Well, now, we still I think — what date do we still have?

Audience: Twenty-sixth.

Oh, you’re still here on the 26th! Hey! Twenty-sixth July AD 12, second lecture. Saint Hill Briefing Course. The subject of this lecture is prrrrrrrrepchecking. Prrrepchecking.

It goes without saying that everything that you are working on — I refuse to leave any errors in it just to appear right.

In other words that’s a peculiarity I have and you’ll just have to put up with it. Most scientists get enamored with an idea and they have so few — they spend the rest of their lives trying to prove it. And were they to change their minds concerning this, they would of course lose in repute. I don’t consider that repute is more important then getting the job done.

I don’t care what you think of my repute, I’m going to go on being honest. When I find something wrong, why, I jolly well reserve the right to say so. And when I have been wrong I have uniformly been the first to tell you. When something can be improved and make the job easier for you I don’t care what it invalidates, I’m going to tell you.

Now, there’s a certain amount of effort spent in the direction of trying to force me over into the other position. Every once in a while I get blamed for not having invented Scientology in the last lifetime. Somebody comes along and says, „Well, why on earth didn’t you tell us about missed withholds back in 1952?“ You see?

All right, if I had known about missed withholds in 1952 I would have told you. It’s as simple as that.

You see, don’t ever assume that I am dealing you data off a stacked deck which has been in existence for Lord knows when. Although this data existed at one time or another on the track — and I don’t mean the whole body of the data — the various data and postulates were made up to remedy and solve things as people went along the track, packaging it up in one piece and so forth, just — well, let me put it this way — hasn’t been customary.

And a thetan got the way he is because of the introductions of arbitraries and when you find out you are dealing with a few more arbitraries than you have to, well, the thing to do is to throw them away. That’s the proper thing to do. You say, „There’s more arbitraries than we need so let’s dispense with them.“ And any time I can get two procedures to do a job that was formerly being done by fifty, well I for sure will give you the two procedures.

And if I can find two jobs that could be done with one procedure, I’ll sure throw one of those procedures away. That’s the only sensible way to look at it. And I’ve just found a way to use middle rudiments and make them double in brass and get the job done much better in Prepchecking which is quite remarkable. And this is very embarrassing because I have just gotten out two policy letters giving you canned Prepchecks! All right, if I had wanted to appear the big man and „I’m always right,“ you know, right, right, exclamation point, right, and so forth, I would of course have to suppress this data because data which is slightly more complicated was just released at the beginning of the week. That would be good for my reputation but it’s sure hard as hell on you as an auditor and a pc, you see. So I don’t subscribe to that policy.

Now, the middle rudiments were carefully sorted out of a tremendous number of buttons which could have been used. Now oddly enough you could add another fifteen or twenty buttons with the greatest of ease and have your middle rudiments maybe twenty-three or twenty-four items long. And what you’d do — this is probably the way the session would go — in any two-hour session, you’d get in your beginning rudiments; you would ask one Prepcheck question and then, to check the thing, you’d spend the remainder of the body of the session and then, if the original Prepcheck question that you asked in the session were found to be alive, you wouldn’t have any time left, of course, to clean it, so you’d have to leave it that way, so that you can get into your end rudiments.

This doesn’t appear to me to be very efficient. So I’ve carefully taken out all the stuff we knew and so forth, and believe me a tremendous amounts of stuff have accumulated as far as data is concerned. You know this research line is only something on the order of about, I think it’s about thirty-two years old right now and the most concentrated part of the area is about fifteen years; and to rack up this much data and cover this much territory in a measly fifteen years, particularly regarded from a whole track viewpoint, is not only incredible, it’s impossible.

There’s been a certain amount of rush on it and so forth, but basically it’s just working on it that has been important and working on it without any pitch. You see there’s no pitch. I am not working for the Intergalactic Survey, you see, or something like that: „Come to Earth to civilize the natives,“ you know or something like that. That arbitrary we can delete.

That doesn’t mean that I am not connected with the Intergalactic government, you see. But they don’t know about it either yet!

I have my name, rank and serial number just like other people. But that’s very funny: hardly anybody can ever clear — „Have you ever worked under an assumed name?“ Clang! „Yeah, what?“ And I have to answer, you see, and I keep giving this thing — I keep giving this thing — I keep giving this thing — and it always gets cleared any time I get that Prepcheck question. Very, very funny. People wonder why it doesn’t clear. Well, it doesn’t clear because it is true! It goes on and on and on and on and on, you see? It’s present time.

Now, we look over this situation and we had all this bushel basket load of buttons in the human mind. You’ve seen them, a lot of principal ones in the Chart of Attitudes, a lot of other areas of data and so forth. There’s various buttons that you can push and frankly although they were announced and given to you very softly and very quietly, the middle rudiments are an assembly and a stripdown of buttons based on this fact: They consist of — when you add the word suggest, which is used in your Prepchecks — they consist of just those things which can keep one of the others from reading and which, if present, can keep a goal or item from reading. That is the whole assembly.

Well, this makes them pretty powerful buttons.

Let’s take a look at them. There’s Suppress. Now if you got all the suppress off the case, nearly everything would blow, don’t you see? If Suppress is alive, of course you don’t get a read on the remainder. So just as a rule and law you’ve got to run Suppress before you add in another series of anything. That’s the law, that’s the rule. You’ve got to put in Suppress. By getting off suppress then you will get a read on the remainder.

Now Suggest could be translated — and sometimes, by the way, has to be — as-isness. That’s evaluation out of your Auditor’s Code. That’s evaluation. That says something is — that’s the isness of things.

Now it is a very powerful button because you say something is and although it wasn’t reading before, it will now read. The auditor says, „That is still alive,“ and oddly enough he can possibly make a pc wonder about it, you see, and the pc jams on it and says, „That couldn’t be still alive,“ to himself, don’t you see, and it would create a little ridge there and it’ll just read on the meter and read on the meter and read on the meter. See? So evaluation can make something read. And that is contained in the most — it’s nearest cousin in the English language that anybody can understand in the form of Suggest.

Now the next point would be Invalidate. And invalidation, if present, if a goal is invalidated, it will now read as the goal. It’ll make an item read which wouldn’t otherwise read. When you take the invalidation off, the item no longer reads which is very peculiar.

Now you’ve got suppress, of course, on top of an invalidate, keeps the invalidation from showing up.

Now „Failed to reveal“ is off the line because it gives you the dirty needle. That is — that is that little minute rock slam that is always a „Failed to reveal“ so that gives you a particular and peculiar needle read.

The item „Careful of“ is to a marked degree another Suppress. But it has this characteristic: After the person has been having something done for a little while that is a little bit offbeat, they can hang up in the thing if they have become too careful of something or other. And they could also make something read in quite the reverse by not suppressing. „Careful of,“ that gives you an opposite flow.

So you get your — you get your middle rudiments, in short, as being something which are capable of making a goal or item read if present.

Now that Suggest, moving that Suggest in there, which you will find in your Prepcheck, is actually not as current or as constant as you might think. It — you wouldn’t use it in every middle rudiment that came by because you can pick it up at all one fell swoop. Mostly based on this fact: that auditors seldom suggest anything, but they might seem to some place or another, so you pick it up on a Prepcheck basis rather than a middle rud basis, every time you go by.

You actually then have in essence five middle rudiment buttons that could be used.

Now, the way you would arrange these buttons, if you wanted the optimum service out of these buttons on — for a Prepcheck purpose, which I am about to give you because I am going to show you how to use just the middle rudiments to perform a whole Prepcheck, which is a very interesting little advance here.

You would say, „Suppress,“ and then you would say, „Suggest,“ you see, and then you would say, „Careful of,“ and then „Invalidate“ and „Failed to reveal.“

Do you follow how those things are played together?

Of course, the one which is most important and can blow the session up in bits and pieces we put at the end to occur when everything else has been beautifully swamped up. And we actually put Suppress in twice by putting its opposite in, you see, careful of.

So you’d have — you’d have these arranged in that particular fashion as being very powerful. You’d have Suppress, Suggest, you would then have Careful of and Invalidate and then Failed to reveal. All right, in that order you would have two cracks at suppression.

Now that would be very interesting if these buttons could be used for the bulk of Prepchecking. Wouldn’t it?

Well, if they are that strong a series of buttons, why, they must have some value. Last night I sat down and looked at a pc — it was very late and I’d had a lot of auditing that hadn’t recommended itself to me one way or the other. I was already violating the Auditor’s Code, one of the only times I get a chance to audit, way after ten, man. You have to be good to audit after ten. Had the pc sort of gummed up and said, „What am I going to do here?“ And said, „Well, the best thing I can do with something like this is form some Zeros here before I get on about my business, form up some Zeros. I was thinking — Zeros? Why the hell should I form any Zeros? I know the pc has not been feeling very well for an exact period of time. Let’s just throw the middle ruds in as Zero questions.

Man! Man, I’ve seen assists in my time but that was about the wildest I’ve seen in some while. That was just about the best Zeros I ever saw. So after the session I said, „What the ruddy bleeding hell happened here? Almost blew the roof off,“ you know. And I said, „Well, of course, you idiot!“ — I seldom call myself an idiot, except — but sometimes do. You’ve carefully got together the most powerful buttons that you can possibly give, because they’re the only things that can make a goal read or not read or an item read or not read, and you summed these things together in the middle rudiments, then you don’t move them over into Prepchecking, well what can you expect will happen if you move them over into Prepchecking? Well, of course they are the main buttons that are sitting there. Crash! All hell’s going to break loose if you prepcheck these things against a period of time. Quite interesting.

So I sat down and wrote this down for you. This would just be a sample action. This would be a sample action. This would be a Prepcheck, guaranteed to do something very interesting with a pc. This is more complicated than it need to be. I’m just giving you an idea of what you could do with this, see. This is fun. Just for you. „When did you decide to come to Saint Hill?“ You ask this guy, see. You ask this student, „When did you decide to…“ Well, he finally picks it out of the ether and you get the thing confirmed on the meter and so forth and you get the date! You write the date down in your auditor’s report. Then you ask him, „Just before — whatever the date was, see — what happened?“

In other words you discover an area of overts which is the prior confusion to the date. Got the idea? An area of overts.

And then date the beginning of that prior Confusion. We’re moving it back a little earlier. Date the beginning of the prior Confusion. And now, just for the hell of it, in case he’s skidded and missed, why let’s select an arbitrary date a month earlier and let that be our date by which we head these questions. You know, your Prepcheck question has got to have a time limiter. This all starts to get very, very amusing and very interesting indeed, because you’ve moved back to a specific date now. You’ve got the beginning of the prior confusion before he made this decision, now we’re going to move back a month earlier just in case he slipped and didn’t forget the original overt, you know — didn’t remember the original overt, so we’re going to take that as the arbitrary date and then we’re going to do this with it: All we’re going to do is frame an expanded mid rud series of questions. We’re going to flatten each one repetitively and then we are going to go over this two or three times. Going to frame the questions like this: Let us say — it wouldn’t be, but let us say it was June 1st, 1955. Wouldn’t be, but let’s just say that was the date. Your Prepcheck question would be, „Since June 1st, 1955 is there anything you have suppressed?“

Well now, if you don’t think that isn’t going to keep your pc running for a while you’re mistaken. And we’re just going to run this repetitive, see, just totally repetitive. „Since June 1st, 1955 is there anything you have suppressed? Thank you.“ „Since June 1st, 1955 is there anything you have suppressed? Thank you.“ „Since June 1st, 1955…“ — you don’t have to answer these just so I am not missing any withholds on you. „Since June 1st 1955, is there anything you have suppressed?“ See? And finally the pc says, „Huh! No, that’s — that’s all. That’s it, that’s the lot!“ And you say, „Thank you. I’ll check that on the meter.“

Understand this is done terribly formally. Very formal auditing. You are not interjecting comments or running Two-way Comm. Nothing. Because it’s very easy. It’s almost automatic.

You get it over here and say, „All right. Going to check that on the meter. Since June 1st, 1955 is there anything you have suppressed? That reads. That. That. That. That.“

„Oh, yes, well that’s my mother…“ so forth, and so forth. You just lay the meter aside, „Since June 1st, 1955 is there anything you have suppressed? Since June 1st, 1955 is there anything you have suppressed?“ And you go on and on and on. Oh, honest, you’re going — you’re gonna — you’re gonna get yourself some — a bucket of answers, man!

In the first place the pc is perfectly willing to tell you things they have suppressed. In fact they practically springboard off as he remembers them. See? This is auditing with bedsprings under it. Boong, bing, boong! That’s dandy. Oddly enough a lot of somatics come off at this time. Now, what I thought would happen when I was doing this, is that everything might restimulate. But it didn’t. The somatics came off with the suppressions. A lot of them.

All right. Well, let’s say the pc has come to a point of saying, „No,“ and let’s say that we have asked the pc, „I will check this on the meter. Since June 1st, 1955 is there anything you have suppressed?“ And let’s say that we have read the meter correctly and that it was clean. Now, clean is awfully relative in this case. Man, this is relative. But it didn’t show on the meter and the pc isn’t thinking of any answers, and as far as he is concerned, as far as you’re concerned, that’s clean. All right, fine, fine, fine, fine. That sounds good.

All right. Without doing anything else extraordinary or doing anything we simply swing into the second question, „Since June 1st, 1955 is there anything you have suggested?“

Now the funny part of it is that you will quiver on this, if you will redecide perhaps, to run this as decided, or something like that, but that is not the meaning of it, the meaning of the thing is evaluated, don’t you see? But suggested is very mild, isn’t it?

„Yes, I’ve suggested to my father that he go to hell and I’ve suggested to Mamie that she buy a new hat, and I’ve suggested that we separate.“ You get the idea? „I’ve suggested that it’s better that they blow the world up,“ you know, these first little things. It’s very mild. It’s not any overts to amount to anything at all.

Well, we follow the same repetitive on and on and on and on and on and on and on this, and we don’t care if it runs shortly or longly, we are going to run it to a point where both the pc and the meter agree utterly that that’s it. That’s clean. That’s good. All right. That’s fine. We drop that. Everything’s running along fine. It’ll probably be the second or the third Prepcheck session when it is done, but — this is actually a twenty-five-hour intensive probabilities, quite possibly, because my question last night was, „In the past two weeks…“ And it ran and ran and ran.

All right. So we go on and on, and now we get into this sort of a situation. We want to know now, of course, some more suppressions. So we say, since June 1st, 1955 is there anything you have been careful of? Isn’t that mild and innocent, man? That’s mild and innocent. Of course all this time why, given that you are reading the meter and getting your rudiments in every session, and that sort of thing, and not goofing anywhere along the line, your pc’s ARC is building up, building up, building up, building up with the auditor. He’ll be able to blow things better and all that sort of thing.

So we flatten that one. Since June 1st, 1955 is there anything that you’ve been careful of? And of course we get the remaining suppressions off of this thing. And then we let the pc have it right in the eyes, see?

Got that all beautifully flat and so we say — got it on the meter and everything — everything’s clean, „Since June 1st, 1955 is there anything you have invalidated?“

Well, that’s a nice quiet sort of word, isn’t it? Invalidated. Anybody’d answer that. Pow! You know, now you are going to get some somatics he didn’t dream of, you know, here and there, and this and that, various things, cognitions, that sort of thing going to come up. We run that thing on down, pc says it’s flat and the meter says it’s flat, and because we know by this time how to read our meter we know it’s flat. And we got that one all set, and all squared away and pc is feeling fine.

And now we say, „Since June 1st, 1955 is there anything you have failed to reveal?“

Well, what’s very interesting about this is you of course during the sessions as you went along will probably have had to use your random rudiment now and then, or something like that, you might have had this to boost along, but this will come as a totally natural action to your pc by this time. Failed to reveal, that’s very innocent, that’s very calm, that’s very nice and he’ll just walk on through and unload withholds left and right. Hardly noticing that he does so because it seems so easy and natural and everything will go fine.

Now, the possibility is, certainly if that becomes flat at that time we could actually skip the whole thing and not do anything further about it — don’t overlook that possibility — providing we don’t do this idiocy, of check the mid ruds on the period. Do a fast check of the mid ruds on the period. Let’s just cut our throats right there. See?

„Since June 1st, 1955 is there anything you have suppressed, suggested, been careful of, failed to reveal?“ You know? Ugh. Let’s just miss all the rest of the withholds. See. If you just left it at that, went through each one of these things once, you’d have practically a different pc sitting in front of you, providing it was done in Model Session and you were reading the meter and you had your rudiments in, see.

This would be quite interesting, this would be highly informative. You say well, you couldn’t possibly have gotten the bottom of every chain. Well, here’s what I found out, and the only reason I’m releasing the data, is because you are taking them up in this particular sequence and because these are very odd little buttons to be taking up and they appear to be very innocent, and that sort of thing, they clear away an awful lot of track without worrying about fundamentals and basics. And that, by omitting the withhold system, we left ourselves wide open. Don’t you see? Some guy just wouldn’t clear up on this subject, because we never had any method by which to get the earliest on the chain, don’t you see?

But this doesn’t matter, whether you get the earliest on the chain or not. Because these buttons are hot enough, apparently, to wash out whatever is going on without you finding a big missed withhold sitting in your lap and that sort of thing. But you could — this is for the purposes of the establishment of a system here — you could now start in all over again. If you were running an intensive and you had lots of time or if the pc had given it a very shallow pass, you start in all over again and you could get it from the beginning to the end.

In other words, you do the whole cycle of those middle rudiments. Probably take you another session or two or three to get that all the way through again, but you’d pick up some deeper fundamentals along the line.

However, I wish to caution you to this effect: that is cleaning a clean. You’ve already said that that’s all that he has suppressed and that sort of thing. You’d only get into trouble with this if you weren’t able to read a meter or you left one of them muddied up.

Now, a couple of times on TV demonstrations here I’ve seen a Prepcheck question left unflat as though it were not very important or something of the sort. Well let me tell you, man, that — exclamation point — important. Don’t ever leave a Prepcheck question unflat whatever else you do! The Catholic church has sins of blasphemy and other types of sins for which they burn people and armies shoot men for cowardice in battle. I think they shoot them now for being brave in battle — but anyhow, armies shoot people for desertion — when they are headed by Eisenhower.

Every group has its sins, see, but we don’t have many sins, we don’t pay attention to many sins, but there is a sin, really, is leaving a Prepcheck question unflat, because it amounts to a sinful situation. You’ve got somebody all upset and without knowing what is wrong he gets blowy and he is liable to leave Scientology and deny himself auditing. See? It’s important. It’s important.

All sorts of wild things can happen by just leaving one Sec Check question unflat. The darnedest thing you ever heard of. I’ve never seen so much commotion!

God, I’ve had telex machines going wildly in all directions and everything else, just on that one basis. So, we’ll put that down as a sin.

And you’re teaching an Academy student sometime — his is not to reason why he can’t seem to pass the missed withhold bulletin or something like that, just tell him it is a sin.

Now, that’s quite interesting as a clean-up little intensive for a Prepcheck area. Quite interesting. If that were run on you you would be quite amazed at some of the results and things that would come off.

Now, I have just given you a method of discovering a date, by taking a decision which somebody has obviously made. I’ll give you an obvious decision — the fellow has gotten married a couple of years ago. We don’t do a Problems Intensive to find the key problem on the track before we audit him, if we haven’t done that we are not going to spend any time doing that, something like that. You can arbitrarily pick up some obvious decision the person has made. What’s the most obvious decision with this guy? Well, he must have decided to get married. Of course the girl is probably of two opinions about that, but he must have decided this. Therefore just pick on it. And decide that if he made a decision of this character, why, there must have been a prior Confusion ahead of it. And you will always be right. Oddly enough you will always be right.

Now, if you just back up the time a month arbitrarily before the prior Confusion that you’ve spotted, of course you’ve included any little additional activities that might have occurred that he has kind of forgotten about. So you sort of have a basic to the prior Confusion. Just a method of doing it.

Now, you can also run this, wildly enough, on a — this basis — I’ll tell you the basis you can’t run it on in a minute, but you run on this basis, „In this lifetime — .“ Now let’s really shoot the moon — let’s settle in for a fifty-hour intensive, just like that. See? „In this lifetime, is there anything you have suppressed?“ Yeah, we’re settling in for the long haul here! See? Gosh you’ll get to the end of the first question you see, about three or four sessions later. See?

Well that’s fine. That’s fine. And you just follow exactly the same action, except you don’t have to establish any arbitrary prior Confusion, don’t you see.

There is one but don’t try to establish it.

And you just carry on exactly in that fashion. You first clear up, of course — always the same sequence: Suppress and then Suggest and then Careful of and then Invalidate and then Failed to reveal. The magic five. And you’re going to get all kinds of wild things coming up. Oddly enough, if you attacked it in that particular way, you would get withholds off pcs more or less easily and voluntarily. You wouldn’t have to be slugging for it very hard, don’t you see?

Now, there’s only one caution on this, I talked to you a little earlier this evening. Follow the rules. Follow them right straight down the middle of the path, so forth, but don’t be an idiot.

Failed to reveal communicates nothing to this pc, let us say. Just kind of fish around on a question before we go overboard on the thing. See? Failed to reveal means nothing to them, it doesn’t mean an overt, it doesn’t mean anything else. Failed to reveal, well, reveal, he’s never undressed in public, and this is what reveal means to him, see. So his answer is „Nothing. I’ve never failed to reveal anything,“ see? Nothing. He’s got it all backwards and somehow or another can’t realize that when he answers that way means he’s always undressed in public. He just doesn’t seem to untangle this thing.

So you’d have to, at this point, why, any of those points you’d have to be smart enough to stay on the exact meaning, but within the intelligence of the pc.

Give you an example, you’re auditing a little kid, you know. You’ve got to translate the word around, and sometimes you can make a wild mistake. It doesn’t mean the same thing at all. But you’ve got to use the words in the meaning that will communicate to the pc.

So you might run that one, „Since early in this lifetime is there anything you’ve done that people didn’t find out about at the time?“ See? It’s what you are trying to get. See, he says, „Well, I was audited last year at the HASI, see, I was audited last year and I gave them all of my overts. So therefore there is nothing I have failed to reveal.“ If you don’t think you don’t sometimes get this answer, you ought to read some auditor’s reports sometimes. That’s pretty wild. And sure enough, the auditor pulled a lot of them, so it’s now unanswerable you see, as a question. „But people didn’t find out at the time.“ Oh, at the time, they didn’t find out about it. „Well, they didn’t find out about it at the time. Yes, they didn’t, you know. It’s true. Oh, there were quite a few of those! Oh, that’s what you mean!“ Big cognition.

Well, you can run that thing but the only error you are going to get into in handling this little system I’m giving you here of using the middle rudiments doubling them in brass, the only error you’ll make is failing to get a communication established here. „Invalidated.“ Boy, he does not understand that, man.

Of course an invalidation, you should know, is not-is and is the not-is axiom. And so you realize that translates into maybe, „tried to make nothing of“. So it’s „In this lifetime is there anything you’ve tried to make nothing of?“ See. It’s almost a direct translation. In fact, it’s possibly a little directer than „Invalidate.“ That communicates.

So it goes by this rule, that if you find the pc is unable to answer or give you many, don’t blame it on the pc’s unwillingness to give up withholds or something, or the caginess of the pc; blame it on the communication. The communication is not occurring. See? You’ve got to make the communication so it does bite. It’ll be the offbeat of that communication which stomps this thing. Naturally you go to all trouble of finding out what each one of these words means and translates well to the pc. You’ve got a new-worded set of middle rudiments, haven’t you, to use on the pc. They might sound very strange but they are communicating to the pc. Don’t you see? See, that’s what it is. So anyway, if you were to do that and do just that, the bank unstacks in its natural sequence, which is always desirable in Sec Checking and Prepchecking. And you have just about the easiest job in the world which is doing a Repetitive Prepcheck. It becomes just as easy as can be.

Now, I’m not recommending that your Prepcheck assignment be immediately transferred over to this. See? That what you are doing in Prepchecking immediately be transferred over into this activity and so on. You’ve got the last two pages of the Joburg 6A. These are specialist actions which of course have to be checkable and so forth. It’s mainly done as class work and to sweeten up the tempers of your fellow students, that’s why it is, and don’t let them accumulate a lot of auditing overts and that sort of thing.

But if you get assigned to a long stretch of Prepchecking and so on and you’ve completed your assignment, there is some more auditing that you can do in this particular line, or if you are assigned to Prepchecking and you have already completed your requirements on the thing, that’s what I would do. I wouldn’t go into any arbitrary form. Arbitrary forms have their value. They particularly have value in instruction because you can check and find out what the person did. I’d use more this type of approach.

Now I’ll show you another way this could be used and combined and made up.

Let’s take the old style Problems Intensive the way it was finally canned up and released with its 0 and P sections and sort out, by assessment, the chief problem, by assessment, that’s a self-determined decision the person has made. Of course, that’s immediately preceded by a problem and that’s immediately preceded by a prior Confusion. And by assessment of the decisions, self-determined decisions the person has made, by assessment, discover the most charged decision in this lifetime.

Now this would appear absolutely magical to a raw-meat pc and would stand a psycho-anal-yst on his ear.

What you do is just take an assessment of these self-determined decisions, date the problem, date the prior Confusion, and remember now, there’s one thing everybody has missed consistently and continually in the Problems Intensive, that just drives them completely astray and makes Problems Intensive unworkable. We mean the prior Confusion to that decision. And we are talking about a period of time as little as five minutes and as great as a week or two. And we are not talking about three years before.

Auditor after auditor, I have watched them, I have read their reports and I absolutely groan. They come in from Central Orgs and that sort of thing, and I groan on this thing. They take periods of three to five years before the self-determined decision. No, that is not a prior Confusion, that’s not the prior Confusion that is meant.

The prior Confusion that is meant takes place from five minutes to a couple of weeks. It’s right there! And if you ask the pc, you’ve got this terrifically charged self-determined decision and you ask the pc for the prior Confusion. You see, it happened when he was twenty-seven and it was a decision — it was a decision to go to work for the Bide-a-Wee Soap Company. This thing is absolutely dynamite! I mean you’d get it on the meter and you’ve been going down this list, and it goes pow! See? To go to work for the Bide-a-Wee Soap Company.

We ask the prior Confusion and the pc says, „Well, it was my mother washing my ears when I was a little boy.“ And the auditor says, „Well, all right. What were — who were the people who were present during that period?“

„Well, there was myself and my mother.“ And the auditor then runs overts against self, you see, to solve the whole thing. No, that is not the way you do it. I thought I had written it down plainly but apparently I missed there. Because a prior Confusion means the just prior Confusion. It could be within five minutes of the decision. But the pc will slide off of this and go anyplace else rather than face the thing. You’ve got to scramble him right in there.

You’d be surprised what’s left on a Problems Intensive! What gets left, you know? What never gets touched! The whole prior Confusion never gets touched, you know. There’s a murder and a bank robbery, see, that just happened the last Saturday before the fact. All there. That’s all clean. You say, „Well is there any prior Confusion to that?“ Oh, it falls off the pin. „Well, what was the prior Confusion to that?“

„Well, when my mother was washing my ears when I was a little boy. An auditor and I took that all up.“

No! No, no, no, no! See? It’s just prior! So if you think of a just prior Confusion, all will be beautifully resolved.

Your actions on putting one of these things together are elementary actions. You want the self-determined decision, you don’t want an other-determined decision. Like sometimes marriage and so forth is not a self-determined decision. You want something he decided. Decisions he made. And you ask most pcs this and they sometimes start off very sloppily and give you other-determined answers. See?

You want self-determined changes in your life, is what you need, that you decided, you see, and if you say, „Self-determined changes in your life that you yourself decided to change on,“ you can kind of get it across, you know, across.

And the pc says to you, „Well, I was ill and they changed me to the hospital.“ And you just leave your pencil in the air and you say to the pc, „All right, that’s fine. Now, thank you very much. Now, I’ll repeat the auditing question, now. I want you to answer this question. This is the question.“ You know. Until you finally get, all of a sudden, „Oh, you mean things I decided? Oh well, that’s different.“

Changes in his life. Changes in his life, and so on, because sometimes it has to take a little while to dawn on the pc that he himself has effected any change in his life. When you first address him on this subject, he thinks of himself as a pawn, who was moved from one end of the board to the other. He never thinks that he himself pushed himself around. So you sometimes have to dig a little bit before you get these things.

And you get those written down, and you make a nice list, each one, and that self-determined change, see, it’s got to be very short. Very, very short. You shorthand it.

„Well, my wife and I, why, we owned a motel and we had been around the desert for quite a while and we-we-we-we’ve had — we had this service station first in Waco, see, and then — then we owned this motel. We owned this motel. And I went up to Montana for a little while and saw a friend of mine up there. He’s a goat hunter and I saw him for a long time and actually I brought him back down and he made a couple of insulting remarks about this motel, and that sort of thing, but that was after I went to Los Angeles. And I finally found a buyer for the motel and we — we decided to go to San Francisco.“

And honest to God you will find this sometimes on the auditing report. The whole story. Honest, you’ll find the whole thing. I’ve seen some of them and — I haven’t written that hard enough, see. It’s very — you know…

„Decided to go to San Francisco,“ you see. June 1928. Decided to go to San Francisco, June 1928. That’s all you want.

You’re going to have to read those things back and you’ve got no time. „And that was the place where we — Wayco, you know. And we had the petrol station in Wayco and then I went up to Montana and there’s a fellow up there shooting goats…“ You know, you haven’t got time to read all that!

Totally practical consideration — I’m not making fun of you. Actually, I thought I had originally stressed this madly. And you should see some of the old records that we have around here on that; they are quite ludicrous. We’ve corrected it and after that they get so they can really do it. But some of the first efforts have to be carefully explained to them that it had to be in two or three words with a date following it, you see, and you still get this short story, and they keep running out of forms, you know.

Let me tell you the liability of putting down an other-determined change. All you do is assess the list of engrams.

They must be self-determined changes. You must not have on that list any other-determined change or you are liable to find yourself assessing an engram.

„Well, the doctor decided I had to go to the mountains for my health,“ and the auditor writes down „Gone to the mountains for health, October 1956.“ He comes along and he’s assessing wildly here and God! „This October — mountains for health, October 1956.“ Boy, he just falls off the pin you know. You can — you can hear the air being split as the needle falls. Boy, that’s it, you know, that’s it. Now let’s look for the prior Confusion to this area. We’ve got that straight. It has to be within the last week or so before that.

All right, that’s fine. „All right. What’s the personnel in this confusion?“

„Well, there was the lorry driver, and the three children that were riding in back…“ Back of what? You know? We got a car smash, you see, and he spent the next several days in the hospital between life and death and we are running the beginning of a beautiful engram and this system, I assure you, does not handle engrams. So watch it!

There can be moments of pain and that sort of upset in there and this system will get you out of them more easily than other systems, and you mustn’t avoid an area just because there was an accident in it or something like that. As long as you are assessing self-determined decisions to change you don’t run into this difficulty and you get a proper assessment. You go on the line. But the pc has to sort this out for a while. Sometimes he really goes around in circles.

Yeah, he’ll tell you about the doctor ordering him to the mountains, and you just hold your pencil up, give him TR 4 on it.

Say, „Oh, doctor ordered you to the mountains? Thank you. Good. Yeah. Fine. Good. All right. Now let’s have a self-determined change that I just asked for. Let’s have this self-determined change. Self-determined change that you made yourself!“

„Oh, Oh. Oh! Oh! My mother took me out of prep school.“

You say, „Good. Thank you, thank you, that’s fine.“ Like that and so forth. „Now, I’ll repeat the question here. I’ll repeat the question, what I want is a self-determined change that you did yourself, on your own initiative.“

„Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! I’ve got that, I’ve got that. Well, my father and mother moved to another town when I was young.“

Don’t commit suicide. Just keep at it until you’ve got this thing grooved in. Lay down the pencil and say, „Now look, what I want from you is times when you, yourself, you, you, you yourself, decided on a change in life. Now, for instance churches, or you decided to, you know, shift something in your religion or something like that. That’s what I want! That’s what I want. You got that?“ He’s got that now. You pick up your pencil again and you sit there and look at him alertly. All right. And you’ll probably get them!

And then you get a list of that and then you make sure that every one is a self-determined change. Don’t keep challenging the pc each time he gives you one. He says, „I decided…“ That’s good enough.

You go down that list, you assess that thing out, you take the one with the greatest fall. Or assess it by elimination. Oddly enough they will assess by elimination. Just like the Prehav Scale. But you want to watch it because they will assess all the way out if you don’t grab the last one just as it disappears! Don’t sit there like an idiot saying, „Which one was the one that went out last?“

You’ve got two, you see, and you are going between these two and you go from one to the other and keep making marks and you go back and read that one and you say, „Well, it must have been the other one, but that’s gone too, so which one did you have?“

And do your assessment, take that thing, now move back, find out if there was anything happened just before that and then move it back about a month to be safe and take that as your arbitrary date. It’s an arbitrary date that is made to include a distance as close to that as a month. And that’ll include anything that happened in that period. And everything will be dandy. But if you permit that date to go back several years for the prior confusion you will miss it wildly, and you’ll get the pc all wound up in a circle.

You want that area that just happened, because let me tell you, his decision was just preceded by the recognition that he had an awful problem to which the decision is a solution. The decision is always a solution to a problem. And just before he had this awful problem, well, he was in there committing overts and people were missing withholds with both fists! He had both feet into life up to the neck, if that’s the hottest one that comes up.

But you mustn’t go back any great time period from that. Don’t go back years. Take that as your date and give it the works here just as I have been giving you here. Do those middle rud-Prepcheck type of thing. Let’s say it turned up to September the 2nd, 1951. So you’d say, „Since September 2nd, 51 is there anything you have suppressed?“ On and on and on and on and on!

Now, you get sometimes thrown by this type of action. I might tell you at this time, that I’m interested in this and interested in Prepchecking in an effort to upgrade the therapeutic value of Prepchecking. I’m quite interested in doing that. To make Prepchecking more meaningful, to make it do more for a case and what I’m giving you, I should have probably given you a better preliminary on the thing, but what I’m giving you actually makes Prepchecking pretty beefy. If it is well done the things that you can do with this will, I think, astonish even you. When you have already had results on this, I think, you will be quite astonished.

You get somebody, you only got a twenty-five-hour intensive on this person and that sort of thing, you’d be unhappy to prepcheck this person perhaps and try something desperate if it was all the money the poor bloke had and you didn’t think you’d get very far with your Prepchecking and so forth. No, if you had a little experience with this particular type of mid ruds type Prepchecking, why you’d feel comfortable about sitting there and giving it to him, because man, some things are going to fly off he never heard the likes of. And also, because you’ve achieved sufficiently high result, the possibility of your getting a dirty needle after this is quite slight. Your auditor altitude, you see, has taken a rocket ride to Venus. See? You’re amongst the stars as far as this guy’s concerned.

Well, it’s all real to him, that’s the main thing that happens. It’s all quite real. Because of course, he isn’t going to tell you anything that he doesn’t think he has. And you don’t fish for any data, you don’t push him around, you don’t try to get any overts off particularly. You wind up — make sure when you finish all this that you get your middle rudiment in, that you haven’t missed any withholds on him because that could be catastrophic, but that’s a middle rudiment type action. Fast check, see?

And you guys are going to wind up at the end of this line, or the lady involved, and I think you will find you’ll be quite happy with what you have done and actually you’ve done something rather relaxed about the whole thing.

Now, in handling — in handling Prepchecking in general, you would perhaps feel shy of doing it if you weren’t going to get a result which was a desirable result to the pc. Well, I think you’d find this — let us take an example here: Mrs. Jones has just been delivered of a nineteen-pound bouncing boy and has a slight postpartum psychosis and you think the best thing to do is to run out the birth engram. No, I can tell you that the best thing to do would be this middle ruds Prepcheck, predated on some prior Confusion Prior to that, not taking the birth as a date, but letting your date fall so that the birth is included in the period.

You are not targeting at it. You are auditing her a month and a half after the date of the delivery. Well, you fish back and find out a little bit more and talk to her about her life in that period and just take it at two months. That includes that period. And I think you’d be astonished to find the somatics fly off, without winding the pc stuck in the incident! You see? It has value, man!

This amounts to a PT problem, don’t you see? It’s just happened! You don’t get it out of the way, why, you’re going to have a mess on your hands. That gives the auditor another weapon too. And how successful it is is totally dependent upon the quality of your meter reading, and the degree the pc is in-session and the excellence with which you clean off those questions one after the other as you — I mean clean them off when you test them. I think you’d wind up at the other end of the line with a very happy pc.

Because a pc, asked permissively in this fashion, won’t pull themselves deeper into the pit than they think they can go at any given moment, and you’ve got that interesting rule that is given, I think in Book Three of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, that the mind has a self-protective mechanism. You don’t tend to overthrow that.

Now, this was necessary at this time since we have so many techniques that will overthrow the balance of the mind. We could run into somebody today like a — that’s one of the reasons you want to — „Well, my God! When auditing in the old days I never had this many ARC breaks from the pc just putting in rudiments and that sort of thing. Ah, must be my auditing is deteriorated.“ No. You’ve got a stepped-up Model Session, don’t you see? The potential of ARC is fantastic! If you don’t learn how to drive this car right — it’s like a Ferrari or a Cooper Special! Man, that thing is going to go off the curves! See? You are driving a racing car. You might as well make up your mind to it. See? This thing has got power and it has got speed. If you want to go back and drive a Mercedes-Benz 1898 model, why you won’t get anywhere near the amount of ARC breaks and upsets from a pc. You won’t get the results either! You get the difference of what you’re learning right now?

Well, similarly this is gunned-up Prepchecking. But there was a — necessary at this time to have a relatively permissive system, which didn’t overthrow the balance of the mind.

All right, let’s take an extreme example of this. This girl, never under God’s green earth ever dared go near the time she was thrown into the institution and electric shocked within an inch of her life. She begs you not to go anywhere near this! Well, that’s one thing she won’t talk about. If you guarantee not to talk about this in any way, shape or form, she’ll be perfectly happy to be audited. Select a period two months ahead of it, run it!

I think, if you audit well, you’ll be on the safe side. But if you don’t audit it well and find yourself with the feeling that you have just shot off the edge of the Grand Canyon within a racing car and it is turning over and over and over in empty space, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

The thing to do is, of course, go back to giving a Touch Assist. Can’t miss a meter read with a Touch Assist, it has that advantage.

You know, there’s some guy in practice someplace in the Middle West of the United States right now who does nothing but Touch Assists, has never been trained as an auditor and has a roaringly successful practice! So we mustn’t, we mustn’t sneer at these little things. But I just give you the word of warning. See? You put a 500-horsepower supercharged engine in an aluminum tubular-framed hull and it takes some neat driving! That’s all. The driving is neat. And if you notice on such a car, there are a number of curves in the road. I’ll just point out one little thing to you, that there are a number of curves in the road, and therefore you cannot go on the average of not missing many! You are allowed just one curve. And then they bury you. That’s pretty near the way it is.

Okay. You think that might do you some good?

Audience: Yes!

All right. Thank you.

Audience: Thank you.

Good night.