I want to talk to you about Step I of Intensive Procedure, two-way communication.

Although you discover in the examination of existence that consideration is senior to all other things, you have in any preclear who is living in the physical universe who is still associating with a body, an enforced mechanics. In other words, mechanics of existence are enforced upon him consistently and continually. Therefore mechanics are much more important to this individual than considerations.

He goes on an inversion. He first is found considering, only he’s not really considering. He’s not making a postulate and having something come true, he’s trying to figure out who’s to blame. That’s one of the main things he’s trying to figure out. He’s trying to figure out when that ridge in front of his face is going to go away. He’s waiting until the auditor does something spectacular.

He’s doing a lot of things, but first and foremost he is contactable in the field of mechanics, not in the field of considerations. Considerations are prior to mechanics. This is obvious. But your preclear has gotten to a point where he is inverted on the subject and by his day to day living he is closer into contact with mechanics than he is considerations and yet there he is, considering.

Well, he’s never going to recover from anything considering. He might figure his way out of the trap, he might think his way out of it, but as long as we approach the problem as really a purely mechanical problem of a set of convictions rather than considerations, we’ll be successful with the preclear.

And the first and foremost of those is that, of his convictions, is that it is very aberrative to communicate. This he’s certain of. Now, he may have lots of other certainties but that one he’s actually very certain of and we discover that the only thing that is punishable in this universe is communication. Non-communication is not punishable.

We discover that the inanimate object is not guilty, it was the animate object which was guilty. We discover that the driver who was going faster than the other driver was always to blame. This by the way is not even vaguely true. That’s just the way people look at things to keep them turned around so that they don’t have to take responsibility and make everything disappear.

So we discover as we look over this problem that our preclear is certain that if he communicates he will be punished. He has communicated in the past, he tried to talk to people and like the greatest contribution of psychiatry, for instance the prefrontal lobotomy. I don’t know why they don’t go down to the butcher shop and set up a business there in earnest instead of hiding behind a medical license. But it would do just as much good to cut up some calves’ brains lying in the butcher’s counter window as it would be to cut up some psycho’s brains.

Now psychiatry knows this, they know it very well, they have never made anybody well with prefrontal lobotomies or transorbital leukotomies. And yet they go on doing it because the psychotic’s condition is desperate, you see, they of course have to be desperate in treating it. They’ve never won, they have nothing but solid failures behind them. That is not a condemnation, that is just another truth of the matter. Alright.

They operated on a fellow one day at a well-known sanitarium and this fellow had a large chunk of his brain sawed out and he was put on display as an object which had… By the way, the only reason they do a prefrontal lobotomy is because people can survive it. Anyway, they say so. The original case history on the thing, just as long as I’ve mentioned that subject I might give you a little data on it, the first and original case history of this and the only case history that’s quoted in psychiatry is that an idiot blacksmith one day, a blacksmith’s helper approached a forge and the forge exploded and a crowbar flew through the air and drove in at his right temple and came out at his left temple. And he survived this. You look in vain in that case history to discover whether anything happened to his idiocy. And we find that no change occurred with regarding his idiocy, but a part of his brain had been removed and he did survive and this is the sole authority, believe me this is the sole authority for doing prefrontal lobotomies.

Alright. They did a prefrontal lobotomy on this fellow and they put him on display and somebody asked him after he had been put on display if he had noticed any change in himself as a reason of the prefrontal lobotomy. And he looked very solemnly and somewhat covertly around and he said, „Yes. I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut.“

So, that is the basic lesson that anybody learns in this universe. They learn to keep their mouth shut, and it’s the wrong lesson. When in doubt, talk. When in doubt, communicate. When in doubt, shoot. And you’ll be very successful all the way along the line if you just remember that. There’s no, there’s no compromising with this. A thetan is as well off as he can communicate and he’s no better off. And when a restraint comes upon his communication line, then he starts to wind up and finish up and that is the end of him.

So, our preclear sits there, and he knows that if he communicates he’ll be punished. Anything he says will be used against him, they’ve told him so for many lives. Anything that he cares to bring up, he knows that the person he brings it up to is going to make fun of it, is going to dive on it and going to challenge him with it and so on. He’s certain of this, and that if he happens to impart any immediate secret of his existence, he knows it will undoubtedly be on the radio by four o’clock that afternoon. So, he will approach a session with considerable diffidence. He will not be sure what he should say.

I know one very, very bad psychotic for instance, that… all this psychotic; it’s not that your preclears are psychotic, we’ve got no business processing psychotics, but it’s just an extremity of human duress which can be used to illustrate some points because there’s nothing worse. Alright. This person had this as a terrible obsession, it was just a fantastic obsession. They would not talk because they knew that if they said anything, the person they said it to would carefully store it up and wait for the right time to use it against them. And this was all this person would say. This person would utter that sentiment in one way or another.

It was a dramatization a hundred percent, but it lay straight across their communication line. This person was utterly insane, completely insane, I mean this person could not take care of the body or perform menial tasks or anything else. And yet this person’d just go over and over on that record. Just over and over on it. „Well, if I said anything then you would store it up and then you’d wait for the right time and then you’d use it against me,“ and then the person would clam up. And you’d try to get them in communication again, they go through this same routine.

Well let me assure you of something. A person doesn’t have to be psychotic to have that basic manifestation in this universe. They’re not even vaguely psychotic when they have it. They adjudicate their own sanity by knowing when to talk and when not to talk, and it starts to peel down to a point of where they know [speaks louder] when not to talk, you see, and [speaks softer] when to talk. And then they know [speaks much louder] WHEN NOT TO TALK, you see, and [speaks much softer] when to talk, and then silence. And that’s the way the track goes.

So, don’t for a moment suppose that Step I is included as just a handy way to start a session. It is not a handy way to start a session, it’s processing. This person is accessible, ordinarily, your preclear, on the third dynamic. This is probably the last dynamic to fold up. They carry a social dynamic all the way through. Processing itself is a third dynamic situation and so is aberration. Third dynamic. It’s the thetan plus the body that can bring about an aberrative state, it’s the thetan plus the sixth dynamic, the universe, that causes the difficulty and so on.

Alright. We have then Step I as this first step simply because it is the most difficult step. It is the most arduous step and it is the step which the Asclepians, the goddess Febris — I had a talk with her the other day, she said she could never crack it either — that was Roman psychiatry and medicine. And the boys around the time in Germany when they started up the first idea that psychology could be approached on a, I mean the mind could be approached on a scientific basis. That was the original premise of psychology and a very, very good one, brought up by a fellow by the name of Wundt. And, there’s nothing wrong with this, I mean it was a good hunch, never been followed by that particular field, but it was a good, a good way to start. Scientific methodology was not there and then immediately classified. And if he had sat down and classified scientific methodology at that moment, he would have been all right, but after that they did unregulated experiments, uncontrolled experiments, wild cat fuddling around, collecting enormous quantities of data, which data was supposed to amount to something one day. But that field was never able to do anything in the field of a two-way communication. Never knew the parts of communication, doesn’t to this day. They, they’re more and more the only one.

Not only is psychology the only one which belongs to nobody, but it’s the only one in every university in the world where it is taught. That psychology department is the only psychology department. I mean it’s heaped up this way further and further, an incredible thing. But these people are what? They’ve never solved communication so they don’t go into communication. And the main thing they never solved is that Step I, communication.

Alright, we come on up to psycho-“anal”-ysis and we get into that field and we find out that they used various methods there, originally Breuer and Freud did, to produce a twoway communication. And then they went all out and they decided, gee, if they could just get somebody talking and they’d just talk, why, that’s just fine. But the first approach to it was hypnosis and that is a very poor approach. Not only a very poor approach, it’s a very inhibitive approach. If you’ve ever had anybody as a preclear that you’ve been running 8-D on, you will appreciate this. 8-D on the hypnotist, „Where would hypnotists be safe?“ You’d get some sort of an idea of the aberrative quality.

Alright. There we didn’t actually solve a two-way communication. We got a system, a system by which somebody simply talked endlessly, and talked and talked and talked. And there was no communication from the analyst. I saw a cartoon one time and the, one analyst is all bright and cheerful and fresh and he had been so every afternoon at quitting time and the other analyst said, „My goodness, how can you be so bright and fresh sitting there all day long listening to those patients?“ The other analyst says, „Who listens?“

Well, they had it in reverse. You see, they had this idea that if they could just make the person outflow, outflow, outflow, outflow, outflow, this would solve it. It doesn’t solve it. It’s a two-way communication. So they just went all out in psychoanalysis and what success it had was just the fact that they did specialize in trying to get somebody into communication one way or the other. But, they again didn’t have any anatomy of communication.

And we move on forward to various thoughts and philosophic endeavors and so on on this subject and we discover that an individual very rarely is found in a good state of communication when he sits down on the couch. And I don’t care who this person is, they’re just not in a good state of communication. They’re either obsessively communicating or they’re inhibited, they haven’t got a good balance on this subject. And you take the most average preclear in the world, he’ll give you ordinarily just social responses. You say, „How are you?“ he’ll say, „I am fine.“

Forty-five minutes later, the oddity is, this person says to you, „I feel terrible.“ You got a social response, and then the preclear answered the question. This question is sometimes, if you’ll notice it carefully, will come up as non-sequitur entirely. The person, forty-five minutes after you asked them how they were, they tell you how they are. And the gap is filled with a social response, it’s just a trained response so you triggered a little machine. So that isn’t a two-way communication with the preclear at all, is it? You’re talking to a bunch of social machinery.

Well, you’ve done this all too often much longer than you should have, in plain social activities. You went around to ask somebody about a loan or ask him about something or other and you went on talking and this person went on talking and actually you were not talking to anybody. And some time or other you wake up with the great shock that you have just been arguing with somebody or been trying to make somebody be better or be nicer to you, or be kinder to their neighbors or something of the sort, and after a long dissertation on the subject and you think you’ve had a two-way communication with this person, they come up with some completely disrelated remark. Or, they simply don’t pay any attention to what you were saying. Although they seem to have agreed with you, they seem to have said, „Yes, that’s fine, I will be a better boy,“ or something of the sort, they just never, you just never reached an agreement, because the actual truth of the matter is, if you would’ve reached an agreement with them they would’ve been a better person. Do you see?

You weren’t talking to anybody. Let’s just put it there. You were talking to some social machinery. Well, that’s just in the social world. How about an auditor? Should he be able to spot this? Well, he sure should. But he would never spot it if he didn’t recognize that there was something very definitely there to spot. And that is, who’s talking? Are you talking to the preclear? Or are we talking to an education from Harvard? Are we talking to the preclear or are we talking to Mama?

See, it’s a nice thing to have a very, very high toned attitude toward preclears and so forth across the board, but there’s one point there where the column reverses and that’s where it’s trust at the top, you know, and distrust at the bottom. Well, when you’re working preclears you keep with all the top buttons of the Chart of Attitudes except that one, you just reverse that column, it goes right straight across, distrust is the top for an auditor as far as a preclear is concerned. It’s a remarkable thing how many times you can actually crack a case up if you’ll just simply say, „How are you doing that?“ or, „What are you doing? Who is talking? Did you do that? Who touched the wall? How did you do that? Where do you get the clues for what you say?“

Once in a while in a preclear’s communication you’ll find out there’s a file clerk or something and he’s taking every response he gives you as a flash answer from the file clerk. If he’s been trained in Dianetics, he’s liable to do this to the exclusion of any answer himself. Well, these are social responses and that is not a two-way communication, is it? It’s not a two-way communication, that’s a two-way communication between you and a circuit maybe, or between you and a machine, but it’s not a two-way communication between you and the preclear. And it says specifically in Step I that we begin a two-way communication with the preclear.

Well, how many ways could there be to start a two-way communication with the preclear so that you could really get away with it and have a good two-way communication with the preclear? Well, one of the ways to do it is to talk about his problems. He’s fairly interested in these and you get away from social responses. And he’s there because he’s being a problem so we get Step II as an assist to Step I.

Step II, Present Time Problem. But of course Step II is more important than that. You sometimes miss on a preclear by processing him when he’s dog tired or he’s emotionally upset or something very bad has just occurred and he wants to be processed so that he can run away from it or something and you don’t ask him whether he has any present time problems, you will miss sometimes and have a whole session or maybe two or three sessions wasted.

I remember processing somebody who seemed to be rather frantic and they finally came up with this astonishing fact that they were all the time… the case was not making progress, you see, and I got very interested, and this person would not, just would not give me any clue. And I just kept pounding it and pounding it and talking about it, any upset the person had in his current life, you know, yesterday or today or something that’s going to happen tomorrow. I just kept talking about it, you see, and saying, „Is anything that is occurring that I should know about?“ and so on, because the behavior of the case just simply said, „This case is so restive and so upset that they just don’t seem to listen to my auditing orders and they seem to be distracted all the time by something, and certainly this person is either completely off his base or he’s really a psycho or he has some very bedeviling present time problem.“

And finally the guy, the guy got the communication and gave me an answer. That processing session series was being very badly interrupted because he was being sued for divorce. He was being sued for divorce over the period I had been processing him. And he would leave there and go down and talk to lawyers and so forth and he wanted to keep this very secret. And he thought there was something very horrible about this happening and so he wouldn’t even tell his auditor about it.

Now, you see? He’s punished for communicating and we get right back to that. He doesn’t impart the data about what’s going on because he’d be punished for communicating. Now once in a while you’ll run into somebody that medicine can do something for. They have an acute illness of some kind or another that they’re so afraid of any possible treatment that would be offered to them medically because medical treatment is not particularly kind, that they avoid it completely. And you find out that you may be processing somebody for an ailment they have not told you about.

Well, it’s all right for you in your position to treat anybody for any ailment under the sun because illnesses are subdivisible into three conditions. And that is predisposition, precipitation and in the final, prolongation, perpetuation. And you know, the fellow is upset nervously so he gets sick, that’s where the bugs came in. And then he continues to be so upset nervously that he does not recover from those bugs. The three conditions there.

And so, by taking off some of the burden of existence, you actually can put a person into a position where he can heal more rapidly or kill the bacteria that he’s associated with. Well all right, that being the case and people knowing something about this may come to you to be processed through an acute illness of some remarkable nature such as a tremendous infection of the ear or something. You see? And you’re processing somebody who could be handled much more easily with simply a shot of penicillin and then you process them after the infection’s cleared up and they make remarkable progress.

They’re so undermined, and again, present time problem, that’s all it amounts to. They’re so distracted by this present time problem they actually don’t do anything you ask them to do. They’re again, momentarily, and you might say acutely, psychotic. You know, a fellow who goes into a violent rage, he’s a fairly kind guy most of the time, and all of a sudden something happens and he goes into a violent rage, a psychotic rage. He’s psychotic actually for ten minutes and he’s never been psychotic before and he maybe never would be afterwards.

Well, illness can do this to a person. A person could have a cyst of some sort of such pain and pressure and so on that if it could be handled in some other fashion, you might make faster progress. And in view of the fact that modern medicine can do something or other for acute illnesses, it’s sometimes a good idea to, you know, talk to the preclear about this. And you know, look it over.

This was called to my attention very violently since I found myself one day processing a criminal who was acutely ill of syphilis. Well, that’s interesting isn’t it? He was trying to get processed rapidly enough so that he wouldn’t go crazy because he’d heard people went crazy when they had syphilis, you see, and so therefore the person to go and see would be somebody that’d keep him from going crazy. But all the time, he was going crazy with the amount of worry over this thing, you see? His case was just getting no place. Actually, a shot of arsenic is highly therapeutic in this particular direction and that was where he should have gone. Now, somebody with a broken bone is liable to pull the same stunt on you, but all I’m sizing up here is the fact that they will often do it without giving you any word about it. Here sits this person and there’s something acutely wrong emotionally, something wrong in their environment, something wrong with them physically, and they never give you the word, they never tell you. So completely aside from its therapeutic value, it’s very dangerous to go on processing a case without opening a two-way communication, isn’t it?

It’s quite dangerous for the excellent reason that your preclear is liable to get, to be getting auditing for some kind of a condition that his grandma ought to be audited for or something. Actually, I had one fellow apply because his wife had just gone to an insane asylum. He wanted processing because his wife had just gone to the insane asylum. Well, this is all right, the fellow, that adds up sensibly, the fellow’d like to get the incident knocked out and so forth, and get the stress of it off. That wasn’t the idea at all. He was actually so foggy that he thought if he would become sane it would make her sane. The fellow had evidently studied voodoo or something of the sort, you see, and there was a transference and you could heal at a distance if you just held your right toe pointed east and held your mouth in the right position. You know? This was the condition of a preclear. Well, that’s no condition for a preclear to be in.

And a person who is in that kind of duress, he might have been sane for the last eight years you see, and never had an irrational moment. Now he has a tremendously irrational moment, some kind of an occurrence of that character. Well, maybe you started processing him two days before this cataclysm and you process him and this cataclysm is occurring in his life that neither you nor he had anything to do with, and all of a sudden here’s his case. You’re processing somebody and he’s going downhill, downhill, downhill and you say,

„Look what I was doing to this fellow. Just look at the horrible things I’m doing to this preclear. The preclear’s getting worse.“ Well, you haven’t got anything to do with it.

The truth of the matter is that he’s just been barred from ever again practicing law in the state of New York or something of the sort. See, I mean he’s going through some crisis or other. Again, if you had not established a two-way communication, you’d have a rough time of it.

Now, there’s a thing called a confessional which was the basic psychotherapy that man had. The catholic church rather monopolized this, they, I don’t know if you know how a confessional is carried on or not but it’s a… I could go into this in considerable detail but won’t. But the priest sits in a little booth and he has a curtain drawn there and he is not visible to the communicant or the penitent or whatever they call him. And he’s not visible, and this person sort of whispers his various sins and so forth through a crack in the curtain or a little box. It’s a highly rigged affair. He’s sort of passing his troubles on to god, you see?

Well, they’re fond of telling you, they’re fond of telling you that this confessional is based on the fact that if you can get anybody to talk about his troubles, he will get better and that’s why a confessional works. No, that isn’t why it works. It’s putting the blame on god is how it works. This is to say, „We’ll just pass our troubles over to god,“ because again, it is not a two-way communication. Follow this, it’s not a two-way communication.

In order for any therapy to take place by reason of communication alone on any kind of subject, there has to be a two-way communication, not one. You see that? Therefore the neatest trick in the whole book of tricks of auditing is knowing how to start and continue a two-way communication. It is dependent in its skill on the auditor’s ability to grant beingness and actually talk on both sides of the conversation. Communication is opened first and foremost by any sensory perception, any sensory perception. You could get the preclear to touch something, you have opened communication with the preclear. See that? If you could take his hand, and he could register the pressure of your hand on his hand; and this in the case of a semi-conscious person is very workable; you would be communicating with the preclear. A two-way communication doesn’t have anything to do with, and quite incidentally when it does, with words. It’s a communication. You’re there, he’s there. His trouble is inhibited communication. And the trouble you’re going to run into is getting a two-way communication started.

Now, any perception can be a two-way communication. Now sight is enough. If he simply registers the fact that you are there in the room with him, if he’ll just look at you, that is a communication. So let’s define communication by awareness across a distance, no matter how minute that distance is between the preclear and the auditor. And we discover that starting a two-way communication is actually, now that we know that, much easier, much, much easier.

If you want to start a fairly perfect communication of course you would simply duplicate what the preclear is doing with your own body. He’s lying still, you just lie down and lie still. You’ll be surprised how odd this will seem to him after a little while. He’ll get real curious about you. He’ll go into communication with you once or other. He picks up the stool and he heaves it at the door with a terrific crash. You pick up the stool and heave it at the door with a terrific crash. That’s a psychotic level entrance into communication, mimicry, because of course duplication enters into the formula.

But your preclear is sitting there in complete silence. Well believe me, do you think that if you pour out a whole bunch of words, you’re going into communication with this preclear? No, because he’s putting out a communication already: silence. If you suddenly admit that as a communication it will disturb him a little bit and it’s liable to stir him up into a communication. If you will sit there silent while he sits there silent, sooner or later you are going to go into communication. But you can make a preclear enter into communication with you simply by doing whatever the preclear is doing. If he’s talking, you can talk, too, at the same time, and you still made him make a communication.

Now it’s necessary for you to turn around and have him register one back. You see that? It’s just as important for the auditor to go into communication with the preclear as it is for the preclear to go into communication with the auditor. And the auditor can do it by mimicry and because he knows how. It’s harder for the preclear to do it. Sometimes a long time spent at the beginning of a session, just getting a two-way communication going until you really know you are talking to the preclear and he’s talking to you is some of the best time spent you ever saw.

But Opening Procedure 8-C of course is a considerable assist to this. Improvement of communication is the keynote of all auditing. OK.