe." He tells you what it is, rather proudly.
And you say, well, O/W doesn't work because nothing happened. Man, you didn't even get your big toenail wet on the side of the Pacific. The sixty-four dollar question now is "Well, why wasn't it an overt?"
"Oh, well, it wasn't an overt because Joe is a heel and because of this and because of that, and so forth; and he deserved it, and it's the common thing to do in those circumstances; everybody expected me to do it, and of course it was natural that I would because I have a reactive bank, and it forced me to do it."
Now, a guy can go on for some time on the justification of this overt. And you start to get tone arm action, tone arm action, tone arm action. Now you're watching the increase of responsibility along certain zones or lines. And this person has not flattened the process because he has not come up to a cognition or a recognition of anything yet, but he's sure working on it. And that tone arm is a-moving and it's a-moving and it's a-moving and so forth, and we're going along on this. "And after all, Joe really was a heel. And he wrote me a nasty letter once, which was greh-ta-jub-zra and it was absolutely inevitable and impossible that I would have done anything else but this because everybody expected me to do this, don't you see? And if I hadn't done this, it would have committed an overt against a great many other people. (sigh)"
"Now, on this overt against Joe, is it really an overt after all?" and so on.
All of a sudden the guy is liable to get this little sensation of the glee of insanity, or something like that will start to come off. I'm not kidding you. There's a sort of a glee of insanity that starts coming off the surface, and so forth. And some little corner of him is taking a look at this though, "You know," he said, "that there was some part of that that was an overt - mostly against myself, of course, because …"
And a guy will actually worry that and worry that and worry that. Now, I'm not prepared to tell you how many hours he could go on worrying this, producing tone arm action all the way. I don't know. Might be a twenty-five hour intensive on one overt, don't you see? Until you get the thing worn down and eventually, all of a sudden, he says, "Well, even though it could have been explained, you know, that was a hell of a thing to do to Joe. I shouldn't have done that to Joe. I'd completely forgotten. I - I'd completely forgotten. II had it completely in my choice whether I did it or didn't do it. And I did it. Whoo. Yes. Yeah, I committed an overt against Joe. Yeah." Boom. S-phewww. You see it blow. And you won't get another scrap of TA out of that whole thing.
You got one "done," see, one "done" off the pc. See, there are numerous ways to handle these things.
Now, while you have him going through all of this, and so forth - particularly because, his being a Scientologist, he may know all the ropes - keep him guided into this channel and keep him going right on down the line; keep your communication channel, and so forth, open to the pc during this period of time. That's all a trick. This all takes some doing. But in the final analysis you will have done something for the pc - for the pc, not to him.
Now, there is the auditing of O/W. Now, a lot of this lecture, I apparently have not been talking to you much about the process O/W, I've been talking to you about the version and guises of auditing. But unless these things are understood in their proper relationship one to another, you will never run any O/W and never get any overts off anybody, and really never get any withholds off anybody. You know? See, you have to know the technology, you have to know how to audit and you have to yourself be in communication with the pc to know how to handle this situation.
Now, all the way along the line of what I've been talking to you about, you are raising the cause level of the pc. All the way along the line you're raising the cause level of the pc. You do these things fairly slippily, fairly expertly, you're raising the cause level of the pc. And he's walking right up and he'll be able to as - is more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more. Your pc will be changing under your eyes: Your pc doesn't come into session with so many PTPs; your pc is much more able to get the show on the road; the pc is this and the pc is that. And you're seeing this thing progress, don't you see?
Now, you could go into "done" in numerous other categories. I'd swear, I don't know, if you piled up all the bulletins on the subject of O/W and running withholds in chains and all of this kind of thing - man, if you stacked those all up together, you wouldn't be able to hardly look over the desk. There's lots of technology. You don't need all that technology, perhaps, but it's very nice to have it. If you're going to be very expert along these lines, why, there it is. Because the mind is quite funny in the various ways that it works.
Very often you get a tremendous failure in this particular field in trying to direct somebody to do something in this field. They don't understand some of these ramifications I've been pointing out to you.
I've asked somebody … A girl is lying dying in a hospital for no apparent reason, or something of the sort. And somebody asks me frantically - frantically, they'll say, you know, over a long distance line or something of this sort, "What can we do to bring this girl back to life?" and so forth. And frankly, it's not with any hope at all that I tell them what they can do, because I know that ordinarily they won't consider it heroic enough. I tell them the exact fact of what to do. In such a case as that, the exact thing to do was find out what her family doesn't know about. That, actually, was enough - they were in sufficient communication with the girl in this particular case - that was enough to have gotten her out of that bed and back on her feet again.
It wasn't that I knew anything she had done, but I just knew, from the sudden discussion of it, that having retreated from home to this, and then gone to that point, and then suddenly gone to a hospital with an exclamation point and fireworks, and lying there dying from no apparent reasons or causes and so forth, that obviously there was a withhold there. And that would have taken enough off the edge of it, don't you see, because I knew that any situation like that, no matter how heroic it appears, must have been terribly hard to maintain. That situation like that is so unnatural, see? Look at how hard somebody would have to work at it to put it all together this way. And it's just like any other complex situation: you touch one corner of the house of cards and down it'll come. Well, that's the good point to touch.
Some stranger saying to the person, you know, "What doesn't your family know about?" - the girl might have opened up, "Well, they don't know I had this affair with Bill and so forth, and that I'm enceinte," and then all of a sudden have felt much better, don't you see? And said, "What am I lying here dying for?" you know, and gotten out of bed.
Because people look at the heroicness of the condition, they always add it up that it must be an heroic comparable action, and it's not. Might be very complex, the reasons they're there, but the very complexity makes it untenably hard to hold on to.
No! A madman down here in an asylum, he has a hell of a time - poor fellow must work day and night staying in there. He just must work overtime! You can see him, "Now I will be ferocious," you know? The point of entrance on the thing - it's just, actually, the same points I've been talking to you about. You get into communication with him and you ask him what's sensible, see, or you ask him what he's done or ask him what he's withholding. And you'll just see it crack up in front of your eyes.
And that's actually the magic of the world of auditing. That's the magic that can be done with auditing. You get the long-grind situation, looks like a long grind to you, because you say "What have you done?"
"I've murdered the local vicar."
And you're stopped right there; where do you go from there? You have no responsibility, you have no nothing, and so forth. So recently we have developed ways of handling these no-responsibility - it's actually a new development - and compartmented them out so they're much more easily handled.
Well, I wish you lots of luck with it, but when I ask you to get some withholds off somebody or get some overts off somebody or raise somebody's cause level, now at least you know what I am talking about.
Thank you.