Okay, and this is the thirty-first. March 31st, 1954, an hour's lecture on simple procedures.

A little more data on Opening Procedure, why does Opening Procedure work, how long should it be worked, a few remarks concerning when it wasn't worked.

Opening Procedure was invented, gotten together, used, tested and released because auditors were having a difficult time getting preclears to start running. That is to say they would get eight, nine, ten, maybe more, hours in the auditing room on the part of some preclear before that preclear would start doing anything.

What was this period? It was a period of the preclear trying to get used to the idea of being under the auditor's direction and instruction. It was hours of the preclear being very aware of the auditor, being very afraid that the auditor might say something that the preclear could not execute and so forth.

In other words, it was a communication pattern in building. A communication pattern was building up during those first many hours of auditing, and it was obvious that they were, therefore, to some degree wasted.

All right. How did we short-circuit that? The best way to do it would be to get the auditor-preclear relationship on solid footing as soon as possible, in such a form that the auditor would be able to know exactly whether or not the preclear was executing and so that the preclear could discover whether or not he was going to get into serious trouble just because he was being audited. So, to get over that hump, Opening Procedure in its three steps.

Opening Procedure is very simple to run. It is simpler to run than it is ordinarily run. People make it more complicated than it is, mostly because they find it monotonous. But monotony is the keynote of it.

One of the first things it will do is very advanced. It's a very simple procedure. But you understand it takes in an awful lot of elements. And one of the simplest things it will do, if worked for an hour or so, will be to get the preclear over the hump of boredom because of duplication. If you ran Opening Procedure in a relatively monotonous fashion - which is to say he went to the same things, same type of thing and so on-you would find the preclear getting up toward a point where he wanted to scream finally. He just would just be getting so bored.

Well now, if he were sitting still going through that process, he would balk, he would scream, he would quit. He's liable, if he's that type of preclear and that's a lot of the preclears; the ones that you'll have trouble with, certainly - he would have the impulse to rise straight out of the auditing chair and quit the session. Why? Because it's getting too monotonous to him. "All right. Let's put it in the front wall. Put it in the side wall. Put it in the other wall. Put it in the ceiling. Put it in the floor. Let's put it in the front wall. The back wall." And all of a sudden the preclear has just gotten these commands over and over and he's done them over and over. Well, it's too… the first thing he'd do would be to just start blowing his stack, and he'd say "scream." He'd want to get out of that chair. The actual fact is that his legs would be getting so nervous that he could hardly hold them still.

In many, many cases this type of boredom, you might call it, takes on a physical aspect. It's painful. He just can't stand it - nervous tension.

This is fear of duplication, unwillingness to duplicate. The mechanics of this are very simple. They're simply this: that the preclear feels that if he keeps doing this, he's going to arrive someplace, and if he arrives there, it's going to hurt. And the closer he comes to arriving, the more it's going to hurt because he's right in the middle of an engram where, let us say, he smacked the ground after a thousand-foot fall. And you just keep working him. And he's working just a little bit further through this engram, and a little bit further and he's going to get to the point of impact. And he doesn't want to be there.

Or, let's say he hit the ground and bounced. Well, having bounced, of course, you're moving him back to the impact point, and he just isn't going to go back to that impact point. It's a problem of can't, must not arrive, you see that?

Now, you see how that would interfere with communication? If you can't be certain things or be in a certain condition, you can't, of course, communicate with those conditions. And if this is the case, why, the individual can't arrive. He doesn't dare be anyplace. And so you get this preclear, he's sort of floating halfway out of engrams and three quarters of the way out of present time and here and there. But he has no place to flinch to; he doesn't dare flinch because he's in the act of flinching. These arrival points are all painful as far as he's concerned, and you've just given him a hard shove and said, "Boy, you're on the road to Clear." And that too is an arrival point. Or you re on the road to a duplication of an old incident. No, no.

Well, if your preclear was sitting still and running this, unable to discharge some of the energy by physical action, he would be in a very bad condition. He'd actually jump out of the auditing chair. The second you began to be monotonous on auditing, he would leave the auditing room.

Why monotonous? That's just duplication. You get what duplication is. Duplication is essentially "it mustn't happen again." "Mustn't happen again" - that's the keynote of it. That's the phrase, the thought that goes along with it. "Mustn't happen again or mustn't happen twice" or "there must be no duplicate of it." It's all this same sort of thing. So we've got this fellow sitting way back in the past someplace going, "Rrrrr. No. Suum-um… " See? Maybe he's in a dentist's office, you know; dentist about to pull his teeth or something like that, you know. And he's saying, "Mustn't happen!" Well, the funny part of it is if he really protested against the dentist pulling his teeth on a stimulus-response basis, he would actually be running in the middle of an experience whereby he's having his teeth pulled. The fact that he's going to have his teeth pulled, by duplication on a stimulus-response basis, pulls up a facsimile. He has machinery which presents a facsimile of teeth being pulled. This is painful. Before the third, fifth, sixth dentist on the line even picks up any forceps this fellow is in pain. Why is he in pain? The effort to pull his teeth is getting his teeth pulled in the past.

Well, why does this go into restimulation? A very simple thing. He is fighting in the past. See, he's got his energy, pressures, everything is all set up there to resist the conclusion of an event. Well, all right. Let's say he resisted the conclusion of event; you come along and you tell him he's going to conclude an event. Just by auditing him, he will all of a sudden sense that he's about to conclude some event which he mustn't conclude. In other words, it mustn't happen again.

What's experience? Experience is that activity, or condition or whatever you want to call it, whereby an individual knows in present time what is painful by reason of occurrences in the past. If an individual has had painful occurrences in the past, then in present time he knows he mustn't engage in those again. He mustn't touch the stove because the stove hurts. Now when he sees a stove he gets a picture of the stove hurting him. This is stimulus-response by facsimile. So he mustn't duplicate, he mustn't duplicate touching the stove. So he stays well away from the stove. Stimulus-response.

This isn't thinkingness. Actually, a thetan in good command of himself and situation, environment, knowing where he was, and so forth, would know very well, if he were trying to keep a piece of energy from being spoiled, that it shouldn't hit corrosive things. He wouldn't have to have a bunch of facsimiles to bar him from touching stoves.

But the thetan who is going along and is united with a body which is fully equipped on stimulus-response mechanisms gets up to a point where everything is automatic. The second he sees a stove there's a tiny tingle in his fingers; it tells him "Stay five feet from the stove," see, because if he gets any closer he's liable to touch it. So he's being restrained mechanically by forces and identities he knows not what of.

He gets very confused after a while. He thinks he's under direction from all directions. And he's being told by unseen forces and unseen things that this, that and the other thing are liable to happen to him. He has some feeling like the environment is very dangerous but he doesn't know why. Well, there may be a stove in the environment and that's telling him, "don't touch," see, "don't arrive," "don't touch," "don't connect." And he doesn't know then. He thinks he's anxious about his wife or he thinks he's anxious about cats or kings or coal heavers or anything but the stove. Because the stove is "don't touch," and "don't touch" is also "mustn't look at." So he never sees the re-stimulator in the environment. He just never sees it. It just goes automatically and he stays away from the stove. Quite automatically staying away from the stove but never recognizing why he is staying away from the stove, but at the same time being told forcibly by a facsimile that if he touches the stove he'll be hurt, because the thought to touch the stove causes him to have a burning sensation in his finger.

You see this? As a stimulus-response mechanism, there's just nothing to this but the environment ordering the fellow around without the fellow's consent. What do we mean by stimulus-response? Just that: the environment ordering a person around without the permission or consent of the thetan. That is stimulus-response.

All right. Let's look at that in terms of "don't arrive." Mustn't touch the stove. You notice you have to contact things before they hurt you. So therefore nearly all the mechanism in the bank on the basis of duplication and so forth is painful. Mustn't touch the stove again, mustn't duplicate the action of touching the stove again. Well, if you look at a communication graph you'll find out that something has to contact a receipt-point before you've got a full communication. So again this is point of "can't arrive."

So all of this stuff, dizzy as it may seem, and so on, all ties together on the fact that one mustn't duplicate. Under no circumstances must one duplicate. Don't duplicate any of these past actions because they're all painful, therefore all of life is painful, therefore there isn't anything but pain anyplace. One mustn't duplicate any pain so, really, one mustn't live. And when he gets enough experience, why, the thing he really learns is that he mustn't live. That is the end product, the reductio ad absurdum of experience, stimulus-response teaching - that one mustn't live.

Now, because these facsimiles are actually a bunch of unseen orders, contacts and other things… They're unseen, you see. They're not differentiated; they're not recognized. He doesn't identify them. He doesn't spot them. He doesn't go over this chain of experience analytically to discover what has happened in the past; he simply reacts. He must be getting an order, then. And where's the order come from? Well, Lord knows. He just kind of knows he mustn't touch the stove. Well, it's the basis of an order. Well, you get a preclear that's doing very badly and the first thing he'll know is that he mustn't receive an order. He knows this.

Now, just below that, a preclear who's in terrible condition - he's receiving orders, but you might as well be auditing a footstool. Because all of the commands you hand out will be simply obeyed by the footstool just as though you'd pushed the footstool. Now, it didn't do this footstool any good to push it. So in such a case it doesn't do the preclear much good to be audited unless you've broken through this mass.

What is this last preclear? Well, he's actually in a hypnotized condition. He is totally under the orders of the environment. Or he's totally under the orders of every person in the environment, selectively. You can tell this preclear - there isn't one in this Unit - you can tell this preclear very easily; he has an eye flutter - a-rdrdrdrdrdrdrr. Or he has a glazed set of eyes; the iris is expanded all the way out. He's very easy to tell. He's hypnotized. He's in a permanently hypnotized state. His reactions aren't necessarily insane reactions at all; he's just running on the environment, something says this way and he goes that way.

You start auditing one of these preclears after he's listened to a tape. You know he's listened to one of my lecture tapes, something like this. And it says "This and that is wrong with a preclear," and by golly, that's what you'll find wrong with him. And you could make a lecture tape - stated with great deliberateness and very, very convincingly, you could make a lecture tape that would say, "Well now, the actual cause back of most aberration in most preclears is the fact that they're wearing their shoes on the right and left foot respectively. Whereas, as a matter of fact, this was never intended. They should have interchangeable shoes which could be worn either on their right or left foot. And it's a matter of shoes here. Actually you see shoes; it normally is shoes. Freud speaks of foot fetishes, and we see then that shoes are the underpinning of the body, so this symbolically could, of course, be the underpinning of the case." We can go on like this and we'd say the technique to do this is so-and-so and so-and-so. And at the end of that time, after this is done, the individual develops a considerable euphoria, and he's very happy. You'd get this case, you would audit him, he'd insist on auditing shoes, you'd audit out shoes and his conflicts with shoes. And when you finished this, if it were done right according to rote, why, he would feel some euphoria. Yet you wouldn't have done anything to the preclear at all. In went the tape, you pulled it out. I mean, there we have…

Now, in any large number of people - people in off the street, if you had fifty people, and the average people in this society, just grabbed them at random - why, you're liable to find anywhere from one to five people present who are doing just that.

Now, these people have another thing which fools an auditor. And you certainly better be alert to this, because this can cause an auditor more trouble and he can be more upset about this. The case isn't improving, and yet it's such a nice case. They're such a nice person; they're so agreeable. The preclear merely sits there and agrees with everything the auditor said. The preclear agrees and agrees and agrees and agrees and agrees and agrees and agrees.

You say, "All right. Now, what did you do?" And he says-he knows what he was supposed to do, you see - so he simply agrees that he did that. "Yes." "Now, you feel better, now don't you?" "Yes, yes."

Actually this darn preclear isn't even running the auditing commands; they're just sitting there agreeing. They're actually totally under your control. If you were to suddenly say to them, "A lion is now wrapping his fangs around your head," the preclear would probably turn pale.

Now, the other night in that group lecture at the hotel, here, told people to get the worst hallucinations they could get. You know, there were about three people present, just because I'd said that they could get a hallucination, got one, and then of course couldn't handle it. And so I told them to get it again, and get it again, and do the same thing over two or three times, and then it eased down. But one of them was left in a considerable unease until the last… the additional material of "Where you are not." And that was the first thing the preclear chose, of course, "Where you are not" - had to find some places where they were not. Well, they were not in that hallucination, and that eased it off; But this was a shocker to them. Why? Somebody said to them, "There's a big lion about to wrap his teeth around your neck." If you said that to this preclear who was agreeing, agreeing, agreeing, they'd have a lion.

Now, if you said in addition to that, "You see, it's a symptom of the case that a person in your condition sooner or later finds snakes crawling out of their pockets. Now, let's see if you can find any snakes crawling out of your pocket at this moment." This preclear would find snakes crawling out of his pocket, that's all. That's one of the reasons why you don't talk any more to a preclear than you have to talk to one. Because you're liable to get a level of case that's on a agree, agree, agree, agree, yes, yes, yes. They're not doing anything; they're just agreeing. You're running them just like you'd run a marionette. And you start handing them any additional data over and above exactly what you have to say to them in terms of auditing and this preclear is just shot. Why? Because they pick them all up as aberrations. They're in an hypnotic trance.

Now, let me give you a manifestation of an hypnotic trance so you get this even more solidly. You can take somebody, say, "Look in deeply into my eyes. Now concentrate on my eyes," and so forth, "and when I count from one to five your eyes will close," and so on. You keep this up. "Extend your hands in front of you. Now you find them extended in front of you. You find it impossible to move your hands down." He will. He's hypnotized.

All right. Now if you were to say to that person “A kangaroo…" You give them some other things to get them in deeper; get them agreeing with you, you see. And you say, “You will now find a kangaroo one inch high sitting on your right knee." He would actually see a kangaroo, and believe it was there, and be utterly convinced it was there. See? He'd have that kangaroo. You said he had the kangaroo; he's got the kangaroo.

Now compare this person… Oh, you wake him up afterwards, you say, "When I count from three back to one and snap my fingers, three, two, one, snap, you will wake. All right." And so on. But he would; he'd wake up, and he'd be out of your control at that moment. But if you've got too many preclears that walk in to see you, an auditor, who are themselves in a sort of a somnambulistic state, they are pretty bad off.

Now, they're going to puzzle an auditor because they're very agreeable. They are apparently very nice people. They don't do anything wrong. They do everything right, and they don't get well.

Well, recognize what you're doing with this case. You're saying, "Now, did that help you any?" Well, they don't want to make you feel bad, so they say, "Yes, yes, that helped. Yes." They agree. Well, how the devil would you ever check up on this case or on the case that just covertly says "Yes" and does something else entirely, and how would you check up on a case which was running on a lot of machinery (which is to say his machinery is obeying the auditing orders) unless you visibly could look at their body walking here and there and doing this and that. You'd sure know whether or not they were doing anything.

Well, supposing this person who was agreeing with you all the time - this is another symptom of the case - supposing this person that was agreeing with you all the time was asked to and did put, let us say, apathy into the front wall and into the back wall and into the ceiling and into the floor and into the side walls and the front wall and the back wall and the ceiling and the floor and the side wall and the front wall and the back wall… All of a sudden just about that time, and just about that fast they suddenly go nyarrroooo! Everything is getting very tense.

One of the reasons this is happening is the person isn't creating his own energy. He's simply using residual energy in the body, and you're exhausting the energy level of the body down. That's one symptom. But that is just a symptom of something else.

You're asking them to go through the same motions several times, which is to say, duplication. You are actually making them make it happen again. And of all the things they know they know this: It must never happen again. They know they mustn't arrive. It must never happen again. They must never touch anything significant in their case. All of these things go together. These things they know. They may not know if the sun is shining, they may not know if the floor is under their feet, but by golly they know it must never happen again. They're not even sometimes sure what, but just "it" mustn't.

And you ask them to make anything happen twice. You say, "Put some apathy in the ceiling. Put some apathy in the ceiling. Put some apathy in the ceiling. Put some apathy in the ceiling" - all of a sudden they're going to go zinng-grrrrrr! And they're liable to jump out of the auditing chair. Or they're liable to collapse into a sort of an apathy and quit on you.

Various manifestations are liable to set up which will immediately stop the progress of the auditing. You might not detect that this progress of the auditing had stopped, to tell you the truth. They might feel that they are in a sufficiently unfriendly environment so they'd better suppress any protest which they make, and they simply after that just sort of get by one way or the other. You aren't auditing anybody. You're giving them commands, they're receiving them, they're either doing something else or they're not doing anything, they're just being agreeable.

All right. How do we cross this little bridge? Well, you start running Opening Procedure. You have the person walking around, at least you have him in motion. And when he strikes this terrific level of boredom, when he strikes this terrific tension, if he's going to strike it - after you've asked him to do several things, like, "Let's go over and find a spot on that corner of the room there. Let's put your finger on that. Okay. Now let go of that and find a spot on the center of the table and put your finger on that. Okay. Now let go of that. Now find a spot over on that corner of the room, and go over and put your finger on that. Now let go of that. Now find a spot on the table, and go over and put your finger on that."

Now, if you just kept that up for a little while, you'd see this boredom manifestation start to cut through on the individual. But fortunately he's in motion. He doesn't quit on you. He is in motion. You've got him going, you can inspect him, you can watch him. I have had a preclear throw a tantrum on this - you know, get down in the middle of the floor and scream - but after a while got him up and got him going through it again, and broke through, you might say, the boredom barrier. You know, there's a sound barrier and other barriers. There's probably this boredom barrier.

Well, you'll break a preclear through that. You might as well make up your mind to break a preclear through that sooner or later because you're going to have to. It had better occur while you're doing something like Opening Procedure than while you're doing some thoughtful process, because actually they'll just clam up and kind of grit their teeth and clench their eyelids and that'll be that. Auditing will go no further.

Well, you can get too complicated with Opening Procedure in that you can give him something that's very difficult to do. And you can make the mistake in Opening Procedure of letting the preclear do several things, and then have him… Here's one of the… about the only real mistake can be made and it runs like this:

"All right. Now, think of a new place to go. Now change your mind about that and think of a new place to go. Okay. Now change your mind about that and think of a new place to go." This is all the time he's waiting to go some place, see. "Now change your mind about that and think of a new place to go. All right. Now go there." This new place to go… he was running out of places in the room and he was trying to get different, and this new place to go was down, straight down through the floor. He can't do that; you'll give him a failure. So just recall that that sort of thing can happen, whereby you're running off without getting any response to the preclear. So you want to substitute in a "Where was that?" "Now think of a place to go. All right. Now where was that? All right. Think of a new place to go. Okay. Where was that?"

In other words, keep him communicating. Don't let him just run through a lot of things in his mind. Otherwise he's liable to get into one of these impossible situations.

This can be quite upsetting to him, by the way. He's just thought of going down through the floor. He knows you're… you've already told him to change his mind five times, so he knows you're going to change his… have him change his mind several more times, so he might as well think of something silly like straight up through the roof with his body. So he thinks of it, and then you say go there and that failed. Has more effect than you would look for.

Now let's take directional machines and let's find out that direction and evaluation are much the same thing. That is to say, directing a person from one place to another place in this universe is much the same as any kind of evaluation, or is evaluation.

All right. By moving the preclear from one point to another you are changing his position in space. You are to some degree breaking his rapport and agreements with other people who have directed him around. Now, let's take somebody that's been in the army. He's been in the army for a long time and he got a lot of drilling, and this maybe looks to him like close-order drill. Now, you as an auditor start moving him to this corner of the room and that corner of the room and so forth - looks to him like drilling. Do you know that when people tell him to go someplace it's still some kind of a mock-up of his first sergeant or captain or somebody. You know, it's still passing through that line-up. Well, it gives him a chance to break free. He can see clearly that it is the auditor sending him around. Something else can send him around.

But there's a big difference between Opening Procedure and close-order drill in the army. In Opening Procedure he is told where he is going to go before he goes. In the army he's simply told to go. Never told where to go. You'll find there's a tremendous scarcity on this case of where to go. He's actually running a scarcity on it. You start to run Opening Procedure on ex-military men and you'll get interesting manifestations, such as tiredness. You'll get boredom, anger, upset and a tremendous certainty that it's doing absolutely no good. This they're certain of beyond anything else.

But you know what they're really certain of? They're not certain that your auditing is doing no good; they're just certain army close-order drill is no good. And you brought that certainty up to the front. Well, they'll run on out through that, giving them an opportunity, then, to do something that they have never done before, which is actually, with the second step, choosing a place to go and going there.

So it breaks down the machine which was installed by close-order drill in the army. This person is running on some kind of a directional machine. You know, it tells him to go here and tells him to go there. When somebody tells him to go there, it goes into the machine and the body starts in that direction. His body has been handled exteriorly far too much. So there's a portion of the body that sends this body, and he hasn't too much control over it. By running Opening Procedure you break the machine down and put him back in control of his body. Now, that's very profitable, isn't it.

Let's take some other things that this does. Let's take the spiritualist. Now, it wouldn't seem to you that you'd get very many people who had been interested in spiritualism. Well, don't kid yourself. There are lots of them. Mysticism, spiritualism, has been rampant in the Western world since 1735 - actually 1655 - started to come in pretty strongly from the East. But this is a highly specialized kind of spiritualism and highly specialized kind of mysticism that came in from India, and it's been in the Western world for a long time. But there was all kinds of spiritualism before that.

Do you know that Grimm's Fairy Tales are actually the legends of the water and tree spirits and river spirits and lake spirits of the German people? That's Grimm's Fairy Tales. They've just been Hobson-Jobsoned around until they are told to little children or something like that. Actually they're legends of spirits.

Now, spirits have been every place in every time. Man has never quite gone away from this one. Well, we pick up somebody. Let's say he's a Marine. Let's say he's a Marine captain or something, and we're auditing him. He's been a Marine years ago. Obviously, this person is no mystic. This person is no spiritualist. He knows nothing about these things. Let's audit him, and get through, and so forth. And we audit him for about five hours, and he's making very slow progress. And he's liable to ask you at the end of the five hours if you really think his guardian angel approves of the techniques you're using. Don't be too alarmed if you hear such a reaction, because there's practically 100 percent of the populace, one time or another, have been mixed up with spirits, spiritualism, mysticism or any one of the allied lines by which man has sought truth and has gotten booby-trapped.

This Marine, you find out, served a long hitch in Santo Domingo. And all the time he was in Santo Domingo he was talked to continually by a mamaloi. Otherwise, this boy's been sane ever since. He receives all of his directions from a witch doctor, or a witch. Yeah, he's been ordering troops around on the advice of a witch doctor for years. This is not uncommon. Because a thing is not spoken about is no reason it doesn't exist or isn't known. And that's a good rule for you to go on.

You see, although people don't talk much about various types of sexual activities one is prone to think these things might not exist. You see? Supposing nobody talked about sex at all but we still had generations coming along, why, certainly there must be something being done on the subject of sex. Right? Well, okay. And yet people wouldn't be talking about it.

Well, let's take up spiritualism, mysticism, all these various odds and ends - magic. Just because people don't discuss these things is no reason why they don't have a lot about them. They do. They do have a tremendous amount.

And this teaches all kinds of interesting things, but one of the main things that it does is to inquire from nothingness for direction. And that is, you might say, a common denominator for all spiritualism and guardian angels and priests and all of this sort of thing. It's inquire of nothingness for direction - in other nothingness than self.

Well, you know it'll make a man real happy if you're standing there solidly in the flesh - even though you're exteriorized Lord knows how far away - giving him orders because he can see the source of the order. And long since this fellow has submerged from any rationality because he just gave up trying to find the source of the order. Stimulus-response mechanisms all contain hidden orders. Well, the people go around and they get bug-eyed because they are being told that they're receiving orders from nothingness, whether it's spiritualism, magic, mysticism, any one of these off brands of "How do we get to the hidden influence?" This could be the motto of all such practices. It's "Tallyho, tallyho, hidden influence here we come." Somewhere there's a hidden influence is a basic denominator of these things.

All right. "Out here we've got a God. And he gives directions to you personally, John Doe, and he's going to tell you everything to do, and how to brush your teeth, and so forth. And he looks after you all the time, and he writes it all down in a book. But he doesn't exist because he is everyplace at the…" You know? In other words, let's just spin quietly where we are.

This restimulates - you get this - this restimulates the hidden-influence characteristic of stimulus-response direction. Every time you ask somebody to take orders from an indefinite nothingness, you are restimulating their stimulus-response mechanisms. So you spin them. You couldn't figure a neater mechanism, you see, because the keynote of the engram bank is that it gives hidden orders. It tells you to stay off the stove, so on. But where did the order come from? Lord knows, see?

We talk about the racial instincts, and we talk about this and so on. But where did the order come from? Well, Lord knows. We don't know where the order came from. It just… He just suddenly got the idea he'd better not touch the stove.

Actually, where did the order come from? He's got a mechanism which presents him with a facsimile of getting burned, which holds the body off from getting burned a second time. Well, where did the order come from?

Now somebody comes along and sells a bunch of pie in the sky. He says, "The orders are up there in the nothingness, or they're standing on your… just back of your right shoulder. Which is to say your guardian angel or your favourite spirit or your master or somebody is going 'Hocus-pocus' just back of your right shoulder," and that is an indefinite nothingness. And of course it restimulates all of the indefinite nothingnesses of the entire engram bank.

The nothingness impulse is the stimulus-response impulse - the nothingness, the hidden influence. Men are frightened of this thing called the hidden influence. Anytime they can get orders from hidden sources, they can be scared. Most of the people who are occluded are simply holding on to that blackness because it is so mysterious. It's mystery. Something can come out of that blackness and tell them what to do. And so they bird-dog it; they sit right there and they look at that blackness. And there it is, and it gives them orders. Thoughts come out of it. Terrible stuff So therefore they hold on to it. They're afraid of it. The great mystery.

Now, this mystery is, basically, the hidden influence. So we get the individual who is haunted by other spirits. He thinks he has fifteen thetans beside himself all giving him orders. We have the individuals who go around and pray to their guardian angels to give them orders and directions. And each time it's orders and directions from a hidden and undetermined source. And that is the common denominator of stimulus-response thinking - orders from a hidden and undetermined source. So if you want to throw a guy totally into restimulation, you give him orders from a hidden and undetermined source.

How do you throw Fac One, the whole evolutionary track, birth, prenatals, all the accidents he's ever been in, all the operations he's ever been in, how do you throw all of these things into restimulation almost simultaneously? You tell him he's taking orders from God. Where's God? He's a nothingness which is giving him orders. He can't be determined as to where he is. The fellow will then start looking around for hidden orders, you see? The second he starts looking around for hidden orders, of course he runs into the entire engram bank, crash.

You can draw a curve of mental health on people up to, and after the time when, they encountered some sort of a hidden-influence activity, and you will find that their mental health might have been quite high, and at the moment they struck the hidden influence they hit a downward curve which was quite steep and which has been on the way south ever since.

Now, they might in the interim have suddenly given up religion, given up spirits, given up God, given up all these things, just skipped the whole thing. They're being hard-headed and practical. They're being scientific. They're being almost anything you can think of. And they're still hitting the downgrade. Science is just a dramatization of what hidden message does the physical universe have next. You see that? It's just what hidden message is it going to give us next.

Now, people get that, for instance, mixed up a little bit with me. They say, "For Christ's sakes, what hidden messages has he got next?" you see? Well, just to counteract this, in Issue 28-G of the Journal of Scientology, we are reprinting totally the 1947 thesis on this science. It was later brought out and handed around very slightly. It got around very little in published form. Its original name however was Scientology: A New Science. And we have this, then, clear from 1947. Now, that's been a long time stable. We're publishing that in Issue 28-G.

Publishing it really just for this reason: There's only been one single change that is not in that issue, not in that original thesis - just one thing. And that's an auditor is trying to delete the reactive mind from the individual. Now we have discovered the unit of beingness is the analytical mind, is the person, and we are not trying to delete the reactive mind from him now; we're trying to delete him from the reactive mind.

Now, that's certainly a slight change of vector. But you'll find practically everything we're talking about today, not just in Book One 19… what would be called Book One 1950, which isn't the first book. It's 1947. You practically find everything we're talking about today in that 1947 edition.

That, by the way, was by carbon copies, mimeographs, hectographs, and so forth, probably circulated by… has probably by this time circulated more copies than the 1950 Dianetics: The Modern Science Of Mental Health. You'll still find it around under Scientology: A New Science here and there-tattered, moth eaten, torn to pieces. You don't run into these people ordinarily, merely because there's two billion people here on the face of the Earth - a lot of people.

People used to copy this thing and give it to some friends, something. It's quite short. It's only about thirty-four thousand words. And it's got everything in it. It's a very simple rendition on the subject. That's the only difference is the vector.

But that states very clearly, very clearly, it says a person is subjected continually to hidden orders and commands which he cannot identify, the source of which he cannot accurately establish. And this hidden source of command we will call the reactive mind. And there are energy pictures in this mind which hiddenly influence the individual by giving him unseen, misunderstood orders. And he's under continual bombardment with this. Well, that's what that book talks about. That's Scientology: A New Science, 1947 - Issue 28-G.

Now, by golly, we're certainly not very far afield from that, are we? We're a pretty solid thing. Well, what have we done? By examining the anatomy of this very carefully and by a discovery that the individual can be deleted from the reactive mind, instead of the reactive mind deleted from him, discovering that the identity of the individual is a unit of beingness which can be independent of the body, we have found a considerable number of processes which work faster and faster and better and better. Actually, the simpler the process, the faster and easier it works.

Opening Procedure is certainly no exception of this. It gives him a known, establishable source of command, which of course gives you the first breakdown of any undesirable condition. Let's give the guy a visible source of command. That's the auditor.

And immediately after we give him the auditor as a visible source of command, we give him himself "Find a place to go to, now. Now go there." He's choosing places to go to, and now he's even choosing when to go. And you see why Opening Procedure saws through?

Once again, once again, I could make it very, very complicated. We could go into this, we could travel all the way down the line. But there isn't any reason to be complicated in any of this material. And once again I had better emphasize the fact that although it is simple, it works. Only simplicities really work. If a complexity works, it's because a simplicity is working rather well, hidden inside of it. If a complexity works at all, a simplicity is at work inside of it, making it possible for the complexity to work. Now, there was a case in Unit 4 which went all the way to the end of the Unit still fighting back at auditors. And one day, after the Unit ended - this case will be back, will be squared around, because this case hasn't been completed one day after the end of the Unit an earlier Unit auditor grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and put him through Opening Procedure, and in a relatively short space of time had run him through two periods of deep apathy and some other manifestations and had run out the compulsive outward outflow of communication which the preclear had managed to fend off all auditing with. This tells you simply that the other Unit 4 auditors who audited this preclear didn't run Opening Procedure on him. One day after the course a fellow does. Now the fellow has got to come back here.

But this was the break of this case. How much auditing had that case had on all kinds of this-a's and that-a's from all kinds of people? I hate to tell you, but it must have been in the vicinity of two hundred hours. Right here in the Unit.

Now, because he was rather antagonistic and didn't take kindly to auditing, he didn't really have very many auditors working on him. Just some hours were rolled up in that fashion. Most of his hours that were rolled up were in group processing. What was he doing in group processing? He was sitting there figure-figure-figure-figure-figure "How can I possibly evade this one?" That's all he was doing. And somebody comes along with this simple process a day after the Unit is over, and here we go. The case breaks. Well, that's real interesting, isn't it.

You're saying, "What the hell was the matter with the auditors that were auditing him before that time?" Well, they were two other auditors who didn't complete the course, and they didn't complete the course because they didn't run Opening Procedure on that preclear. They obviously, then, don't know how to audit. But again, that's all being taken care of; one or the other. Unit 4 was a big unit. We had to let three, four, five of those cases skid a bit. They'll be back. But the breaking of the case was on simple procedures which weren't run on the case. Savvy?

So in Unit 5 here let's pick this up right at the beginning, so that we don't have somebody coming back here after the Unit is all over, and having us suddenly discover that Doake's case is in terrible condition, and we just can't seem to get an entrance into this case, and then suddenly discover that nobody has run Opening Procedure on this case. Well, they ran it. They ran it for a couple of minutes and said, "Oh, that's how it goes," and skipped it from there on.

How long could you run Opening Procedure? Well, by golly, on a case that isn't accessible, I would simply run it until the case was accessible. Ooooo, that's a long time. Well, it's a lot shorter time than the eight or nine hours you would run of various kinds of commands which weren't being executed, which weren't getting through, because this preclear is sitting there listening all the time… Now, let's get this real straight. He's sitting there listening to a bunch of hidden orders, source hidden, from the engram bank. And the auditor says to him, "Now get three places where you're not." And the engram bank says to him, "Oh ye, oh ye who sitteth there? Getteth thee three places where you are drinking." That's what's going on in his head, only he doesn't even articulate it that much.

He simply spots around - "Let's see, three places where you're not. Okay. Now, let's see, I'm not drinking. I'm not drinking at the local soda fountain, and I'm not drinking in that airplane that went overhead, and I'm not drinking. I don't drink. I don't drink. Drinking, drinking, oh ye who cup runneth over. Oh, be something, the auditor says? Oh, the auditor said be something. Okay. Be, bee, bzz-bzz-bzz." Reactive mind in operation. It's taking precedent over the auditor's commands.

So what's the make and the break of the case? It's when the auditor's commands carry more weight than the engram bank's commands. And then, finally, where the preclear's commands carry more weight than the auditor's commands or the engram bank commands. The gradient scale of case rise. It's a question of command value. If an individual is afraid of being ordered around, if he's afraid of being an effect, you certainly better bust through the easiest way first, and you've got it.

Now, just because some auditor of the 4th Unit - two auditors to be exact - decided that they knew a lot about it and they knew what to run on this case (they were going to run a yengram or a spengram or a "spingram" or something on the case by logarithmic tetrahedral or something), this guy drifts through two hundred hours of group processing going "Bzz-bzz-bzz, bee, be, no, no. Let's see I'm not drinking in that airplane. Drinking. Drinking is the root of all evil."

This guy isn't even crazy, you understand; he's not mad. He's just mis-routed on his communication lines. When he starts to concentrate on obeying some order, what happens to him? He obeys some other order. This is all that's wrong with him.

Do you suppose there would be anything wrong with you if you said to your body, "All right, now be awake. Now be asleep," and your body, bing, was awake, and your body, bing, was asleep? Do you suppose there'd be very much wrong with you if you could do that? By golly, there sure wouldn't be. Well, this would be a case of your body obeying your orders. So therefore you'd have to have confidence that your orders are going to be obeyed, and you'd have to know who was issuing the orders. You'd have to know who you were, wouldn't you, in order to know who was issuing the orders. Well, you can start out by that by knowing who's issuing the orders; it's the auditor. See? That identifies and localizes that.

How is Opening Procedure run? It is run in such a fashion as to promote confidence on the part of the preclear in the auditor. It is run by the auditor in such a fashion as to never offer a second command before the first has been executed. Its purpose is to establish as adequate a communication line as possible and to get through to the preclear and to be able to observe adequately, visibly, whether or not the preclear is concurring immediately with the auditing commands given, exactly as given, as precisely as possible.

Now, perhaps in spite of all I've said to you, you're going to say "That's a light, nothing-much, throw-it-over-the-side, skip-it sort of a procedure. It's much, much better to run basic-basic on reach and withdraw." No, it's not. It's much better to say to your preclear, "All right, let's reach," and have the preclear reach and know he is having himself reach, and when you say to the preclear, "All right, withdraw," and the preclear withdraws and knows he's having himself withdraw, than to say to the preclear, "Reach," and the preclear withdraws, to say to the preclear "Withdraw" and the preclear says, "Let's see. I guess I better double-terminal my father now." How can auditing work unless commands are executed. But in the far essence of the thing, how can you control you or your environment unless you know who's giving the orders.

As far as the preclear is concerned, all he has to learn and the biggest lesson he has to learn is who's boss. That's the biggest lesson he has to learn. The first lesson he learns: Who's boss? The auditor. And the next lesson he has to learn, and the lesson the auditor teaches him after he's learned the lesson of who's boss is: Who's boss? I am.

And if he learns both of those lessons, he's boss. He doesn't have a sudden command sneaking up on him that says "I think I will be sick now. Okay, I'm sick." And he'll, "Who-who the devil said that?" He could say to himself "I am well," or he could say to a person in the society, without even articulating it, "You're well," and the person would be well. A command will be carried out as well as individuals understand who is giving the command, and as individuals are able to receive the command and know what and who is receiving it.

So there, in essence, is Opening Procedure. It's very easy, but it should be done right if it's going to be done at all. And it better be done, because it'll save you many, many, many, many, many hours at the beginning of cases.

Furthermore, it puts the preclear to a large degree under your auditing control, because you're changing his position in space. Therefore you are to some degree handling him and he knows it. And so he can follow your auditing orders afterwards. But unless you've given him that much indoctrination, he doesn't think he has to follow your auditing orders afterwards.

He'd rather listen to that voice that comes in from two sectors off the left occipital, the voice that says, "You sure look silly running that." You know that a lot of preclears sitting there, they have these voices that say things to them. Perfectly sane preclears. They've been engineers for Westinghouse, or somebody, for years and years. Or they've been mayor of the town or something. And the mayor… you'd be surprised; he'd probably… the mayor of Poughkeepsie, or Podunk or something, very well may have been running the whole city and so forth on this basis: "Let's see now, should we go in for slum clearance?" and then he sort of listens for a moment. And there's a little voice just off to the left of his nose or someplace, and it says, "Yes." "Okay. Yeah, slum clearance. Yes, that's what we're putting up in front of the City Council this week." That's the way he was running the town. You examine him, and you find out this circuit he depends upon utterly says yes all the time. It doesn't ever say no. He never discovered this himself He was under the command of a hidden influence.

Woe, woe betide he who is under the command of a hidden influence. If you put an individual in the society… out into the society and then convince him that the society is all running under a hidden influence of some sort, you're liable to spin him. It's the loveliest mechanism of all as far as psychosis is concerned - the hidden influence.

All right. You'll find a lot of people that are always trying to add a deeper significance to what I am teaching people in Dianetics and Scientology. You know, there's something about "Where do you get the information from?" "Who tells you this?" "How do you plot that out, from what source?" It never occurs to them that about the only way you could ever latch on to Scientology or have developed it at all would be in the aggregate if you were in a sort of a native state of knowingness. If you were in a state where you were being told all the time, believe me, you never would have developed a thing. You get the idea? The fellows who tried to research the mind from textbooks on the subject of the mind never got there. They didn't get there because continually they were being dictated to by hidden influences.

Well, I'm not a hidden influence dictating anything to you - not even vaguely. Most straightforward sort of an approach possible. Nothing mysterious about it at all. What I'm telling you is the aggregate experience of myself and hundreds, even thousands, of auditors. This stuff works. It works because it's simple, because it's a direct approach to the problem, and because it doesn't have any bugs, which is to say hidden influences in it.

Okay.