Thank you.

▼ Well now that Mary Sue has headed you into the right place …

The subject of the lecture today is Security Checking. And this is the 26th of October A.D. 11. It better be called A.D. 11, because something new and strange is happening. There are some cases breaking up in a fine way.

Of course, you probably don't think so. Do you think anything is happening to cases?

Audience: Yes.

Oh, you think something is happening to cases. Isn't that nice? Isn't that nice?

Is anything happening to your case? No. Nothing is happening to your case. Is that right? Tell me the truth. Do you think anything is happening to your case?

Audience: Yes!

All right. Do you think anything is happening to your pc's case?

Audience: Yes!

Well, is your goal to make something happen to cases?

Audience: Yes!

You sure? All right.

Okay. I want to talk to you - why things don't happen to cases.

There are certain definite fundamentals of processing which must be observed before a result is obtained in auditing. There are certain safe things you can audit: You can audit concepts, ideas; you can Security Check and get overts, by getting the times an individual's attention was pinned on another terminal on the track; you can find the goal and terminal of the pc and run it; you can run engrams on the goals-terminal line after a long run has established that they are on a goals-terminal line. And that is about all you can do. That's just about all you can do, successfully, to a case.

If you try to do anything else - such as run a generalized terminal (to run Mother out of the case while his terminal is "a tinker"), if you try to make him create things which are off his goals-terminal line, if you try to do many other things having to do directly with terminals and running terminals which are not his goals terminal, or if you ask questions too searchingly so that they are repetitive and are newly attracting his attention to a terminal which his attention was not on before - you're going to get a slowdown. His bank is going to become more solid and he's going to be upset.

I'll give you an idea. Your idea of what's wrong with the pc is he's having trouble with his father; well, your idea stems from the fact that the pc has told you repeatedly that he's always having trouble with his father. So you say, "If I could just get Father out of the road, then we're all set here. And we will therefore run Father." "Now, what have you done to Father? What have you withheld from Father? What have you done to Father? What have you withheld from Father? What have you done to Father? What have you withheld from Father?"

You see, it sounds almost right. Sounds just like you're going to get away with it, and everything is fine, and then the pc doesn't recover, and things look a lot different to the pc - all bad. You see that?

Because you're saying "Father, Father, Father. Your attention on Father? Put your attention on Father. Put your attention newly on Father. Put your attention - brand-new attention - let's search for more things which you have done to Father." Guy has already given you everything he's done to Father, you see? "So put your attention on Father. Put your attention on Father. Put your attention on Father." And of course, that means "take your attention off your goals terminal. Take your attention off your goals terminal." That's the one thing he must not do.

At no time must he take his attention off his goals terminal. He knows this. This is the one thing he knows better than he knows that there's air and sunshine. He never found that out yet, that there's air and sunshine. But he does know that there is this terminal "a tinker."

Of course, he knows it so well that he doesn't know it at all. It's buried completely down in the further deep reaches of the coal mines. Yet it is nevertheless there and it is reactive. So we can say bluntly, what some of these oddities that we have run into occasionally - we've piloted our way through them; don't think that we've just [been] making mistakes left and right and front and center. We've had things that prevented any casualty from occurring along in this line.

But let's take a look at what you could do that would be wrong. Let's take a list of wrongnesses that an auditor can pull: (1) he could disobey the Auditor's Code; (2) he wouldn't know his business; (3) he audits a pc with a screaming present time problem; (4) he audits a pc when the pc knows he can't communicate with the auditor - which is Clause 16 of the Auditor's Code, after all - goes out of two-way comm, but that's a particularly serious one. And he could run the case with tremendous withholds on it, and of course, this is another violation of Clause 16. It's a violation of the Auditor's Code to run a case with tremendous overts undisclosed on the case, because the pc is not in two-way comm with the auditor. So that would be dead wrong. And the other dead wrong thing he could do would be to pick a terminal at random and run it ad nauseam. And that's dead wrong.

That's the first time you've heard that that was dead wrong. This is the first time we've known that was dead wrong. Before, we said only do a terminals by assessment, and only do this and only do that. These are little preventives which kept very much bad from occurring. But now I can tell you broadly that you just shouldn't fool with it. You just shouldn't run any terminal but the goals terminal of the pc.

All right. Now, if you can't run any terminal but the goals terminal of the pc, where does this leave you on the subject of Security Checking? Because you've got to find out what he has done to his mother and what he hasn't done to his mother and what he's withheld from his mother and so forth. Is that running a terminal? No. It is not running a terminal as long as it's run against the E-Meter and you're only asking for it every time the meter falls. Because every time the meter falls, the pc's attention is stuck on that other terminal. It is a violation of his attention being off his goals terminal.

And every time your meter falls on a security question, you have located a time and zone on the track where the individual has violated "attention must be on the goals terminal." This is the basic modus God-'elp-us of the pc. This is the stuff of which he is built. His attention must be on the goals terminal.

So every time you get a knock on the meter, and you say "Have you done anything to anybody? Have you withheld anything from anybody?" - you actually find a knock on the meter, you find a reaction on the needle, it immediately says his attention is stuck in violation of the goals terminal. That's for just Security Checking. That isn't what's back of every fall you ever get on a meter. But that's the violation of the goals terminal.

So, on an E-Meter where you get a needle reaction, you have a violation of a goals terminal. Now, if you leave him in a violation of the goals terminal, you have an upset pc. If you find one, you got to clear it. That's the rule which goes along with it.

This assumes tremendous importance, because here, there, I've been picking up cases, time after time after time, where an individual has been left with an uncleared withhold. And I've found in every case that he's squirrelly, he's thinking unkind thoughts, he's wondering about things, he's wondering if Scientology works or doesn't work, he's having an awful time. Actually, he dreams up all sorts of gossip trying to lessen the overts of one kind or another. And he just gets into a terrible spin.

And this is an empirical datum. This is a datum which I've been watching now through auditors' reports coming in from Central Organizations, from this particular class, and they are just mounting up to be legion. They are innumerable, This is a datum which is being forced upon me by constant, constant, constant observation of that datum. And it is not a datum which you can ignore - any more than I have been able to ignore the datum. So I say, "Well, all right. Huh - Susie Ann is in an HPA class, and she doesn't know what she's doing, and so she misses a couple of Security Checks. Ha-ha-ha-haha-ha-ha - ha-ha-ha. So what?"

Oh, I'm afraid that an auditor has to learn how to swim perfectly the first time he's thrown in the bay on a Security Check. Isn't that interesting? Because frankly, you could get blows out of the Academy. Every time a student sits down and he picks up the E-Meter and he says, "Let's see, these are the - that's the tone arm. No, no, no, that's … that's … that's … Ah-ha," and so on. And he hands it to somebody diffidently, and he says, "Now, let's see."

The instructor finally comes around disgustedly and says, "This is the 'on' button," and throws it on.

"What's this moving needle? When you turn it on, the needle moves. Move the tone arm, needle moves. Ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha! Move the tone arm and the needle moves. I see what they're doing. When the auditor gets something on the pc, he moves the tone arm and that moves the needle. Now I understand an E-Meter."

And he understands it all for two days. And then a pc actually has a stray, unkind thought about what he's doing, you see - one of his fellow students - and the needle moves when he isn't touching the tone arm. "Broken."

And during that period of time, unfortunately, although he has to be practicing in something vaguely resembling meter actions, and so forth, he is asking people questions. And these questions, any of them, can become Security Check questions. And he doesn't know enough at this period of time that he's got to clear it off. The needle moved: What's he supposed to do? Well, he writes it down on the piece of paper he has: "Needle moved."

The instructor comes around and says, "Where's Pete?"

And this fellow that's just written it down, "I don't know. He went out …"

And you have the HCO squadron of cavalry riding all over the neighborhood trying to round up Pete. By this time he has socked a policeman, he has done this, he's done that, and slept with his best friend's wife.

Well, somehow or another they get it patched up, but that is the immediate consequence of what would happen if he missed a Security Check question. We can't ignore the fact. That is what happens. It's just in from every place. Some of the most confoundedly weird things have occurred you have ever heard of.

Girl in an HGC: they missed a Security Check on her. She rushes straight out, she sees every friend she's got, she says, "All auditors are doing in that organization is sleeping with their pcs, and there's all this going on, and there's that going on, and it's all terrible, and it's awful over there, and horrible things are occurring in that organization." And then this girl went and wrote a whole bunch of letters on the subject, and all this in relatively a few hours. She was the busiest person you ever saw.

And you know, it took the organization about a week to round this up. They got a hold of the girl and they put her down and had enough sense to realize, that the last thing she was doing was unflat. That was probably all that was really known about it.

So they made her do the last thing she was doing, and it was a hot question on a Security Check. And it was something to do with the second dynamic. And the auditor had simply gone on, you know, and not asked any questions about it, and then sort of ended the session, and it was never going to come up again, and boom! Immediate repercussion.

So hell hath no fury like a pc whose withhold isn't pulled. It works completely reverse. I don't know whether the pc instinctively realizes he's been done wrong or if he has had something reactivated so that he must compensate for it or if he is making - trying to make nothing out of the overt by making nothing out of the people who might have gotten the overt, so that nobody will believe them when the overt does come up, you see? But an unpulled overt has horsepower in it. It has real horsepower. And it drives people to the most confounded excesses you ever heard of.

I think the excesses of the criminal are simply on the basis of just tremendous numbers of overts against the society. The overts, which are a withhold, then become the horsepower which make the criminal. Not quite that the man goes wrong, you see, and then who hides it from the society, the way we ordinarily look at it. I think it's quite different.

I think, because the individual is withholding something, then you get horsepower. I think this is a source of explosive reactor fuel of some kind or another.

So a restimulated withhold becomes a lighted charge of dynamite. And when you ask the pc if he has a withhold and then you don't get it, you have just the same as stuffed a stick of dynamite down his throat and litten the fuse. You've lit the fuse, and then you say, "Well, you don't have anything," you see? That's it.

After a while, in the distance, there's a dull boom! You see? And you say, "What's that? It has nothing to do with me. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. It has nothing to do with me. I audited him. I tried to help him. Tried my best, but he came to us too late."

You see, you could get off into all sloppy things. You realize this, a psycho-anal-ist always and totally excuses every failed case on that one phrase "He came to us too late," which I think is quite amusing. He believes this, too, you know? He believes it implicitly. Fellow has been with him five years and "He came to me too late." Always. I've talked to these birds, and they tell me with a perfectly straight face. Well, three of his patients have committed suicide in the last month. And he tells you this, quite frankly: "Oh, yes, they committed suicide in the last month. Yeah, a lot of them. Well, there's Bessie. She came to me too late. And there was George. If he'd come sooner, I could have done something. And then there's Mehitabel. Well, long, long overdue. She should have come to me much earlier."

You say, "Well, what were you doing with these patients for that time?"

"Well, they just lay there on the couch and talked."

"Well, did you ask them any questions?"

"Well, uh … of course. I asked them what had been done to them in their childhood." Restimulate every overt in the bank, don't you see?

Boy, I tell you. You talk about people who have taken people's lives in their hands, look into that field. But it'd be any field where you didn't pursue the question.

Now, the poor old Catholic church, that I have raised so much the devil with occasionally, from time to time - the poor old Catholic church - for the lack of this datum which we're talking about right this minute, has developed all of its heretics, its Martin Luthers and the lot. The boys they've had all the trouble with, they manufactured at the confession box.

Person comes up, he's just groveling in the dust, you see, and he's just got through having intercourse with his sister, or something. And he scratches on the confession box, you see, and he says, "I have something to confess."

The priest is sleepy that day, you know? He says, "Yeah, what - my son."

And he says, "Well, I've done something very …" And his courage fails him, as you see in pcs all the time. Guy's courage fails him, you see? And he says, "Well, I - I heard some nasty gossip about the mayor."

And the priest says, "Well, what was it, my son?"

"Well, I heard the mayor was sleeping with the alderman's wife, and that the alderman - and that the alderman has committed incest with his sister."

And the priest says, "Well, that's eighty-nine and a half paternosters and two umpteegahs. So, tool off now."

And the fellow says, "Whew!"

And a little time goes on, and the Inquisition all of a sudden is called upon to find out what all this sin is going on over there, and what's all this commotion against the true church. And all this commotion against the true church is getting more and more commotional.

Well, they managed to burn most of them. After they'd missed their withholds, then they had to burn them. But they managed to burn most of them. But they missed just enough to cause an overthrow of the Catholic church, because it's no longer the dominant church on earth. Well, I forget, we in the white race consider ourselves extremely, egocentrically, as being the races of earth. But as a matter of fact, there are so many other churches elsewhere that are bigger than any church we have anywhere that - that was it. Well, one time the Catholic church could have numbered up along with some of the great Eastern churches, and so on, and it doesn't anymore.

But that's it. There's your Martin Luther. There's your Calvin. There's your - there's … so on. I'm sure that it happened right there at the confession box. Priest didn't have an E-Meter. I think it's very poetic justice, because he buried most of the knowledge - the Church buried a great deal of knowledge that came out of ancient Greece and Egypt, and so forth. They put a lot of this knowledge away, because they didn't think it was good for people. They kept it in the catacombs. Actually, they released Aristotle. Just in the Middle Ages, they suddenly broke out Aristotle complete and released it to the scholarly world.

Nobody had ever heard of Aristotle and Plato before that. They broke out Plato so as to prove that Catholicism was the true religion. All of these various things occurred, and they sort of shut off knowledge, one way or the other. And they didn't have an E-Meter. That's what it amounts to.

Well, what problem are you faced with then? You're faced with an immediate heretic. He doesn't like you. He doesn't like your organization. He's going to dream up all sorts of wild tales and lies about you and your organization, or about others, or something, because of a missed withhold. And what are you supposed to do then?

Well, let me caution you against following the policy of our immediate forebears on this particular planet. Firewood is very costly. If only on economic grounds, why, you shouldn't have to go burn every person, you see, who has been missed on a Security Check.

Now, that's what it would amount to, sooner or later. You're walking up the line, you see? You're walking into a heavy - a heavier power position on this particular planet, and that's what it would amount to. You already have means and ways of cutting down the overts against the group, to keep the group from being sundered, and keep individuals of the group from being cut to pieces. You have that, inherently, in a Security Check.

Now, supposing the Security Check becomes badly done and overts get missed left and right. Well, the very mechanism which is supposed to prevent dissension and upset and slowed-down cases and all of this sort of thing - that very mechanism is the mechanism which restimulates an heresy, of some kind or another, which eventually brings about an overthrow of the group.

So it's no very light thing I'm talking about now. And this has been presented to me so many times, on so many folders, by so many people, and it has happened so often, that we must conclude that it - not that it is an invariable reaction. No reason to conclude that it is invariable, that because somebody has had a withhold and it hasn't been pulled, that this person immediately tries to destroy everything under the sun, moon and stars. We're not justified in concluding that, because it's happened many times without repercussion. And some auditor got it later, or didn't get it at all, and the case merely stalled. And some Director of Processing or some auditor someplace noticed the case wasn't moving sooner or later, and decided to get ambitious and went back and found the withhold.

And the only thing that happened there is the case stalled, which is an overt enough, but nothing happened to the group and nothing happened to individuals. But you can count on the fact that it will happen sufficiently often that a repercussion will follow the act, but in the cumulative centuries it could utterly destroy anything we're trying to build up.

It is not at all a tiny mechanism. It is a big, important one. You could disobey most of the Auditor's Code and you wouldn't get into terribly serious trouble, except pc would be upset, and case gains and ARC breaks and you'd feel unhappy, and a few things like that. But Clause 16, "Stay in two-way communication with your pc," is violated the moment that you find - that is, you tick, that you come close to - a hot withhold and don't get it.

You're asking a Security Check question, you say, "Well, have you ever raped anybody?"

And the individual says, "Well, people who rape people … Actually, I heard about a terrible rape, and there was an awful situation occurred over in Northumbria, and so forth. There was a number of rapes over in Northumbria, and I think this is pretty terrible. And that's what the needle is falling on."

And the auditor says, "Well, I guess it is pretty terrible," and goes on to the next question.

As I say, it isn't invariable that he burns the house down. It's amusing that the psychoanalyst in - Freudians - in dealing with kleptomania make statements of this character.

They're the most generalized, sweeping statements you ever wanted to hear in your life. It's something on the order of "every time a kleptomaniac fails to steal anything, they burn the house down." I don't think there are that many houses. That statement is part of a text. It's a direct quote. (The bad English in it is not mine.) "Every time a kleptomaniac fails to steal anything, they burn the house down."

Well, it isn't of this order of generality. It's every now and then when you fail to get a withhold, you set off an atomic bomb. And it's often enough as a group repercussion, and far too frequent, as an individual repercussion, because you get a stall.

The individual goes through this cycle: The overt, having failed to be pulled by the auditor, restimulates the necessity for the pc to minimize the overt that he has done by running down the target against which the overt was committed. So the pc, far from having an overt pulled or having a withhold pulled, has been tricked into committing a new overt on top of the withhold, against the people who tried to get it. Do you see the mechanism?

All right. The Rosicrucians were trying to get the withhold, and they failed to get the withhold. The individual would then go "natter, natter," and his withhold, then, is against the Rosicrucians. So he immediately tries to blow up the Rosicrucians. You got the idea? They have no such mechanism as this. But I'm just giving you an example.

If his overt is against the ETU, and he's withholding it like crazy, and it's the ETU that ticks the overt - see, that tick the withhold, but not get it in any way - he is liable, if it's a center-line withhold of some sort or another, fly into a fantastic potpourri of yip-yap against the ETU, don't you see?

The overts are always against the people who fail to pull the withhold. Knowing that, I think it might put a little spurs to your ambition never to miss one, because the succeeding overts are always against you. You fail to knock out the withhold, and you or your group will get the benefit - questionable benefit - of the succeeding overts. And this is one of the primary principles of mental reaction.

They try to lessen the overt, to make nothing of the people who might find out. They've had the overt restimulated, so now they have to make nothing of the people, to everyone, so that nobody will ever believe the people, if the overt-withhold is suspected.

You see, as long as the thing is unpulled, it has dynamite. The second it is pulled, there's no dynamite connected with it. It's just - they just throw a flounder out on the table, you see? It's a very mysterious action, this whole thing of pulling a withhold. You reach down into the pc for this smoldering volcano, you know, with lava running all along and the villages burning on all the mountainsides, everything going to pieces, you see, and the steam flying out of the sea. And you've reached down his throat to pull out this unsavory, bombastic object, and you drop on the table a dead haddock.

Just in the process of it passing from his throat to the middle of the table, it goes flop. There isn't even a cinder. Have you noticed this? A cleanly pulled withhold transmutes from the most bombastic explosive manufactured to about the limpest fish ever caught, in the process of being pulled. It is just nothing. The pc sits there and he looks at it and he says, "What on earth is that?"

And he's mystified. There's always a little "unknow" follows this thing, which doesn't do him any damage at all: "I wonder why I was so upset about that." He always has this kind of little action. You yourself who have had a withhold of magnitude pulled on you have probably experienced the same thing, you know? You just grind and you worry and you search, and so forth, and you're - "It's, well-mm-ulp. Oh, I'll try - I don't know. Well, let's see if I can get away with not telling them. Well actually, the truth of the matter is, I really have never had anything … Well, I'm gonna tell him. Hm-hm-hm-mm. All right. Well, I'll come out with it. All right! All right! I pick my teeth. I pick my teeth. I pick my …

"What is the matter here? There's nothing very important about picking your teeth. Now, why was I so upset about telling the auditor?"

And when you've had a big one that you've been sitting on for a long time, you can see the partnership in that particular series of reactions. It absolutely feels ghastly just before you hand it out. Have you had something like this occur? Or something? All right.

Now, supposing it went this way: "Well, on the subject - well, you - you got reaction on it. You … you sure your meter is working? Are you sure your meter is working? Oh, you're not sure your meter is working? Oh, well. Oh, well. That's … it's … Okay. Well, I feel much better now. Let's go on to the next question. All right. That's good."

And the auditor goes on to the next question. And you get outside the door, you know, and you say, "Should have told him. No, I couldn't have told him. Uhrrrr."

You get home at night, you know. Wheels start going around, and you say, "God, he's a lousy auditor. Well, that's terrible. Horrible things. I remember something Ron did once. Let's see. Hm. Hm. And I heard of an auditor one time who - who charged too much for auditing, and so forth. And see? see? see? see? see?" - immediate reaction of that kind of thing on a withhold of magnitude that's missed.

And a guy sits around - actually, he's disappointed. He's left sitting on the middle of something. It's too much for him. He can practically feel the steam coming out of his ears, and nobody did anything for him about it. He basically is disappointed.

Also, he knows that it is so forceful and so powerful that if he had told about it there might have been great repercussions on the subject. And therefore, it's much better that he didn't say anything about it, and he has really won because, you see, if it got around that he'd picked his teeth … oh, well, I don't know, lots of things might have happened. The Dental Association might have gotten on to him, and all kinds of things might have occurred. They might be … "So it's a good thing. It's a good thing. A lousy auditor, and he should have known better. And actually, truth of the matter is …"

But that's all because the withhold is simply restimulated, don't you see? And the person is fighting back and forth, and he's left sitting on a charge of steam, dynamite, volcanic lava, and so on, all of which amounts to, when he finally gets out and looks at it, in the final run, why, he picks his teeth. He picks his teeth. He picks his teeth.

Well, what was so important about picking your teeth? And when you've seen that mechanism occur, you'll realize that if you interrupt it before it is displayed, you've left the pc with a full head of steam. And of course the pc is liable to do almost anything. Do you see this?

And he might as well face up to the fact there are liabilities to auditing. There weren't liabilities to unsuccessful auditing. There weren't wild liabilities to very mild auditing. There weren't liabilities to simply running out a few engrams, if you could get your hands on them, and so forth. There weren't any great liabilities to it, nor were there any great liabilities to running concepts. No real mess on that. So we got away with that fine.

Now we move over into the heavy artillery, and we bring up parks of 155s, and German 88s, and we string it out along the line. And then we put a bunch of rocket launchers in the lineup. And then we say well, that's fine. Let's take some B-47s and line them up over here and put atom bombs in their stomachs.

And now let's go ahead. And along about this time, you're possessed of sufficient tools, that what - the stuff you are handling, which is the root stuff of human aberration, and so on, has to be handled as it should be handled. That's all.

Now you'll go, in this basis, from one extreme, perhaps, to the other. I don't remember if this was the exact sequence, but it makes better telling this way: A bunch of recruits who were just out of boot school were assigned to a ship, and they were afraid of ammunition. And the main battery was sitting there, and they, of course, were the loaders. And they were handling the ammunition and slamming it into the breech - they were supposed to, you see? And they'd pick up a long shell, you know - a shell about that long, you know, with an explosive-fuse nose, that if you ever dropped it, you know, it'd go boom! and that would be obliteration with magnitude.

And they'd pick up this thing, you know, and they'd - they'd pick it up with their … you know, and hand it to the next one, you know? You can see, in a rapid-fire action, that shells being passed with that slowness and that care into the breeches of guns, you see, are not going to obliterate anything. It's quite the contrary. They're liable to be dropped on the deck and blow everybody in the gun crew to smithereens.

Well, I adjudicated that they had been talked to too long about the great care that they must use - the great care they must use - in the handling of ammunition. I assume that they probably had been talked to by fellows from the ordnance department, that explained to them, "These were the nose fuses of the goodygumps, and if you ever dropped one, why, it went blang! and so forth. And you must always be careful to keep the ammunition in its proper cases and in its proper slots, and you must always keep it marked and flash-marked, because it's all very dangerous. It's all very dangerous. It's all very dangerous."

By the time they got to the ship, of course, they were afraid to touch a piece of ammunition. They had no familiarity with the ammunition. They just had the sensibility that the ammunition was dangerous.

Well, I saw this at drill, you know, that sort of thing. They're trying to whip this gun crew together and so on. And at drill it was just this matter of "Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-no-ooooo. Uh … you got - you got it, Joe, you got it, Joe? Ha-ha-ha! Oh, thank God, you've got it, Joe. All right. Now open the breech very carefully. Don't hit its nose against anything, you know?"

Oh God, it was terrible. So I asked them if they had any dummy shells. I asked the gunner's mate if he had any dummy shells. And he said "Yeah, I got some dummy shells."

And so I had all the gun crews of this particular type of gun in the main battery around and line up in a ring on the foredeck. And I took one of these dummy shells and I handed it to them and told them to play catch with it. It was the same size and weight as everything. It was just what was used in order to demonstrate or drill-load something. And of course, they were very happy with that. And they'd catch it back and forth and kicked it around. They got so they'd throw it so it was spinning to one another, and toss it back and forth across about five, ten feet of deck, you see, to one another. They were happy with this dummy shell. Of course, not live, no fuses in it, no powder, nothing.

And they kept doing this and doing this, and I had them do it for two or three days, if I remember rightly, or maybe a day or two. And I saw they were at it one morning, and they were having a fine time playing catch. So I went down, opened up the magazine, had the gunner's mate hand me a real brass-case, fuse-loaded, nose-fuse-set piece of artillery.

And I said, "Here you go.

And the first guy in the line - they were looking at me sort of like snake - staring at that thing, you know, like birds who just sighted a snake or something, you know? I took the first shell and I said, "Here you go." And I just threw it to him across the open deck, you know?

The guy caught it. "God!"

Three days, they were throwing that live shell with a set nose-fuse fifteen feet across the deck to one another, playing catch with the thing. Some ordnance officers came down from ordnance and saw this ship lying there alongside of the pier, and its gun crew was playing catch with a live shell, and he went straight up and a mile south.

He had no authority over us. He pointed out to us, though, if anybody had dropped it, it probably would have been the end of the USS Washington which was lying alongside of us. And I said I didn't like battleships anyway. But he totally was overlooking some of the principles with which we are now totally familiar, that a person has to become familiarized with a dangerous object before he can use it easily and well and not have accidents with it.

The way you can have accidents with a dangerous object is to know it is dangerous and not know there is any way to handle it. And if you know a dangerous object is dangerous, you can always have accidents with it.

Now, the actions of an auditor are given publicity on this particular basis: Because people are generally very nervous about auditing and very nervous about looking into people's human minds, and because "everybody knows" you mustn't have anything to do with a human mind - oh "everybody knows" that.

Some of your friends - you say, "I'm studying Scientology."

And they say, "Oh, well, what does that have to do with?"

You say, "Well, that just has to do with the human mind."

And they say, "Oh, well, you shouldn't - I don't know if you ought to tamper with that or not. It's a pretty dangerous situation. You mustn't have anything to do with it."

Well, why don't you point out to them at that time, "Well, you mustn't have anything to do with it? Don't you think they have an awful lot of casualties with this thing they mustn't have anything to do with, you know? Don't you think it's kind of dangerous not to have anything to do with it? Haven't you got one? Have you got one? Well, don't you have anything to do with your own mind?"

That would be a staggering thing, but the guy is liable to go into a funk when he realizes that every time he figures out an arithmetical problem, he is tampering with the human mind.

And we're liable to err along this line. We're liable to say to people, "Oh, well, auditing is very easy. You can't make any mistakes. There's no way to make a mistake. There is nothing you can do wrong, and you just sit there, and you go through a certain … There's nothing to it. You actually can't do any damage." And there is a tendency on our parts and on the part of instructors, and so forth, in order to give students confidence, to say that you can't really do anything very damaging or very wrong.

There's a tendency on our parts to do that. And that is in the effort of restimulating their courage because, well, students in an Academy, and that sort of thing, are awfully nervy characters. They sit there and they pick up the E-Meter and wonder if they're handling a thirty - megatron hydrogen bomb, you'd think, to look at them. They can't even look at the thing. The needle wobbles, and they don't even know what it's all about. They think it's a dangerous weapon.

So we say, "Well, it's not dangerous, and there's nothing you can do to hurt anybody, and so on, and so on."

Well, we've actually leaned too far in the other direction. All this attitude was possibly perfectly justified in 1956 when we were running a tremendous number of concepts and sort of havingness processes and SCS and things like that - all of which are perfectly valid. (Add to your list of processes early in the lecture, "objective, physical-universe processes," as a safe series.) But all of these things are valid. You don't get into danger with them, and they don't blow anybody's head off. But look, for years and years and years, now, Ronnie has been at work. And I've been trying to get the hydraulic jacks underneath of the basic core of human aberration to a level that any case - without paying much attention to the auditor - that any case could be resolved fairly easily within some finite period of time. Well, they're resolving Clears now, and some of the places are making Clears, and so on. We're resolving Clears maybe, in something on the order of two, three hundred hours - some top figure. It's a finite period of time. Last Clear made in Australia was 118 hours. This is finite time, you see?

Yes, but what have we paid with? With what coin have we paid for the speed-up? Ha-ha-ha-ha. We have paid for it with stripping the safety precautions off, because now we have to run things that, run wrong, wouldn't spin somebody in but it'd certainly make a pc unhappy as hell. It'd certainly mess things up. It won't do any permanent or lasting damage, but it'll certainly make somebody awful sad. And it'll certainly make them very uncomfortable.

And done wrong, we have moved into a strata of processing - done wrong - that will make somebody awful miserable, because you've got hydraulic jacks. And all you have to do, you see, is you just take another little notch on one of these jacks, and it puts thirty tons of pressure against this particular engram. And the pc says, "Well, it isn't resolving." And all you've got to do is lean over and put another notch on the thing, and put another thirty tons of pressure - another inch, you see? And the pc still says, "Well, it isn't resolving." And you're dealing with technology that it is very easy just to pick your finger up and just put that jack over another inch.

It's the wrong object you got the jack leaning against - wrong target. And your pc, of course, gets very uncomfortable and blows session, gets very upset with you and gets extremely disturbed, and he acts like a nut. And part of his shame is the fact that he doesn't know how come he is acting like a nut. This is a mystery to him, don't you see?

You've sat there being nice and sweet and kind, and you're not doing anything wrong. Obviously, you're sitting there to help him, and all of a sudden he feels like hell. Well, what is this? You didn't do it, so he feels guilty every time he gets upset, and you have a much harder time with it. And he's upset, of course, because something has gone awry in his bank. Don't you see that a gross error has to be entered in.

Don't think that it's a minor error the auditor would be making, you know, like running a command one time too many. No, it'd have to be the wrong terminal and the wrong command, run on top of a present time problem and an ARC break.

But the auditor, because of the processes he is handling, and so forth, actually can, in spite of all this, hold a pc in session and throw that hydraulic jack an additional notch. And of course, that's the one notch it shouldn't have been thrown, because the whole thing is awry anyhow. You see what I mean? I mean, you're dealing with high horsepower, highly skilled technology. And if the technology is wrong, or if you do some of the most obvious wrongnesses that can be done, you're going to get a repercussion. And the repercussion is considerable. I don't wish to minimize it, so I'm just leveling with you, you see?

So on the one side, we could say "Oh, auditing is easy, and anybody could audit, and there's nothing you could do to hurt anybody's human mind, and so forth." Well, it's true. There's nothing we can do to permanently injure or damage somebody's mind, but oh, brother, could you give somebody a very nasty cold, for instance. Could you give him an awful bad bellyache, could you do a lot of other things, don't you see, that would be damnably uncomfortable. They'd all fade out in three days or ten days, or a couple of weeks, or something like that. But it wouldn't be good.

Now, there's no sense in saying, "Well, you can't do anything. You can't hurt anybody, and nothing will ever upset the pc, and so forth." That's an extreme, and it's a dangerous extreme, because it's not, strictly speaking, true.

And on the other hand - on the other hand over here - we say, "Oh, well, auditing the mind is very dangerous, and there is no way possibly that you could really tamper with somebody's mind. It ought to be done by an expert. Call an electrician," or something like this, the way the psychiatrists are doing these days. And you get over to this and you can say, "Well, it's very dangerous, and you shouldn't have anything to do with it at all," you see?

Between these two extremes, there is the sensible level of "Yes, there are tremendous numbers of things you can do with the human mind, if you don't make gross errors. "

Now, the errors that you can make that will be damaging errors to the human mind are all of them under the heading of gross errors. They are glaringly large. They are huge. They loom up out of the rundown like Marble Arch up in Hyde Park. I mean, they're big. You can run into that with a car, and you'd know it was there. And if you've got the idea that an auditing error is the size of a twig that just fell off a tree on Rotten Row, change your mind, you see? You go over that with a car wheel, it just goes flick! or something like that. You hardly know it's there, and so on.

Auditing errors are not of that order of magnitude. The auditing error, to produce a bad result on the pc, has to be absolutely huge. And you, in running auditors or directing an HGC or doing something in this particular zone or area, do a good job only when you get your eye off the twigs and start looking at the Marble Arches that have gotten across the road.

You know that that's quite interesting? It's quite an interesting fact, that people directing auditing and supervising auditing, when they get auditing reports, and see that the case is not running well, or something like that, always look at twigs. Yeah, the little tiny things. And they say, "Well, are you very sure that you're giving him an acknowledgment every time? You know? Are you very sure you're acknowledging well? How is your TR 0 as you're auditing him?" You know? Little, little things.

Of course, the auditor's TR 0 has to be good, but an auditor's TR 0 can be totally out and the case will still make gains. It's fact! And the acknowledgments can be nonextant. You can say, if you're running a goals terminal or something like that, you're running some level, "Well, how have you helped a mugwump?" "How have you helped a mugwump?" and "How has a mugwump helped you?" "How have you helped a mugwump?" "How has a mugwump helped you?" The preclear probably wouldn't notice from one second to the next whether you acknowledged him or not. Do you realize that? He's just so interested in the thing. He follows the auditing command, and so on. He doesn't notice it.

On the other hand, he gets so interiorized into high-power techniques that you acknowledge him perfectly, your TR 0 is perfectly in, everything is perfect, and he never notices that either. You get the idea?

So these are tiny. These are tiny. You've got to know your TRs to be a good auditor, and the combined effect of all TRs out can be rather interesting. But let's not, when we say something is happening with this case that is wrong, go into these tiny things. And do you know that you will most often avoid the gross errors, you know? And it's the gross error … Now, what's a gross error?

Well, was the auditor there for the session? Now, that would be a gross auditing error, don't you see? And you know, in directing auditors, you almost never ask these burning questions.

"Did you have your E-Meter turned on? Does it work?" "Have you gone into any screaming fits at the pc?" These are all gross auditing errors, you see? "Now, when you clear the rudiments, do you clear the rudiments?" Gross error is "Do you ever look at the needle while you're clearing rudiments?" That's a gross auditing error! Of course, how the devil can you audit and find out anything about the pc if you're not looking at the meter? And you would be amazed how often this is the auditing error which causes the miss. The auditor under training is doing everything but looking at the meter. He asks the question and then looks at the meter. The meter's reaction takes place in a tenth of a second, and he takes a half a second to look from the question to the meter. So he misses all reactions.

And do you know we've had that going on right here? That comes under the heading of a gross auditing error. It's just not doing auditing.

All right. Now, you read along and this auditing report is just fine, and everything seems to be okay about the thing, and you just can't understand why this pc isn't making any advances and you say, "Well, now, are your rudiments all in?"

"Oh, yes, rudiments are all in. Yeah."

"Well, as you're running the goals terminal on the run, you're not overrunning the assessment? Still getting tone arm action?"

"Oh, yes, getting tone arm action."

You check it all out. Everything is perfectly beautiful. And you're running in some Podunk, someplace, where you've got auditors there, you know, that haven't been very well trained, or something like that, on the line. Whole case becomes a total mystery, and you say, "Well, gee, we must have some wrong combination or the technology is wrong," and we start adjusting the little things, and we say that the auditor's TR 0 has got to be improved, and there must be a different command used here, and there must be a this and there must be a that, and we fix it all up, and we get a whole bunch of extraordinary solutions.

Truth of the matter is, if we went back and checked it up from beginning to end or if we had a motion picture of the session, we'd find out that the session went along just fine, except right in the middle. Because after the break every day, and after they go back into session every day, the auditor gives the pc a total spinal adjustment!

Now, you think I'm kidding, but this kind of thing is the usual - the usual gross auditing error. It belongs in that category, don't you see?

All right. Gross auditing error: You could actually audit a pc on the technology you have today with somewhat of a present time problem. You could get him through one session, and he has a bit of a present time problem, and just kind of bully it through and somehow or another arrive at the other end, and he'd get a little bit of gain. It'd be almost impossible to miss. But you couldn't do it with all rudiments out. Or not running any rudiments at all. You say to the auditor that - it's this Pumpkin Center that you're running - and you say to him, "Well, now, are you sure you got your rudiments in?"

"Oh, yes, sir. I got my rudiments in. They're all in," and so on.

And then a brilliant stroke of genius comes to you, and you say, "Well, when you're putting the rudiments in, do you put the pc on the E-Meter?"

He says, "Oh, no. Never."

"Well, how do you know if the rudiments are in?"

"Well, the pc tells me so."

"Well, how does the pc tell you so?"

"Well, I ask him, 'Are all your rudiments in?"'

Now, this sounds utterly, fabulously idiotic to you. But do you know that auditing errors of this magnitude exist? And when you're supervising a large number of auditors and so on, you will always have some people who are just out of the Academy, who are pretty green, that sort of thing, and you can just beat your brains to pieces trying to figure out why the technology isn't working.

The technology always works. But is it being applied?

And the gross auditing error comes in the application of the technology. And that's the zone you should look in, in order to correct a case.

Now, we can add to these gross auditing errors "leaving a withhold in restimulation." Because then, I assure you, the case is not going to make any progress.

We right now have a course running someplace in the world, and in weeks of run they have only found, in a number of students, a goal or two. And those they have found a goal or two on, early, they found no terminals for. You'll find this quite common in various places, by the way.

A whole group can go sailing along and getting no terminals and no goals and no nothing, and so forth; we were doing it right here, till I finally just got right down and figured out what the devil this was all about. And I found out the rudiments were just wildly out, and the auditors were actually in a games condition on the subject of goals. You know? I mean, just frankly that. They were in a games condition. They were so ARC broke on their own goals, they were damned if they were going to let anybody else have any goals. I think that was about the way it added up, something of that sort. So, by straightening the rudiments out, and raising the magnitude of importance of keeping rudiments in, why, what are we running into now?

Well, I was just asking a question. There's a student been here for about two weeks and two days, and we don't have his goal and terminal. I'm starting to ask questions. What is happening? Because this is not usual now.

You see? We've learned to keep our rudiments in before we do goals and terminal assessments, and having learned that, why, we find our goals and terminals, and that's about all there is to it. That was the gross error; it was just not having any rudiments in.

It wasn't that we needed new trick methods of finding goals and terminals, we just had to have somebody sit there and actually ask for the goals and ask for the terminals and not invalidate any of them and not add a bunch of things to the nonsense that was going on. Keep the rudiments in, we found goals and terminals, just bangity - bang! It's very easy to do. And some of you right here have experienced that particular gruesome experience. And that was gruesome, wasn't it?

You see, the light and dark of the situation was too fantastic for words. The first course I taught, immediately ahead of this course, I found all the goals and terms - I think they were all found the first few days, weren't they?

Female voice: Yes, it wasn't very long. We did Presession 38 first and then -

We did Presession 38 and shook down a lot of - 37 and 38, wasn't it?

Female voice: 37 and 38 too.

Yeah, and we'd had them - we had their PTPs and their withholds all off, and bang! Assessment, there was just nothing to it, just fell in your lap. Nothing to it.

Well, now this unit, at great distance from here, happens to be running into the same difficulties right this minute. And I have sent over cables about "Get your rudiments in. Get your rudiments in. Get your rudiments in." And I don't know whether this will be heard or not, because this has to amount to looking at the E-Meter. And I've just had a datum from that particular unit, that some of the students on that particular course can be forced to stand and look at an E- Meter which is reacting and be asked what the reaction was, and they can't tell you that the needle moved.

Well, we look for a gross error, so I tell them, "Get the rudiments in, get the rudiments in, get the rudiments in." I probably ought to be saying "Show them an E-Meter and find out for them where the tone arm is. Show them which is the knob, or black object, that wiggles." We'll find out it's some gross auditing error, you see, of that magnitude.

It always defies your imagination when you run into these gross errors, and running a great many people, a great many auditing teams or a great many staff auditors, or a great many students, it all boils down to the same thing: You're just sure that you have a dog case that has avoided technology, and then you try to do everything under the sun, moon and stars you can with technology in order to straighten out this case. And you find out the case hasn't advanced for some time because "Well, you see, actually we're supposed to look at tapes at four o'clock, and the auditing session is also at four o'clock, so we, of course, have been skipping the auditing session."

The case wasn't being audited. I mean, this sounds idiotic, but that is how idiotic, and that is how gross most of these errors are.

"Oh, yes, I always get the rudiments in on the pc. Yes, I always get the rudiments in on the pc. That's very good. I make sure that the needle is moving when he says he has withholds. When he has no withholds, if the needle moves, then I know I can pass on to the next rudiment."

I know, they're all so stupid and all so incredible that they get missed. And you are very often persuaded into being very inventive about technology. This is - even I have been. On the basis of persuading some - of being persuaded that you just "You've got to think of some new solution, that's all, because this case just isn't moving," you know? And then we find out that, well, he doesn't get audited, either. Tapes are at four o'clock, and the case is supposed to be audited at four o'clock, so he just doesn't audit the case, but hasn't really had nerve to tell you. Or something wild like this, you know? And it comes down to something fundamental.

The common denominator of all of this is no auditing done. It'll be some degree of that, and I wanted to give you the common denominator of it. It's some degree of no auditing done: Whether they just - the auditor never reports to the auditing session at all; or, after he gets to the auditing session, omits some large section of auditing. Oh, doesn't run the goals terminal of the pc, decides actually that he's got to get Mother out of the way first. And he just goes on for ages auditing Mother. Mother, Mother, and we audit more Mother, and supposed to be auditing "a tinker."

And you'll get errors of this character, and I hate to say it, because staff auditors are actually terrific. I have lots of confidence in staff auditors. I've never had staff auditors balk at doing anything; I've never had them do anything but, when they followed through results, just try their level best to deliver. Terrific willingness. Main failure has been - is me telling them, comprehensibly enough, what I wanted done, so that it could be understood. I consider that any main failure, because the willingness - there's never been any want of that.

So therefore we come down to a simplicity, and they can do this, and everybody goes off at a smart trot, and everything is working along fine this way.

But I've seen some of the wildest miscomprehensions of a relayed communication, such as this: "You run the level" - this actually happened - "you run the level until the tone arm gets moving and then reassess for the next level." And that was the way the auditing direction was interpreted. You know, "you run a level long enough to get the tone arm moving well, and then you assess for the next level of the Prehav Scale, and you run it."

Man! I can tell you that if you did that for about four or five levels, the whole case would come down to a slow jam and the pc would feel like he was going crazy. It'd take him about ten, twelve days to get over the idea, too. He'd just feel like he was going crazy!

If you want to audit the pc into a feeling that they're nuts, don't do a terminals run on his goals terminal, but just take some kind of a general Routine 2 run, and assess the pc - very carefully assess him, and find out a real live level, that good level. Find his level real good, and then audit it and audit it until you get the tone arm moving good, see? And then just skip it. And then do another assessment (and ignore the fact that that one is still going), and pick up some other level of the Prehav Scale, and then run it - don't get rudiments in - and run it, run it, and run it hard and run it hard and run it hard and run it hard, and all of a sudden the needle will freeze up and the tone arm will freeze up or something. Well, insist that that isn't so good, you see? That isn't so good that it did that; run it a little bit longer. And don't get in any rudiments - no need of end rudiments, either. Now, on the next line, assess again, get some other level of the Prehav Scale, and just run that one till you finally get the needle broken loose - just get it broken loose - and then reassess again. And your pc, about this time, will go "Hmmrh! What's happening? Everything is going green! I have this horrible sensation that this ear keeps tying a bowline with this ear! Ha! I knew I shouldn't have drunk the coffee."

He'll actually have a sensation of going mad. He won't go mad! A few days later it'll drift out, and he will merely spit every time he sees you.

But that actually is the direct results of not flattening levels of the Prehav Scale. But that's a pretty gross auditing error: Every time you get the needle moving, every time you get the tone arm moving well, reassess and get another level; and when you get the tone arm moving well, reassess and get another level - never flatten anything. And on the Prehav Scale, of course, a person feels like he's going mad if you do that, because you're using one of the most powerful set of boosters you can.

You talk about thirty-ton hydraulic jacks! The commands can't help but move his mind around. You know, he could sit there and resist even doing the command, and suddenly he realizes, well, he does it, you see, and rrrr! rrrrrr! It's running a ship on a rocky ocean, believe me.

Do you see what could happen? Because the technology is quite adequate to really pushing the thing down the line, you see? He will do it, willy-nilly, and he goes far in, much further in than you would ever dream that anybody could be pushed.

It'll all drift off in three to ten days, and he will feel fine, whether he gets any auditing or not. But that's not the point. You've wrecked a pc and you may have wrecked a goals-terminal line. And, believe it or not, this actually occurred in a Central Organization. This actually occurred.

Yeah, the interpretation of my request was - wasn't any backwards reason - is as soon as you get some motion in the tone arm, you reassess and do a new level.

All right. Gross auditing errors is what you are dealing with here. That is a far, wide departure.

Now, technically, there aren't too many of these things. One would be, right now, to run any terminal but the goals-have terminal. We would consider that a very gross auditing error, because it would really make a mess out of things.

Leading that, in terms of violence, or even worse than that, is leaving a withhold question unflat. That would be a gross auditing error. We have to move it up to there, because it produces a gross mess when it is done.

Doing a wrong assessment, or using an assessment that was done carelessly, indifferently or incorrectly and not getting it checked: that would be a gross auditing error. Getting or using an assessment that was briefly and carelessly done, or even lengthily and carelessly done. But use an assessment that you just aren't sure of: It's a gross auditing error.

Failing to continue to security check a pc as his case advances, because again this is quite case-damaging and is a gross auditing error.

You haven't heard that one for some time, have you? But nevertheless, it's very much present right now. Do you realize the faster the case gains, the more withholds are going to come to view? And if there's no Security Check to pull them off, your case can ball up in a knot quick as scat. So, the auditor who is running the line should think of his withhold point of the end and beginning rudiments - and the withhold should be left into the end rudiment, also. Just add another one in there. You know, add a "Have you told me any half-truths, untruths?" and so forth. And also add withholds in, because your technology is going too fast. It gives you another crack. So you got an additional one, additional crack at it.

I haven't given you a new write-down of this, because I'm still redoing the end rudiments. You'll see it shortly. There are two or three things that I'm questioning and don't know quite what to do with, yet, but I'll know pretty well, very shortly. That's why I haven't issued you a new slip on it.

The auditor who is running a run on a goals terminal - having found it and he's running a run on it - and he doesn't pay a considerable amount of attention to withholds in beginning and end rudiments, is actually guilty of a gross auditing error, because the withholds are going to appear by the reason of the case is making advance, and the case will advance just to the degree that the withholds are off of it.

And he'd say, "Well, I got all the withholds off at the beginning of the week, and it was just clean as a wolf's tooth. And so the rudiments are in, so I don't have to pay very much attention to withholds on this particular case just now." And then we had two days of marvelous and wonderful gain and everything was just going along beautifully, so of course we're going to have a third day, aren't we?

Ah, that's an unjustified assumption, because there is this about withholds: The withhold which is not pulled - which is restimulated but not pulled - can raise hell.

That's "missing a Security Check question"; can just raise the dickens with a case. And a case advance is also marked by an advance in responsibility, and being marked by an advance in responsibility, brings to view more overts than were formerly available to a Security Check.

That is a test: Is a case advancing? If a case is advancing it develops more withholds; more withholds come into view if a case is advancing.

Now, I'll give you an example of how a case is not advancing. We've done a Security Check, we've cleaned the rudiments, we asked a sort of a Presession 38-type of question in the rudiments, and "What question shouldn't I ask you?" And we've done a good job and we've got the rudiments all clean, and he's just had a Form 3 and everything of this sort. We already have his goals terminal; we go on a goals-terminal run. And we run it Tuesday, and we run it Wednesday, and we run it Thursday. We pay no more attention to withholds, see, and we - Thursday and … What the hell happened? Everything is stuck, and so on. The pc is very unhappy and appears rather blowy. And Friday - oh, well, it's an ARC-breaky session, and it's all very upset.

Well, what could possibly be wrong with the case? Well, the case advanced, that's what's wrong with the case, and if a case advances it develops withholds.

Now, this is how it should run, according to some auditors. Let's look at this one: Now, you get all the withholds off and you get it all straightened out, and you run him Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And you do another Security Check and you're just very careful of withholds on Friday, and you make sure they're all polished up and the end rudiments, and so on, and so forth. You don't find any more. There are no more withholds than there were on Monday.

And you say, "Boy, I'm sure doing a good, clean job of auditing" - with absolutely no advance of any kind whatsoever. It's almost unthinkable you could do that these days, but it theoretically could happen.

And if you got no gain on the case of any kind whatsoever, it will occur, then, that the case will not raise in responsibility of any kind whatsoever. So it will occur, then, that at the end of a considerable period of auditing, the person will not have remembered any new withholds of any kind whatsoever, because no raise in responsibility, no additional or new withholds that he hadn't remembered before. See?

Gross auditing error not to keep the withholds off a case while you're running it. It's the one thing that can really stall it down to a walk. It can just go to a sudden thud! and so on.

Withholds, then, make a good test of case advance. Actually, you could take a short Security Check and shake a case down at an end of a short period of auditing, and find out whether or not the case was winning. You do the short Security Check at the beginning, then you audit him for a little while, and do the same, exact Security Check at the end, and he has remembered nothing new: no advance in case. Much more reliable than a profile. A profile is reliable, too, but it'd tell you directly and immediately.

Yeah, because in the first place, remember that withholds are not relegated to current lifetime only. What happens if you start opening up whole track? Don't you think anybody has got any withholds on the whole track? You mean they - you mean they lived all these lifetimes right up to this lifetime, and so forth, and they never had any withholds in those lifetimes. They just died by natural acts and causes, you see, and everything would go along. Yeah, but this lifetime is different; in this lifetime they have withholds.

Well, you start opening up a track, and you, frankly, will see it in running this groups terminal process. Individual will all of a sudden realize he has a withhold from a certain particular group. Uhh! He didn't tell them that!

And then it finally occurs to him, at the long end of a run or something: "You know, I'm not in that group any more? And this amounts to the fact that I am actually withholding my body and my beingness from that particular group. Yes! I have a withhold on that group."

He'll recognize with great clarity that he isn't in the group, and therefore is withholding himself from the group. He recognizes things like this, and they didn't occur to him earlier.

"Oh, yes, well, there was the Marcab government, and there it was, and - still there! Yeah, I was part of it once, and it's still there. No, I haven't anything on them. No withhold. No. There isn't anything I've done they wouldn't like. It's funny, your asking me that, because, actually, I've never done anything, you know, as far as they didn't like. I never have, never have. They get along fine, I got along fine with them, and there's just nothing, you know; and it's all kind of imaginary anyway, and [doesn't] have anything to do with me."

And after you've run the process for a while, why, you come back across the same thing, and he says, "Well, the Marcab government is .. uuuuhh!"

And you say, "What's that?"

And he "Ugh! Well, the last time I was there they had a warrant for my arrest. Ha-ha-ha, ha-ha! I'm not about to go back there!"

Every time, of course, you run across one of these: "I am not about to go back there." "I am not going to there anymore." "No, I do not want to be a member of that group! No!" "What? Become a member of that church? Oh, no! Under no circumstances! Well, that's silly! Stupid! I mean, I don't want anything to do with them, you know, I mean, ruhh!" and so on. "Of course, I'm totally unemotional about it."

"Have withholds from the subject?"

"Oh, no, I don't have any withholds! What made you ask a - ? Oh, wait a minute. Ha-ha-ha! We had a treasurer once that robbed the exchequer and took all the cash that was in their account. I know that happened, and the group was pretty mad about that."

And then we go through, and we mix up, and a few questions later, maybe the next auditing session, all of a sudden the pc goes back across this church group, and he says, in a little small voice, "You remember my telling you about the treasurer that embezzled all the money? Ha-ha-ha. That was me!"

Well, what's the phenomenon? It isn't that he didn't recall it. It's that it was below his level of responsibility. And if his responsibility increases, he eventually remembers more clearly what the situation was and takes responsibility for his own overt.

So actually, the number of overts and withholds that show up newly on a case haven't very much to do with what a criminal the person has been. Everybody has plenty of withholds. You can just assume that; everybody has got plenty of withholds.

The question is, how many are available at any given instant? How many can be pulled or how many are they willing to talk about, at any given instant? Well, it's a direct coordination with the amount of responsibility the case has.

Now, I'll give you a brand-new way of thinking about this: Everybody has a number of withholds. Let's just say everybody has a number of withholds. This would be pretty close to a fact, you see? It's a finite number of withholds - eight hundred billion, or something. But it'd be the same for every person. People aren't necessarily different from one to the next. But that number could be considered more or less constant, person to person, pre-auditing - before they're audited.

All right. Now, what is different? What is different is the degree of responsibility the individual can take for his withholds. So that you have a criminal sitting there. And he says, "Yeah, I robbed a bank, and I did this and I did that, and I did the other thing, and I did .. Oh, yeah, yeah, I murdered babies and so on. And I just killed my wife and children one time and left home," and so on. There's not even a knock on the E-Meter.

Well, his irresponsibility is down to such a level that they're not even withholds. All right, he gets some auditing progress, and he finds out that out of this whole potpourri of crime, one time he was standing outside of a bank and he turned the dead guard over with his foot. And that's an overt. That's a real withhold. And he hadn't remembered that, and now he's telling you. And he sort of feels a little bit bad about it, and he's happy to get it off of his chest.

Then we go on, a little bit more auditing, and we got, a session or two later, and other things are coming and going, and so forth. And he tells you, "Well, uuuhhh, I just realized I'm wanted in Chicago," even though that was two lifetimes ago. "Remember that bank guard I said I turned over my foot? Actually, I shot him."

You say, "All right."

Few sessions later, you're running across things, and so on, and you're getting off withholds and so forth, and that's fine. And the criminal comes back across this point, and he says, "You know that bank guard I told you I shot? Well, the truth of the matter is, I shot him when his hands were up and his back was turned to me. And I read later in the papers that he was the sole support of his wife and children and two aged parents."

And you say, "Well, all right. Good. All right." And he's glad to get that off of his chest.

And then you audit him a while and he comes back across this thing later, and he happens to be clicking down the line on his various overts, and so forth. And he says, "You know that - that bank I was - told you I robbed in Chicago. And I was just a hood - I was just nobody, and so forth. Actually, I was a leader of the gang. Ha-ha-ha - ha. Ha-ha-ha. Hate to have to confess this, but uh … I was, and uh .. we dealt exclusively in bank robberies, and we brought about the panic of 1929. Yes. Ah-ha. I hate to have to tell you about that. There - there it is. There it is, you see?"

You get the idea? Perfect pattern of it was pulled by a fellow one time - I mean, a pc, a very famous guy. I won't particularly expose parts of his case, but he said, "We had a plan, one time. And this plan … Well," he said, "it was just a bunch of us fellows, and we put some people in ice cubes, and we just got rid of them - and, you know, heh-heh just - it was nothing. Didn't have anything to do with thinking of anything. Nothing much going on, so we just thought this'd be a good thing, and it was a gay thing to do. And we - later on … I realize it was bad now, but we just froze 'em up in some ice cubes and dumped 'em in an ocean on another planet, and that's all there is to it."

Well, on a little further questioning, why, it turns out that, well, actually there was some plan in it; there was some reason they did it, and so forth. And it went on, on this kind of a stupid gradient, and so forth, and we find out that we're talking to the fellow who thought up the plan, and executed the plan, and directed the plan that had to do with the implantations of all planets in this corner of the universe.

That was just too much overt, don't you see? It starts out with the basis, "Well, a bunch of us got together, and some people weren't behaving very well. And just some crummy little people, didn't amount to anything very much, you know? And we just put them in some freezer compartments, and we took them over and dumped them in an ocean. Ha - ha-ha! Funny joke, wasn't it?"

You get the difference of magnitude in how these things walk up. Of course you don't know what series of withholds are going to develop into big ones, and what will really remain little withholds.

But the only thing dangerous about it is not clearing the question that you come to as you go across it. So it amounts to one of the greater auditing goofs, and it is a goof of magnitude. The individual that you let sit there and "natter, natter, natter, natter, natter," you're actually ruining his case, because you're letting him sit there and lessen the overt, lessen the overt, lessen the overt, lessen the overt. And you should realize what he's trying to do. He's trying to tell you "I have a withhold!"

And you never say, "Yes, yes, but what did you do of that type and kind that would make you feel that way yourself?"

And the individual says, "Nothing!" and the needle falls off the pin. And then you find out, "Well, yes, as a matter of fact …" and it is quite something else, the time you do this. And all of a sudden it clears! And the case starts going Clear.

But by finding things which other people have done on the pc, you see, getting the motivators, and finding that the pc's - other things, and so forth, you worsen a case.

Only thing you ever want is what the pc does, and what the pc did.

But it comes under one of the headings of one of the finer crimes to leave a Sec Check question unflat. It can do more damage per case, per question, than any other single action; obviously, from the case histories which I have immediately and directly at hand.

So take it to heart, that's something you should never do. Make sure that it's flat before you leave it. And then don't think that a little later, when the person has had a lot more auditing, that the question, if found unflat now, was left unflat at the time it was hit. It wasn't. This is a whole new series of withholds coming up under the heading of the same question. And you differentiate that particular difference.

Okay?

Audience: Yes.

Well, will that do you any good in your auditing?

Audience: Yes, sir!

All right. Thank you.