Okay. The problems of auditing. Well, this is the second lecture, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, 26 June 62. I'm going to talk to you about Prepchecking.

Prepchecking is a very easy activity. There is nothing very difficult about it except trying to understand it. you sometimes can try to understand it so hard that it becomes quite difficult. Prepchecking is based on one of the simplest fundamentals of Dianetics; which is that every type of incident which had relationship to one another tended to form up in a consecutive chain on the time track.

You should understand the time track as consecutive occurrences in time. You live, you live, you live, you live, you live, you live. Those are all different items in time.

All right. Let's put it this way. you make a picture, you make a picture, you make a picture, you make a picture, you make a picture. Those are all separate items in time. But pictures classify themselves after construction, into chains. You've got a chain for most anything You've got a breakfast chain of all the breakfasts you didn't like. And you have a lunch chain of all the lunches you didn't like, particularly those. And you have a supper chain for all the suppers you didn't like. you see. Now, you have an eating chain of all the eating you didn't like, you see. But inside this chain you have these subdivisional chains of the breakfast chain, the lunch chain and the supper chain. Get the idea?

Now, when you get so general that you have livingness you didn't like. . . See, these are — these are pictures you didn't want and therefore suppress and submerge and get the hell out of the road and try to do something with, you know.

It's something like the artist in the studio, he's got this potentially beautiful model. She's standing over there on the platform and he takes all of this clay, you see, and he slings it together and he makes something that looks like a combination between a giraffe and a custard pie, you know. And he says to hell with that thing, so he says, "I'll work on that later," or something. But that's very unsatisfactory, so he tries to push it out of the road. Well, suppose this was made up of stuff that he didn't know how to squash it after he had made it. Supposing he'd just forgot that. Well, he's got an unwanted picture there. He's got an unwanted statue. So let's say he hangs some curtains across the thing or puts it back in the corner, you know and pushes it out of sight and hangs some curtains over it and says, "Well, we don't have to pay any attention to that."

And he takes — and he says, "Well, let's have another go at it." you see? "Let's have a much better go at it," and he gets all this clay and stuff and he makes himself up a new statue of this model, you see. And it is mostly feet. And he says, "Well, heh-heh, ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha." Not knowing how to unmock this thing, you see, we'll get some more black material and we'll drape the thing and we'll shove it over in the corner.

Well, this can continue and is a perfectly successful activity up to this point — when he runs out of studio. He got no place to stow these things. So he probably tries to push them all together into various classified piles, classified into things we don't look at. Now, actually if they're hanging up, they are a violation of purpose. That's not in Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health, but that's how a picture gets there. That's how a picture persists. The alter-is is a violation of purpose.

A guy intended to hang somebody and got hanged. Violated his purpose. But that really is a fairly close activity and won't trouble him as much as going out to shoot the mayor and electing him. Now, that will trouble him. And he'll have this beautiful picture of this election. You'll run into it in the bank, you know? And you can't find anything wrong with it, you know. So he elected a mayor. Eventually, you dig around for awhile and you discover well, hell, he wanted to kill the mayor, not elect him and he wound up electing him when he intended to kill him. you run out that basic purpose with regard to the mayor and the picture will fold up. T-he pictures are held in place by violation of purpose.

Now, the place they hang up in is the mind and they get into classifications of chains. And every chain has a basic and a basic-basic. Now, every chain has a basic. Well, that means that there are tremendous numbers of basics. You probably have a basic on the subject of bad food for every lifetime you ever lived. But there is only one basic-basic and that is the first time on the track you decided food was bad, see. And that's hung up because you weren't eating and intended not to and then did. And you'll get a basic-basic.

Frankly, there is no basic picture on a chain. There is no basic picture on a chain. There is a basic purpose on a chain which the chain violates. And that is what hangs the chain up.

That is even more esoteric than you need to do adequate Prepchecking You need that to do 3GA but the mechanics are still true otherwise. The only thing you need to know to do Prepchecking is the fact that there is such a thing as a time track and that a time track has classified chains on it. And by chain is meant a consecutive series of incidents: He ate breakfast and didn't like it; he ate breakfast and didn't like it; he ate breakfast and didn't like it; he ate breakfast and didn't like it; he ate breakfast and didn't like it, see? Well, that runs from this lifetime, the first breakfast he ate and didn't like, up to the last time he ate breakfast and didn't like it which is probably this morning See, he got a nice chain there. Well, now basic for this lifetime — actually when you say basic, you needn't add for this lifetime because you mean that. you mean somewhere near this lifetime, you see. Could happen in the last two or three lives. Sometimes these chains overlap a lifetime. You'll find yourself occasionally prepchecking back past this lifetime. Perfectly all right.

And basic, then, is the first time this happened on this particular chain. This chain is not united particularly with other chains and will free by finding that one basic. You can get rid of this whole concatenation of not liking breakfast by finding the first incident where he didn't like breakfast in these finite periods like the last life or two, you see. Now, there is a chain and they are pictures. And the only thing which holds them all in place is the basic. You needn't particularly play around in Prepchecking with the purpose because you're going to get yourself into 3GA a long time before you're ready to be in 3GA. You start running back to find the purpose back of not liking breakfast. Oh-ho. The violated purpose.

"What is the violated purpose of not liking breakfast?" Well, it's a woooooo, and then he's back a thousand years woooooo, and it's back ten thousand years woooooo, and then he's back a hundred thousand years zzzzz, and then he's back a trillion and he's two trillion and fifteen trillion yawhoooo. There it is. Oh, yes, yes. you finally get it back down to the bottom and find out that's not his goal. What's happened during all this period of time? All you've done is beef up the bank all the way.

So you don't bother much with these basic purposes and that sort of thing as a relationship to chains even though that's how they exist and how they persist. The only thing you're interested in is the first time. The first time. Well, that is a very, very reserved statement, (quote) the first time (unquote) see. Honest, he's been having — a first time he didn't like breakfast here for trillennia, see? Every GPM has a not liking breakfast chain in it or something like that, you see. Back we go — back, back, back. But for our — for our purposes and for the edification of the general public and the pcs and so forth that you start auditing early on, you say well, that is the first incident. That's what we mean by basic. That is the basic incident.

That doesn't mean the first incident ahead of all such chains. That just means the one ahead of the chain that is close up here to present time and fairly accessible. So that's what you're after in Prepchecking. Because the mechanics exist that if you pull the basic, the rest of the chain will go, bzzzzzzt. You can discharge a chain by pulling the basic on that chain.

The basic on the chain generally hangs around childhood, oh, maybe a few years ahead of this life. It's fairly recent. You can expect it quite normally to occur two, three, four, something like that. Sometimes you startle yourself by finding a basic in the prenatal area in spite of the fact that the medicos at first objected seriously to prenatal engrams and their objection to them has not eradicated them. I thought you might like to know that. They still run into them. They now, by the way, heal people by healing their prenatal proclivities, you see. Johns Hopkins University has issued many learned papers about prenatal influence now and not any one of them has got the story straight yet.

As far as past lives are concerned, you rather inevitably run into past lives. You start Prepchecking and everything is going along fine. This person's never heard of past life, never heard of living before and all of a sudden you find him in 1868 with the basic of the chain of hating wool. you know, what's he done to wool? Something like that. He's an Australian sheep farmer, you see. And he has — he's out there and he's sheep farming and so forth. And you all of a sudden find out the reason he is sheep farming has something to do with his having killed a man in England with a woolen scarf. That happened in 1868 and he finally gets it straightened out that he started sheep farming in 1870. And this doesn't seem to be quite right to him, but he eventually straightens it out and all of a sudden he has no wool allergy. See wool doesn't do anything to him.

I didn't mean to step on any Australian toes here with regard to that sort of thing Just for the benefit of it, as far as Australia is concerned, Australia is — shouldn't feel sad about it because that's what happened to everybody on this planet, you know.

Anyway, you've got a situation there, don't you see. And the basic on the chain doesn't pull in this lifetime. And the pc will go back and he'll go back and sometimes they go back two or three thousand years. Seldom much more than that. It would be quite unusual if they did, but you'd let them if they did. And they all of a sudden pull this basic. And it's some overt. They did something. And you pull that thing and bzzzzzzt. The rest of it will go.

Actually no charge can remain in a chain after the basic has been pulled out of unknownness and put into known category. The electronics of the situation is you're not going to get a read on a chain if it is no longer charged. And what charges it up is what keeps it in place. And that is the basic on the chain is an unknown zone or sphere. There's something unknown about the first incident and it remains charged up until that becomes known at which moment the electronics of the chain convert and the chain is desensitized and remains so thereafter.

And it is quite tricky. The pulling a chain is a permanent activity. Chains don't charge up again as long as you have the basic on the chain. Therefore in Prepchecking, you always test the What question for charge. You test the What question. Don't test the Zero Question because a person's reliability and responsibility increases. He's going find new times when he used wool for strangulation purposes, you see? Or something. He's going to find brand-new times and so forth, but it'll be on the Zero.

"Have you ever killed a man?" See, something like this. And no, he never killed any man. You've got this What question, see? Finally you find that he has an impulse to strangle people, particularly on sheep farms. For some reason or other this doesn't make any sense, you see. And you follow this on down and you pull the basic on the chain. Well, now that particular activity is going to desensitize. That'll never charge up again. But he's going to get more responsible and realize that by his reckless driving at some time or another or his failure to repair a car or something like this, his extensional responsibility is all of a sudden going to make him realize that he's killed somebody else. At this time the Zero is flat. you raise his responsibility and the Zero unflattens. But the What question flattened, remains flat. There is the curious difference.

Now, the anatomy of the mind then, is that chains consisting of similar incidents plot from a basic which can be reached up to present time. And Prepchecking is simply an effort to reach one of these chains and trace it back down to its earliest basic that can be found. That is to say — I beg your pardon — to the earliest incident that can be found, which is its basic for this finite fairly recent chain. And get the unknownness off of that incident at which moment the rest of the chain should go bzzzzzt. You find out there's no real necessity to come back up a chain again once you have gone down it and blown the basic.

You test the What question and the What question is now flat. It is completely null and doesn't register anymore. It's gone. And the whole magic of it consists of finding the basic.

Well, therefore, the system called Prepchecking consists of a method of locating chains of sufficient charge to aberrate the conduct of the individual. And then provides a withhold system — it's called originally — a little system which knocks out the basic and removes the charge from the basic on the chain so the chain will fold up. So whatever else we say about Prepchecking and whatever else rote activity we get into about Prepchecking and however involved we get with Prepchecking, please don't lose sight of what you're trying to do.

You-uns is just trying to find a chain of antisocial activities on the part of this pc that are considered somewhat less than optimum; and you're trying to run that chain on down to its basic; and you're trying to knock that basic out and so get that chain to fold up. Now, whatever you are trying to do, you are trying to do that. And you will discover you have some remarkable successes doing things like this.

You find this person just cannot stand their mother-in-law and you say this is normal and natural. Nobody likes his mother-in-law, you say. Yeah, but can we investigate this thing a little bit further and we find out that his mother-in-law does all the washing and bakes him pies and cakes that he particularly likes and is always giving him money and is very pleasant to him and is quite proud of him. But he doesn't like his mother-in-law. And this starts to get senseless. This starts to get stupid. It's ruining his whole life. That's all it's doing.

Well, all right. We prepcheck this thing — not because we pick upon it as a particular wrongness — we just happened to collide with it and run into it while looking for overts on the part of the pc. There we all of a sudden find the similarities and so forth that he has associated up with and the overts and the missed withholds connected with this mother-in-law and we find they all lie in a chain. It is not the mother-in-law chain, see. It is the — a female chain or an elderly female chain or it is some other characterized chain. But it is — it's better called, "Doing something to older women," chain. You locate that, pull the basic on the thing, bzzzzt, comes up to present time and he goes home and he kisses his mother-in-law and says how nice she is. She hasn't changed. He has.

Now, this could get more serious. He could get so upset about his motherin-law and that sort of thing, he's perpetually sick. And you sometimes won't be able to figure out just why the pc became so mysteriously well. The pc had constant and continual earaches. Constant and continual earaches. Well, there's no sense in going in and trying to audit his ear or find a wrongness. You just do a more or less standard job of Prepchecking. All of a sudden you find out he hates his mother-in-law. You run this out, overts against elderly women, see. And you find out when he was a little boy, why, he pegged a rock at some elderly woman and hurt her in some fashion or another. And this all associates out and magically turns out that this woman was not his motherin-law and somehow or another. And his crimes were so-and-so and such-and-such. And they all fold up and he doesn't have an earache and he likes his mother-in-law. Very mysterious.

How did all this occur? Well, it could only occur because of misassociation. He's reactively making identifications: A=A=A=A. Prepchecking is all out of Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health man, I mean this is — this is wild that something like — like Banquo's ghost coming to life, you know. It's right out of the old book. Except this is how you run it with an E-Meter and you don't bother much with the engrams. The engrams all rip up anyhow and you don't pay any attention to engrams anymore, but you can get the whole chain, don't you see? Chains are described in Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health. Basics are described. Basic-basic is described. Also by the way, 3GA is also piloted out in Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health. The basic purpose of the individual. That's what you're finding when you're finding goals.

So anyhow, not to show you how right I was — just to show you that you're — just to show you that you're dealing with fundamentals. You aren't dealing with a whole series of chains. You're dealing with a peeled-off series of fundamentals. This is very streamlined auditing, man. When you get down to Prepchecking, why, you find yourself looking at all the parts that you saw in Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health, except you don't bother to run anybody through engrams or put them into engrams or explore still pictures or get too nosy about what the pc is looking at or anything because you can actually just run on down and pull the bottom of the chain and the chain goes bzzzzzt.

Now, there's been a reformation in Prepchecking. Originally we prepchecked on the basis of take the last incident in order to settle the individual on the chain or reveal the chain. We ran the withhold system on the last incident — the nearest to present time. And you see, that was the one we found.

All right. We have what's called a Zero Question. All right. That Zero Question is some highly generalized question that is liable to get the pc where he lives. It is arbitrary. If it operates on the pc, good, we use it. If it doesn't operate on the pc, we discard it. And lists of these questions exist in what we used to call Sec Check forms. They are found in HCO Policy Letters. The best of them are Form 3 called the Joburg and Form 6A as far as Scientologists are concerned. There are many of them, however. They exist. Though, there's been a lot of them put out in Info Letters, people have been real busy making up Prepchecks. They've done a real good job of this sort of thing.

So you've got lots of Zero material. I suppose at some time or another we'll be so rich that somebody has been a bus driver and we just look up in the — der master textbook on der subject of Prepcheck Forms. And it will say Bus Driver, Type B. you see. And "How many fares haven't you turned over to der company?" You know? In other words it could be quite stylized. You could even bring it out for dynamics. Do a Dynamic Assessment on somebody and then you'd get a Dynamic Prepcheck and all of that.

But there's a danger in being too fundamental in Prepchecking. There's a danger. You start doing — you start doing assessments and you're going to run into the GPM and the GPM is nothing to handle with a Prepcheck, let me assure you. So you want a shallow draft sort of look. That isn't to say you don't want shallow incidents like I . . . "Well, the reason I hate little girls is because that — I was at a party one time and I took my index finger and I touched the little girl on the shoulder and that's my overt act." The hell it is. He's done worse than that. He can do — he can come up with better than that to show for a whole lifetime for heaven's sakes, you see?

But comparatively speaking, we are not going to do 3GA and then a Prepcheck, don't you see. We're going to take something that's relatively light, you see. And we get it out of these forms.

"Have you ever stolen anything?" Well, on the whole track, look at you, man. Look at you on the whole track. Aw. Think if you — if you try and clear this question up for the whole track. Oh, wow! You know. Like, There'd you put that planet, man?" You know. But we ask this question as a Prepcheck and we find out that he's been stealing pennies out of his mother's purse and he's been stealing lollipops and he's been stealing copy books off of his teacher and he's been — he's been purloining this and that for quite a while. And it's finally wound up into the fact that he'd better not reach certain items in this lifetime.

So we ask him the Zero Question, "Have you ever stolen anything?" Of course, we don't know that he's stolen something or not stolen something This is minor. This is just a test question. Zero Question equals test question. And it reacts on the meter. It goes bang!

Well, we say, "That reads. Now, what have you done?" And he says, "Ah, well, stealing things. I . . ." He says, "I — I — I stole an icebox once."

And you say, "Good. Thank you. I'll check that on the meter. Have you ever stolen anything?" Clang! Well, you've had it, see? You gave him one chance, you see. you gave him one chance to clean it. And if it didn't clean, you got your paws on a chain. Chains never consist of two incidents.

Sometimes there are isolated, single incidents that clean up just, boom! Well, you don't want to monkey around with those and beat the pc to death, but they clean up just on utterance. Pc says yap-yap. They're gone. That's it. They don't read. But you say, "Have you ever stolen anything?" A second time, he goes clang! Oh, well, come off of it, man, there's a chain here.

Now, what is it a chain of? Well, probably it might be four chains. It might be six chains. Now, he says he stole an icebox. And this is the way you prepcheck now. you take that incident and you don't run, "When did it happen? Appear?" and so on. you don't — you don't do that with that incident. He just tells you that incident. You try to clean it on the meter. It didn't clean and now you put your What question around that except you dibble and dab and monkey and fumble and fool around trying to get this What question to operate like that clang! you got there on that "Have you ever stolen anything?"

"Have you ever stolen anything" fell about two E-Meter divisions with a very fast chop. Well, you want a What question that falls two divisions with a very fast chop, see? So you're just going to have to be inventive at this time and this is the weakest part of a Prepcheck system. This is where the auditor can make most of his mistakes.

You say, "What about…?" All What questions begin with "What." "What about?" they say. Isn't even very grammatical and it isn't very sensible, but you find out it works fine. And nearly all Zero Questions begin with "Have" or have "have" as their third word. Like, "In prison have you ever . . .?" See? It's a modified have. So your What question: What about? All right. Now you've got to find out what about what? Well frankly, you're like a fisherman who is blindfolded standing on a stream. He does not know even, really, if the stream exists using tackle to catch fishes that he does not know the type or identity of, you see? So this is a sort of a — of an interesting activity. He's got to form a What question all on his little lonesome. So with great genius our new HPA student says, "What about stealing iceboxes?" See. That's genius. This is just brilliant, you see, because he only stole one icebox. He's stolen lots of things but only one icebox.

So now let me show you how the guy's made it tough for himself. This thing is at the top end of the theft chain. See? It's supported all the way back to the age of two when he used to steal safety pins off his nurse, you know. It's supported all the way back there by all that charge and all those incidents. My God! He's stolen iceboxes and opera hats and he's stolen women, he's stolen all kinds of things, you see. And this auditor says, "What about stealing iceboxes?"

"Oh, th-blah-blah-blah, this-that, uh-aw-yeah-blah."

And the auditor says, "Are there any earlier times?"

The fellow says, "No, there aren't any earlier times." So he checks it on the meter." Any earlier times you've stolen any iceboxes? Well, there are no earlier times."

"All right. When was that that you stole . . .?"

Oh, no. This isn't going to — this isn't going to give. This isn't gon---- . He can sit there now and grind on it for the next couple of hours. I'd say he could probably spend four or five sessions on it.

"When did you steal the icebox?" See. "Is that all there is to it? What might have appeared there? Who should have found out about it?" And the What question — it sort of dies a hard death. After several sessions it sort of dies a hard death. Both auditor and pc finally get tired of this icebox. It was sort of cold and clammy to begin with and didn't get any more entertaining as we went along

Well that is what could be classified as asking, formulating, the wrong What question. We want to know something that will give a chain. So this is what we do. We — of course, in a test question, you say, "What about stealing iceboxes?" but we're wasting our time, you see. We want to know about, "What about stealing furniture?" see. "What about stealing appliances? What about stealing equipment? What about stealing heavy things? What about stealing massive items? What about stealing property that didn't belong to you?" That doesn't read. "What about stealing white objects?" Sheer genius. Didn't work either. Finally the auditor remembers what the pc told him — that is he stole the icebox and hid it in a barn. So, "What about stealing and hiding things?" Clang! "Oh, that was good, huh-huh." We got the same clang And we say, "Have you ever stolen anything?" Clang! "What about stealing and hiding things?" Clang! Hey, hey, that's all right. All right, now.

"All right, now — what a — what about, stealing and hiding things, huh?" Oh, the auditor, he's got it easy now. In this new type of Prepchecking, he has it very easy. He wants the pc to get windy. That's all. He just wants the pc to go on and tell him all about it. That's good, yeah, well yeah, all right, fine. The pc just tells him all about it. He doesn't ask for anything earlier; he doesn't steer the pc in any way; the pc tells him all about this question. Actually, the pc may give him three or four overts. He doesn't challenge the pc, he doesn't stop the pc. Because listen, if he stops the pc he's got a missed withhold right there in the session that's going to go all — fly to pieces.

See, he did, he sort of shut the pc up while he found the What question and that sort of thing And it was a little bit lengthy and he did it and that's fine. But now that he's found it, now he wants to know about stealing and hiding things. And the pc's — well, the pc's been sitting there kind of ready to tell him, you know, about the Ford car and the house and the battleship and the bass drum and the giraffe and all these things that he's stolen and hidden, you see? And the guy goes on and on and on and on.

And only when the pc runs down, the auditor — this is the time the auditor should encourage — he should understand the encouraging acknowledgment. Girls know this better than men. Girls are experts at this sort of thing I know a girl, stone-deaf she got through her whole life, married eight millionaires and all she knew how to do was give an encouraging acknowledgment! It's the invitational, "Hm-mm." You know? "Right. Right. Right. Right. All right. Hm-mm, hm-mm, good, good. All right, all right, yeah." Of course, the girl adds the "Gee whiz!" to it, you know, a little bit, but you don't have to add that.

Pc runs down — doesn't matter whether he gave you one, four, six, eight — doesn't matter what he gave you, take it. You've got this What question, you've written it down. That's the main thing. It's got to be on your board. It's got to — registered along with the "Have." And after that you let the pc answer that What question in full. And now start pushing for earlier. And you don't even have to read the meter, man. See? You're not reading the meter during all this time. Give your eyes a rest.

You know he's not going to tell you the earliest. Because if he could reach the earliest all by himself, it wouldn't be a chain. So he can always answer the question, "Is there an earlier incident?" And you shove him back to the earliest incident you can find. That is, he's always going to tell you "the earliest," "It is the earliest." The pc's always using "earliest," and the auditor is always using "earlier." See, auditor never says "the earliest," "Tell me the earliest incident." "Tell me the earlier incident," you know, because he'll hang the track up.

And he gets the pc back to the earliest one that the pc can be coaxed back to without a meter and without anything. See? He gets him back there. And he gets that earlier incident — pc says it's the earliest, it's not. That incident is the barrier.

That incident that the pc can reach without much assistance is the barrier to earlier memory. There is always a barrier incident. It's a barrier to earlier memories. It's not particularly a technical term, I just want you to get the idea that there's a fence built about a third of the way up one of these chains. And the pc can get back there dead-easy. That's to the age of eleven. He can get back there awful easy. But somehow or another, at that point it all folds up and that one's pretty foggy.

So it is at this point that the auditor now brings out his withhold system. Now, he wants to know when that early — the pc says "earliest" — he wants to know when that "earliest" incident, when it was, wants to know is that all there is to it, he wants to know what might have appeared there and he wants to know who should have found out about it and didn't, so on. The When-All-Appear-Who system. And he works that over, one time, two times.

And when he's got that far — I'm just giving you this in the rough, not by the rote procedure of the HCOB June 24th, 1962 — he wants to know if there's any earlier incident. Well hell, of course there is. See? He used the withhold system to blast the track open so the pc could remember earlier, see. And he runs the pc on down and the next thing you know they've got their hands on an incident about stealing and hiding things from his little sister and driving his little sister berserk and plenty of overts. And finally we find out that he'd steal and hide things — it's usually got a — the basic on this thing has usually got a hell of a curve in it, somehow or another, you know. And he finds out that he stole and hid things from his little sister so that she would get beaten for losing her toys.

And he sort of sits there stunned for a little while and he says, "I do that? No, I couldn't have done that. Yes, well, I guess I did do that." And, having arrived down at that level, then we get the withhold system being operated again, very strenuously and we get that thing gone over two or three times, he develops new material out of it and he gets his own overts out of the thing, he gets disentangled and so forth. And then we test this What question. Does it still bang on the meter?

"What about stealing and hiding things? Bingo! See, still reads. All right, so we go back into our song and dance again and we get an earlier incident. And we find out Little Sister be damned, you see. As far as stealing things is concerned he used to steal bottles of milk at the age of eighteen months. And we actually have plowed memory back to that point.

The beauty of this is the withhold system, the When-All-Appear-Who system, has the power of opening up track. And it will open up more damn track, if you'll pardon my French, than any psychoanalyst ever hoped to see. And it's nothing to get somebody to remember at the age of eighteen months, see. Well, stealing and hiding things, he used to drive everybody nuts. He'd crawl across the floor and open up the icebox and he'd steal his own milk bottles out of the icebox. And he'd go around and he'd hide them all over the house. And there was nothing but sour milk being poured all over the house. And this turns out to be an overt against himself in some fashion, an overt against his mother, an overt against everybody in sight, don't you see. And it finally — we picked up the icebox, he finally tried to do this all over again, you see, because he'd just got through stealing an icebox, see? But now we find out what he was stealing out of the icebox, you see and that happened at the age of eighteen months.

And there'll be some wild and extraordinary curve on this one too, somehow or another. There'll be some kind of a starvation terror. Has to do with his ulcers or something like this. We get that thing all worked out, we work that out again and then we test this question, "What about stealing and hiding things?" And we find out it is dreadfully flat now. There is nothing left in it. It hasn't got a click to its name at a very high sensitivity and so we get the middle rudiments in, zing-zing-zing! "In this session is there anything you have suppressed, invalidated, failed to reveal or been careful of?" Boom. We get those in and then we read the What question again. And maybe there's a little tick on it, on the What question. And the pc says, "Well, I — uh — one thing I — I — I didn't tell you, I — I didn't tell you," he says, "Uh — I actually, uh — steal sour milk. Heh-heh," you know or something like that.

Just ask the What question — flat. That's the end. That's all. That's all there is. That's even a chain.

So, we go back to the Zero Question now. And we look down the throat of the Zero Question and we say, "Have you ever stolen anything?"

Now, if the Zero Question reacts we do exactly as we did before: we get an overt and we go on and we do everything for him. And we'll find this time we're on an entirely different chain.

We keep that cycle up until there's nothing left of that Zero Question. And then we go to the next Zero on the list, regardless of what it is. "Have you ever raped anybody? Have you ever eaten waterbuck?" you know? Doesn't matter what the Zero Question is. And we work it the same way.

Now, we're not necessarily looking for fantastic amounts of crime. We're not looking for quality. And we certainly are not looking for sordidity. You can very often find pcs who have read a book by Freud and — or comic books or anything — and they've read these things and they've got an idea that if they recall certain types of incidents, which they make up and say enough about it and fill in enough words, somehow or another something marvelous will happen to them. And you never fail to find somebody who's been psychoanalyzed, trying to apply the formula of psychoana — analysis, you see, to clean up a chain or something like this. And man, in that particular case, when you find this, man, you better tackle those middle — the middle rudiments with those beginning of the end rudiments. You know, the half-truth, untruth? Otherwise you're mucked up all the time. So just add the half-truth thing to your middle rudiments and spit out that four-way one.

And they'll try to give you all sorts of very sordid, down-to-earth modern literature-type chains that haven't got a single thing to do with their overts. Now, it is so much so that you can assume that if you were to tear into a case without an arbitrary standard, such as a list of Zero Questions, that the case will present to you the least aberrated chain. The case will inevitably give you the least aberrated chain, which is best known to them. And if released, will produce the least possible change in their case. This you're sure of. Because that chain is safe. And the pc is always for security. Good roads, good weather and security and no bank turned over and we will be all set. See, what he'll give you — he'll give you something that he has already made up his mind is aberrative.

Now, if he's made up his mind about it, he knows about it. And therefore, so help me Pete, it probably has very little to do with his case. And there's where you get sucked in on Prepchecking and sent over the falls. If you sit there and the pc, "All right, now what have you — what. . ." If you approached it — if you approached this: "Well, what do you think is wrong with your case? What overts have you done in life that have affected you or influenced your life most singularly?"

"Oh," the pc would say, "I — I — I think it's all the — all the terrible things I have done on the second dynamic."

Now, you could approach it just like that, see. you know, "What do you think is wrong with your life?"

"What I think is wrong with my life is this series of overts."

Just — you could take your meter right at that moment and say, "Have you ever palmed this off on any other auditor?" "Has anybody ever tried to clear this up in Sec Checking" "Has anybody. .." — "Have you ever persuaded anybody to audit this with repetitive processes?" see, here we go, man. This is Brahms, "a la preclear." It has absolutely nothing to do with the pc's case.

Therefore, I very earnestly recommend to you, lists of arbitrary questions. "Have you ever stolen anything" "Have you ever raped anybody?" "Have you ever shot anybody?" "Have you ever fiddled the company's books?" I don't care what it is. you go right on down the line and you just take what falls. And you could actually prepcheck the rudiments. Use those as Zero Questions. "Are you willing to talk to me about your difficulties?" Blang! "What difficulty aren't you willing to talk to me about?" Set that up as a Prepcheck and you'll get someplace there too. you can also set up any type of activity, such as finding goals or auditing. Well, as far as that's concerned, you know the fellow's driving buses. As long as he doesn't tell you what's wrong with him is because he drives a bus, you're always at perfect liberty to pick up driving buses, see? "Have you ever — have you ever sinned in buses?" see.

The trouble with you is your sales resistance is low. That's the main trouble with you where the pc is concerned. The pc gives you the most interesting story you ever heard in your life as what is wrong with the pc. "I've just told auditor after auditor about this and they've handled it, but they've ARC broke me so much that I really have never been able to really handle this adequately, but if I ever really got this handled adequately, then I know then, that everything would be . . ." oh, let's play it on Nero's violin. It sounds so much better. He knows about it, therefore it isn't what's wrong with him. See, it is the unknownness that makes it wrong.

So of course, if you can open up some chain that the pc has never gone "ulp" on, why man, you're going to tear up track in all directions and the pc's going to say, "ooh!" Pc's got ulcers, he knows what caused his ulcers. It was being rammed in the stomach with a pogo stick at the age of six. you could say to him, "How many people have you told this to, pc?"

"Oh, just most every . . ."

It — you always get taken in on the idea that you're the first one, you know, that he's ever told this to. You've got a virgin complex or something. He's told doctors and his mother and his sisters and his brothers and his last three auditors, all about this pogo stick, see. Well, look at the evidence. Look, he's told about it often enough to have run it out long since. Well, you can't say that, well, it's just held in place by something else. you can't say that. If he got that close to it, that it was the pogo stick, if he just got that close to it, he wouldn't have ulcers. Because it's almost impossible to maintain an aberration.

How people keep their Goals Problem Mass balanced is the — is the glory of all time. you know? There's supposed to be certain rocks in the world that hang up on the tops of mountains at very delicate balances, you see. And man, that's nothing compared to the GPMs.

Well, similarly, an aberration has a hell of a time being maintained. You hit the thing and it'll slip. So, let me tell you, that if it is as advertised, it ain't. So you don't pay any attention to it. That means you — that doesn't mean that you never pay any attention to what the pc is telling you. But as far as — oh, yes, always pay attention to what the pc's telling you — but you get him telling you about things that you want him to talk about, not that he wants to talk about, you see. And you — the balance and the delicacy of auditing is getting the person to talk to you about things that he doesn't know he should have talked to you about, preventing him from rambling on about things that won't increase the stature of any session and he doesn't find out about it. He doesn't realize how thoroughly he's being steered. Now, that's the delicacy of auditing.

Some people can jump in onto the seat of the fire truck and open the sirens wide open, you know, go dashing around the corner and so forth. And the pc almost inevitably knows he's being taken for a ride, you see? Now, the adroit auditor, who's very straightforward and doing his stuff very well, actually does have the pc going down the road and driving. The pc knows he's driving. They're going down the road at a hell of a rate of speed. And the pc thinks it's all his own idea. And the pc starts to go up the wrong road, starts to turn to the left, you see and the auditor has him turn to the right and the pc never notices. He just goes right on with the story, he just goes right on down the line and he's — that's it, that's the way it is.

Naturally, he'll tend to bounce off of things that are aberrative. He doesn't like to confront them. They are not as-ised, so therefore he hasn't confronted them, so the probability is, is he doesn't want to confront them. Well, you don't get any place by forcing him to confront something. You've got to let him discover he is confronting something. There he is standing there and he says, "Well, here's all these damn statues I made. Hey! Hey!" He says, "Hey! Hey! There's three statues here and they're actually of a beautiful model and so a-ha! Look at that! Heh, look, I put some black flat covers over them. Hah! That's pretty clever of me to find them again."

Man, you've been heading him down corridors and beating him over the head with a baseball bat every time he tried to dive out the window and you've finally moved him into this room, you know. And even had to put horse blinkers on him, you know, so he could only stare in one direction. And he found them. That's quite ideal, this session. Pc's very pleased with it all. Very often the pc suddenly looks at you after he's discovered them and realizes, "Hey! How'd you know these were there? These are — this is pretty clever of you," see? Well actually, you always look clever when you use a standard Prepcheck, Model Session, steer the pc into the chain, that sort of thing You always look clever to the pc. Sooner or later he begins to realize that you know where you're going.

Well, you know where you're going because you're traveling on a series of fundamentals. You're only trying to pull up the basic on a chain of incidents which were wrong conducts on the pc's part. And he knows they're wrong conducts and therefore he's got these things buried. And you don't want to make the pc guilty or something like that, but you really hit pay dirt on one of these things. You can't — you can't have it good all the time. But you sometimes . . . My God, there'll be an incident within the last year and the pc, "I stole a car last June! You know, I . . . What the hell? I — I didn't remember it till just this minute. I'd never thought about it! Wow! Gee. Hey." He's found something. There was something lived there that he — been haunting him for some time, because it wasn't the car he stole in June. The top of the chain is closed off. How hot do you suppose that chain is, huh? Boy, that chain's as hot as skyrockets. The top of the chain is gone. Most people know the tops of the chains.

"Aw," they say, "Yes, I have this peculiar, peculiar penchant, I — I borrow money from my friends and don't pay it back," and so on. "I — I know that's what's wrong with me. I know I do that."

You've said, "Have you ever borrowed any money and not paid it back?" Some Zero, you see. "Oh yeah, I — well, I — I do that, yeah, I know I do that."

And you say, "All right, well . . ."

He says, "I just — I just borrowed — borrowed some money just the other day" and so forth, "and I didn't intend to pay it back. Yeah, I know all about that."

See, they know the last one. you ask them again, "All right, have you ever borrowed any money and not paid it back?" and it goes, clang! And you say, "Well, any earlier times this happened?"

"Well, yeah. Yeah, you know, there are — there are quite a few." And he starts reeling them off and so forth. "And the first time I ever did it was when I was twenty-five."

Maybe so, man. That's the earliest time, that's the earliest we can get him back to, so we run that particular crime and incident. And what do you know, it might blow the chain too, but, probably it'll not. And we finally get the thing back. We've opened up track he didn't know a thing about. And that's when you're really getting someplace.

Now, a Prepcheck that is terribly successful usually runs as a short story of this particular character: The guy's been doing something he knows is wrong. He can't account for it. He's got a lot of motivators, people do things to him on this particular subject. This worries him. And you run back down the chain of doingness of these things — it's always what has the pc done, you see, it's not what has been done to the pc. you never buy anything that's been done to the pc. Nothing has ever happened to the pc in Prepchecking we don't care if the car flew around and cut his head off, nothing happened to the pc. you understand that this as unreasonable as that sounds, that's how it has to operate. You let a pc give you a lot of motivators, his needle will dirty up. It's a bum thing to let the pc give you motivators. He's pulling in circuitry.

And, you start charging down the line here. This pc — and he didn't know what it was doing and so forth. And he's opening up track. And then we all of a sudden get to — we get to something that he's always thought of as a motivator. This is quite common. He's always thought of this as the motivator, you see. He's thought about this fellow who threw his tricycle downstairs. And that was a pretty terrible thing, to throw his tricycle downstairs. He remembers this. He remembers this. It's always stood out in his mind, you see, throwing that tricycle downstairs.

And there's something goes just before this which gives a volte-vis and a reverse that would make O. Henry green with envy. It's got a short story twist on it at the beginning of the chain. It'll be something on the order of: it turns out that it wasn't his tricycle being thrown downstairs, it's his young friend's tricycle being thrown downstairs — after he threw the young friend downstairs, you see? And it sort of turns out that it wasn't the young friend who threw the tricycle downstairs — it all got kind of mixed up, actually. But it was he who threw the tricycle downstairs so it landed on top of the young friend! And he thinks this is all fine, but it's still kind of active on the needle. And then we find out that he's convinced his mother and his young friend's mother that his young friend had done it!

And this will all be sort of obscured at the bottom of the chain. And he gets this all straight and all of a sudden the thing goes zzzppp.

You'll find out that it's characteristic of a very thoroughly aberrated chain, that the incidents are all in juxtaposition. The later ones are always earlier and the earlier ones are always later and it's all mixed up and it's one of the symptoms of the thing — the pc starts to straighten out and keeps saying, "Oh, well wait a minute! Wait a minute. Wait a — wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, that was — that was the year before! That was — that was the year before." Well, this is — you know the track's straightening out and you're winning all the way, see. He never realized it was the year before, right up to that moment. He thought it was the year after.

See, he thought he went to the university and then joined the ambulance squad. But as a matter of fact he joined the ambulance squad and then went to the university. How he could lose this much detail from his life is quite a mystery, but they manage it on these chains. So that the time factor is all scrambled on these chains.

So when you say earlier and earlier, you sometimes get an answer from the pc which apparently is — oh very innocently — earlier in the pc's mind, but actually is much later. And it suddenly transpires that this was at the age of eight and he had already been down to the age of five. And all of a sudden he gets it back to eight and he finds the earlier incident of five.

Mixes in time is a good indicator. If you're on something hot, time will be mixed up on it.

As far as the earliest is concerned, let the pc use that because the earliest probably happened two hundred trillion years ago. And the earlier only gets down to what you call basic.

You're normally dealing in these things with locks — Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health — you're dealing with locks. You're not interested in moments of pain and unconsciousness, you're interested in locks. And you're interested in only overts: Things that the pc has done to others; damage the pc himself has created or herself has created. A resurgence of responsibility happens as a result of these things. A lot of interesting things occur.

Of course, you realize that Prepchecking — Prepchecking is a method of straightening out the life of an individual, making him feel less harassed and haggard and a lot of things like that. But Prepchecking is not something that can be gone on with forever. You cannot forever prepcheck a pc. you will never clear a pc with Prepchecking In fact, somewhere up in the hundreds of hours you would start to run into an increase of bank by reason of Prepchecking because you're off the pc's goal.

You see, a hundred hours of this — they'd go a long way, man. That'd go a long way — a hundred hours of Prepchecking And you start taking it over — you're demanding things of it which it won't do, which is to clear somebody and it won't clear anybody. But it'll straighten up somebody's life. It'll make them feel much happier and a lot of things will occur, highly beneficial. You'll get a smoother needle; you'll get practice in auditing and sessions. They suddenly realize that things can happen. They can talk to the auditor better and circuits key out and things. You get a lot smoother, but don't expect it to go the lot. Don't expect it to go the whole road because it won't.

It will do more than any psychotherapy system which has ever been developed on this planet for straightening out sanity. It will do more by a factor of maybe a thousand to one. It is fabulous from this point of view. If you were to walk into the field of psychoanalysis with a Prepcheck system and just to do Prepchecking in the field of psychoanalysis, my God! The people — their eyes — eyeballs would fall out and roll around the floor, you know? Because it would be for the first time that anybody dealing with memory had produced a lessening of insanity or neurosis on the part of the individual. In fact, there hasn't been any psychotherapy dealing with this lifetime and dealing with the various quirks and aberrations of human beings as they are recognized to exist or thought to exist by modern science, before Prepchecking There was none.

So it's a — it's a kind of a first all by itself. Of course, the earliest forerunner of this was a very spotty sporadic, "If you did it, boy, was it wonderful. And if you didn't do it, wasn't it horrible?" You've — it was the Straightwire taught at 42 Aberdeen Road at Elizabeth, New Jersey. And you just remembered somebody who had the similar illness and spotted when it was and sometimes — most of the time it would blow and the guy would lose his unsimilarity with that individual and he'd break up the identification with the person. And it was quite remarkable when it worked. But you had to be awfully clever and it didn't work all the time. Well, this'll work all the time.

Now, what is it — what is it good for? Why is anybody teaching it to you in the first place and that sort of thing No. It's a very good thing to know because you can straighten out an awful lot of things with human beings. Because it won't clear somebody don't underevaluate it, see. It'll sure make things smooth. And if you don't know how to prepcheck, you'll be stopped with a lot of cases. You'll just be stopped in your tracks because the needle will be so dirty. And you can smooth it out just so far with consistency, with Havingness, that sort of thing It goes just so far and then it sort of hangs up. And the individual's got a lot of withholds and a lot of things from you and you can't quite get rid of them. And they give you the same overts every session and you know, recurring — recurring overts. They give them to you session after session after session — same overts.

And you'll wish to God you had something like Prepchecking to straighten out that pc and grab him up the last few rungs of the ladder to where you can run 3GA on him. That is actually the purpose of Prepchecking But, of course, it has much wider horizons and applications than that.

And if you were to be a very clever auditor and did nothing but prepcheck people they would be — and did a very good job of Prepchecking — they'd fall around your neck and think you were solid magic. And if you are a good Prepchecker, of course, you are solid magic. Thank you very much.