Man is a duplicity. He is at once a body and a spirit. The personality which we know as the individual is a spirit by its contagion with the body. The body, as a very small amount of processing will demonstrate, is not the personality or the being, but a used thing.

In the hectic days while research and investigation were in full swing, it would not have been possible for me to have stated with accuracy what an auditor should know to be a good auditor with any expectancy of the answer remaining valid for more than a few months.

The body is a very craven and degraded thing in an unprocessed state and rather rapidly debases its spirit, so that when one first begins this process of Acceptance Level, it would seem to him that he, as the spirit, is actually at the level where he finds himself. True enough, he conducts his affairs at the level of the body, not at the level of the spirit. But the spirit can be freed, decontaminated, and the body itself, by this process, can be healed of its depraved thirsts and hungers so that it becomes almost fit company for a spirit.

Running Engrams, Black and White processing, Beauty and Ugliness, technique followed technique, each one more workable than the last, each one issued solely on the valid excuse that it was better than anything we had before it.

Acceptance Level Processing is that process which discovers the lowest level of acceptance of the individual and discovers there the prevailing hunger and feeds that hunger by means of mock-ups until it is satiated. The process is not a separate process itself, but is actually a version of Expanded Gita. It is, however, Expanded Gita used in a very particular way, and because one has successfully applied Expanded Gita, he should not think as well that he has a command of Acceptance Level Processing.

I can greatly sympathize with anyone attempting to follow what must have appeared to some, scraps of knowledge and disrelated material, and who yet expected to know a whole subject.

The process is done in brackets. A bracket is very simply done. The pattern of the bracket is for the preclear, via the preclear for others, and via the preclear others for others. One has the preclear mock up, no matter how blackly or how crudely, items for himself to accept, then have others in his mock-ups mock up things for them to accept, and others to mock up things for others to accept. In Acceptance Level Processing this bracket, which is the technical name of this pattern, extends to having the preclear also mock up things for others to accept and others to mock up things for him to accept. Thus there are five stages in the bracket.

After this year’s work in Europe and some six months after the current techniques were last polished, it can at last be stated with security what an auditor is expected to know of Dianetics and Scientology to consider himself adequate to his task, and in order to assure himself of excellent results upon his preclears.

Acceptance Level is what the preclear himself accepts, what the people around him in mock-up form accept, and what others will accept from others, and included as well what others have wanted him to accept and what he has wanted others to accept. Be very alert to this difference and to this particular phase of Acceptance Level: that people have wanted him to accept something does not mean that he accepted it, but it does mean that he will gain an insight into their motives.

Probably even more important organizationally, certification boards of experienced auditors can be set up who can have before them unchanging standards of examination, to the end that when auditors are at last certified the organization can feel secure that they have “the latest information” securely at work in their hands. It is highly possible that America, with its craving for change, may not find this very acceptable, but it is certain that auditors putting out hard money for training and preclears putting out their dollars for processing will be assured of knowledge and results which are standard and predictable.

Acceptance Level is a voyage of discovery. It is the method of making a MEST clear. It is the method of clearing the genetic entity. There is no other method of which I know which will accomplish this. The running of concepts, the running of engrams, straight Creative Processing, will not any of them accomplish this clearing of a thoroughly degraded MEST body; and, so long as the body remains thoroughly degraded, the task of rehabilitating the spirit connected with it is difficult at best.

Many things have changed, but many things remain the same. To those who stayed with me for three years — and these number the majority — the shifting panorama and emphasis have at last begun to make sense. These people, in effect, have been studying a gradient scale of technology. They have been studying life, human behavior, and psychotherapy. It is astonishing to many of them now on reviewing Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, to find most of what they know stated in the first place in the first book.

The process of Acceptance Level can be combined with Expanded Gita, in which case wasting good things in brackets in the five steps (which is: what did people waste, what do people waste, what did the preclear want others to waste and what did others want him to waste) resolves the occasional stalls which occur; for it often happens that the preclear must waste something good for a short time to discharge an accumulated charge in the bank brought about by a continuance of “feeding by mock- ups.”

This graduated scale enters with the most basic knowledge man has, as represented by the Asclepian Priests of Greece, continues through the work of Freud and is continually back-shadowed by the knowledge of the wise men of the East. It goes then into what we now call facsimiles (which is to say mental pictures) and all techniques which address the past, and into processes which directly adjust the future.

Nowhere in Acceptance Level Processing, except in the form of wasting, does one seek to eradicate an engram, a thought, an emotion or a circuit.

The marriage of the deepest knowledge of India with the latest technologies of nuclear physics could not help but result in a swift climb upwards into the understanding of the behavior of life in the physical universe, and could not help but deliver into our hands technologies with which to resolve the immediate problems of Mankind.

The entire process is built upon feeding the apparent cravings of the body. These have come about because of the mechanism of resistance. The MEST universe is built upon the theory that one must resist. When one starts resisting something, he engages upon it until it finally breaks down his resistance and he then goes into the cycle of actually craving it. A hunger is therefore created for various things which would not be suspected in the absence of this process. It is the object of this process to feed these hungers until they are satiated and until they depart.

In a recent book On Auditing by Martha Courtis, the gradient scale of Dianetics and Scientology is made extremely apparent, and it is shown there quite expertly how each advance only extended knowledge already held, and the inevitable consequence of Standard Operating Procedure in Scientology.

A very thorough and strong warning must be injected here by calling your attention to this apparent law. ACTION IN THE MEST UNIVERSE DOES NOT RUN OUT ACTIONS WHICH HAVE OCCURRED IN THE MEST UNIVERSE. THE ONLY THERAPEUTIC FACTOR POSSESSED BY MAN IS HIS OWN SPIRIT. ACTIONS WHICH HAVE OCCURRED IN THE MEST UNIVERSE ARE ALTERED OR ERADICATED ONLY BY ADDRESSING THE MATTER IN ONE’S OWN UNIVERSE IN THE FORM OF MOCK-UPS DONE BY THE PRECLEAR.

It could be said that those auditors who entered early have spent those three years studying the same thing, and they now can look back upon an integrated picture. Indeed, it is a necessity for auditors contacting Scientology now for the first time, without any background knowledge of Dianetics, to review the entire process of the evolution of the science. Just as an auditor would be foolish indeed to know nothing more than the running of engrams now that far faster techniques such as those contained in SOP exist, so would it be foolish for an auditor to study SOP only, and with no knowledge of earlier processes find himself adrift, alone and incapable some dark night with a preclear who is stuck in and is looking straight at an engram. Just because phenomena have been more adequately handled in these later months is no reason why phenomena discovered earlier have ceased to exist, and auditors in training are confronted by each and every phenomenon observed in the last three years. While this makes, apparently, a complex picture, the simplicity lies in knowing the entire story of the preclear, and then in applying techniques so simple that they could be used by a child upon children, and indeed often are.

By living a life of debauchery, in other words, one does not heal the debaucheries he has committed. By feeding his hungers in terms of the MEST universe, whether these be liquor or much baser things, one accomplishes only a further degradation and a further thirst. Such things are healed by the only process of healing which we have, which is the spirit itself. The spirit accomplishes this by direct address of energy as in the case of a Step I reaching in and patching up parts of the body or by mock-ups which themselves alter the condition of the body. More whisky can only make a worse drunkard out of a drunkard. A constant and continuous stream of mock-ups of bad whisky can satiate the craving and restore to him his ability to drink when he wants to drink or not at all.

What should an auditor know? He should know how to run engrams and secondaries, he should know effort processing, he should know how to apply, in its entirety, Advanced Procedure and Axioms, Handbook for Preclears, and Self Analysis, old and revised editions. He should know the 50 Course Books. He should have a good understanding of the axioms as they appear in the Handbook for Preclears. He should know Scientology 8-8008, and he should have a command of all the SOP’s from 1 to 8L. He should know Formula H, Acceptance Level Processing, Change of Space Processing, he should know the theories of randomity, and automaticity and the processes by which these are remedied.

Basically this process is a learning process. It brings to the individual an understanding of the motives of himself and others who have been around him. These enter as sudden flashes of insight as the process is continued. They are not given to the preclear as evaluation.

If that is an appalling lot of knowledge, be assured that the auditor who knows it-knows it well — and who is himself cleared will have excellent results, and that an auditor who knows only fragments of it will continue to run into cases which he cannot solve, even though he may solve by rote procedures over 50% of the cases he addresses. The question of training is the question of how many cases is the auditor going to resolve out of the hundred cases presented, and the length of time the preclear must spend in processing.

This matter of Acceptance Level is of far more use in understanding one’s past than one would immediately suspect, for one sees immediately that if something is being healed by the process, the hunger must have existed.

What the auditor should know is answered by what the auditor wants to expect in terms of results on himself and preclears.

Acceptance Level is also extremely useful in the MEST universe in evaluating and understanding the why of the actions of those around him. One can understand at last why cheap and dirty hotels are patronized, why in some cities garbage is not collected, why a person dresses as he does and acts as he does; and, indeed, an understanding of Acceptance Level gives one an enormous command of his fellow beings.

An auditor who knows and knows well SOP-8, Short 8, and Six Steps to Better Beingness, and yet does not know other phenomena as it may appear in a case, may find some 30% of his cases unsolvable. What might happen to render a case unsolvable? A preclear in 1953 can be expected to be stuck in at least one place on a time track just as in 1950. The preclears haven’t changed, the techniques have. Generally, the preclear is in a “secondary engram.” While there exist techniques in advance of SOP-8 which run secondaries rapidly, the auditor is poorly equipped if he cannot discharge a “grief charge” which is lying there waiting for him, the discharge of which will in itself entirely alter the attitude of the preclear toward the world. The auditor may have before him someone who actually does not have sufficient randomity to interest himself in further living, and who is yet incapable of creating more, the auditor may come up against in this what is termed “the speed factor” a subject discussed and covered in late 1951. Only by “increasing the speed potential” of the preclear can the auditor place the preclear in a situation to engage in sufficient action to discard his boredom. There are fifty reasons why a case can hang fire. The auditor who doesn’t know at least ten of them will often find himself staring into an enigma past his understanding. Further, he may be astonished by the material if he does not know the strange adventures of preclears as they rise on the tone scale.

There is one thing you should know about ARC. The most ARC there can be is a complete identification: the person is the person with whom he has the ARC. One sees this in valence shifting. This goes down a dwindling spiral until the most complete ARC there is exists in the form of eight anchor points enclosing no space: in other words, a particle. Thus, trying to understand, purely as such, from data offered is in itself a perilous undertaking, for the end of the road is zero space, and that in itself is the opposite end of the tone scale. That is the end where MEST is. “Trying to understand” run as a concept — even that is quite startling. Knowingness has to do with certainty, and understanding which advances along the lines of certainty creates more space, not less space. Thus there is the low funnel end of ARC as well as an upper end of ARC. Trying to understand by reason of data before one looks brings about the vanishing point of existence. The psychotic often confuses his terrific stress on circuit-prompted thought as telepathy and thinking itself. Thus in running this process we are not trying to understand anything, but simply going through with the process to satiate hungers. One can very easily go off and plot the entire evolution of everything by running this process, but one should move along rapidly, gaining only his insights as they seem to apply to him. Only the preclear knows when these insights have taken place.

All too often an auditor is so set on enforcing his own concept of existence upon the world at large that he insists that a science agree with him, and lays down the boundaries that the science must not exceed what he himself, before he studied the science, believed to be true. The auditor who is not trained through all the data i prone to make errors which will cost him the resolution, not only of his own case, but case after case if, in ignorance of earlier data, he. is seeking to warp theta clearing into some tract of mysticism where it does not and cannot belong.

The process is best run on an E-Meter, for as long as the E-Meter rises slowly and gradually, further mock-ups are necessary; when the E-Meter sticks or stutters, a change in bracket is necessary or, in some cases, something good on the same subject has to be wasted before the process can continue.

I recently resolved the case of an old man whose trouble was that he desired no more of life. Observedly, his body could no longer serve him, and his hope in being audited was that he would die. I have recently seen several such cases. The auditor who is not sufficiently wise to establish the actual goal of his preclear will continue to try to make this person physically well, while the entire attention of this preclear is absorbed in using auditing to assist his dying. The only thing one can do for such a person is to bring him into a situation where he is no longer entirely dependent upon his body, but does not need to destroy it in order to be interested in life.

The process works best on severely occluded cases — the case we have called a Resistive V. It works least on a Step I, and is, indeed, not needed in the running of a Step I save only to clear up his MEST body, in which case it is run while he is exteriorized.

What does an auditor need to know? What he could know is formidable. What he must know is easier to face.

One can take the list in Issue 16-G of the Journal of Scientology of Step IV, Expanded Gita — that being the most complete list published — and pick out the most revolting items as they occur or the most dangerous items as they occur and have the preclear accept them, have him have others accept them, and others have others accept them until the subject does not have charge. One can take any of the good items of this list and, by prefacing them with no, attain an additional source of acceptable objects.

Abstracts of all past data have been prepared at this time, and the courses available from the HAS are now highlighted by the necessary knowledge.

As soon as one starts to run this process (and it can be self-audited) he will wonder at first when he starts to mock the thing up for others what other person than himself could possibly have had such a hunger for the thing. After it has been fed into the space before him as destined for others, the personnel will come to view who had the acceptance level of the object; and when others run for others these mockups (via the preclear, of course), various groups and ideas will display themselves.

The difference amongst auditors is the difference of what percentage of cases is the auditor capable of solving. It can be observed that any psychotherapy in the past could have reached, and did reach and remedy a certain level of case (Step 1). This case continues to be resolved with great ease and in a few minutes with Scientology today, no matter what is wrong with it. The same case was resolved, within two years, by psychoanalysis. Earlier the same level of case was solved with great ease by Asclepian Priests. Analytical Procedure will solve such a case. Lock scanning will solve such a case, as can any elementary and shallow process, including a changed environment which promises a good present time. And so an auditor who has little command of the subject, obeying most of the rules of the Auditor’s Code, can solve it.

In various instances, as in the matter of running blame, the process may stop moving, at which moment it is up to the auditor, or, if the process is being self-audited, to oneself, to begin to waste praise. One will occasionally be astonished when praise is wasted in the form of brackets how violent the wasting can be.

But immediately adjacent to that is the one which doesn’t quite solve, which improves a little, but not a lot. This one (a Step 2) also improved after many years of psychoanalysis. This one was solved also by the first techniques of Dianetics, even when they were crudely used.

In Expanded Gita, by the way, all the wasting and forcing upon and desiring, giving and taking, is done in brackets.

The third level of case (a Step 3) was the one which psychoanalysis hoped about, but never improved, which Dianetics kept from deteriorating, but seldom (in the hands of average auditors) stabilized, and with this level of case we have departed completely from the past abilities of man, and the abilities of Dianetics as used in the field.

The reason you had Viewpoint Processing in an earlier PAB was so that you could understand the source of evaluation and why evaluation was important and so that, even more, you would get the idea of mocking things up in masses. Just, then, as in the practice you got in Viewpoint Processing, you mock up in Acceptance Level vast hordes of things: for oneself, for others, and others for others. Large masses of others for large masses of others mocking up large masses of the desired thing is very good processing.

We have reached at this point some 50% of the populace. We have 50% remaining. The intriguing thing about this is that these first three grades (or 50%) number amongst them sane, insane and neurotic alike, for these step levels are not established by sanity, but by the ease with which they recovered.

The remaining 50% were never touched by the Asclepians, the psychoanalysts or auditors using Dianetics in the field. These 50% numbered amongst them some of the most able people, but not necessarily all the able people in the society. They were sane, neurotic and psychotic, just as the first three types of cases I have mentioned, but the workability of the case exceeded the ability of all.

The three cases mentioned above are referred to in Scientology as Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3. The remaining four steps, as represented in Standard Operating Procedure 8, are resistive to any betterment regardless of the sanity or ability of the case.

What we are gazing upon here is, distasteful as it may seem, the ratio of the potential of the individual being met by the environment. The last four cases are not necessarily more able, but they have met more resistance than their reality potential could accommodate, and although they continue to function, their certainty is insufficient to their environment. Their native ability permits them to continue their performance, to exceed former skills. We are now handling these cases in Scientology. All but a few of them, in the hands of an able auditor, resolve with the use of SOP-8. The few require even more advanced techniques, such as those being given to the Clinical students in the East.

What should an auditor know? He should know enough to resolve those cases which come to him and to retain and increase his own stability. Now at last we can write down in specific detail the exact data which he must command in order to do his job well.