It is utterly fascinating what you can do with a process which is apparently as permissive as the Opening Procedure of SOP 8-C. The exact details of the process are given in Issue 24G of the Journal of Scientology.

Although you discover in examining 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 mechanic. In other words, the 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 is found not really considering – he is not making a postulate and having something come true – he is trying to figure out who's to blame – that's one of the main things he's trying to do. 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.

The number of case factors which are handled in 8-C is fascinating, because here you are processing straight toward simplicity.

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.

We know that what is wrong with a person is his subjective universe. That has gotten into trouble. Now, in view of the fact that he could mock up a tremendous amount of space if he had to, he could mock up lots of energy, he could mock up objects, and he could do this any number of times, then why he's lugging around something called "his universe" is a little bit difficult for a reasonable man to understand, and yet that is what people are doing. You get a sort of idea of somebody walking around with a great many clanking chains, old tin cans, old cigar butts, and so forth and calling these possessions. "His universe" looks like a kid's toy box. If you've ever looked into a three year old's choicest possessions, that's about the order of havingness the thetan pulls along with him.

Well, he's never going to recover from anything considering. He might figure he's way out of the trap. He might think he's 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.

He gives these things up with the greatest of reluctance, yet his total health, you might say, is dependent upon his ability to make, to have, new fresh things, and to do almost anything he wants to with them.

And the first and foremost of his convictions is that it is very aberrative to communicate. This he's certain of. 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.

But, remember, it was always very, very difficult for him to get an object into such a circumstance that it was actually somebody else's object. To procure an object which was somebody else's is what he has to do in order to have that object. If we look at the four conditions of existence, the "Ises", we discover just exactly why these things are so very valuable to him. They are so valuable because they mean to him a period when he was actually in communication with thetans as such, and he could blame them, and if he could blame them then he could have something. And if he couldn't blame them then he couldn't have anything – unless he duplicated himself, and so had another thetan to blame. This way he would get a persistence, he would get survival in terms of motion. Otherwise it would all seem completely motionless to him.

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.

Now again all of these things are simply considerations, and in view of the fact that they are all considerations, we can get enormously baffled as to how considerations could be so important.

This, by the way, is not even vaguely true. It'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.

Remember they are only important because of the considerations which one held in common with others.

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 has tried to talk to people. And he has met with the greatest contribution of psychiatry, for instance, the pre – frontal lobotomy. It would do just as much good to cut up some calves' brains lying in the butcher's window, as it would to cut up someone's brain and psychiatry knows this. They know it very well. They have never made anybody well with pre-frontal lobotomies or trans – orbital leucotomies.

It would be one thing simply to change one's own considerations all over the place, and it would be quite another thing to do this when one has a series of considerations which have been thoroughly agreed upon with others.

They go on doing it because a psychotic's condition is desperate, and they compute that they of course have to be desperate in treating it. They have therefore nothing but solid failures behind them. That is not a condemnation. That is just the truth of the matter.

So the thetan, with his old cigar butts, torn playing cards, and clanking chairs – you see he's been in communication one time or another and the system of communication was all established and therefore he could have an other-determinism so true and so convincing that even he, would not be able to question its convincingness. Nobody could possibly question the validity of these objects he was carrying around.

By the way, the only reason they do a pre-frontal lobotomy is – because people can often survive it. That is what is stated in the original case history on this.

It's simply, then: he will have some way of blaming somebody else for having put that mass of energy there, and then that energy mass will persist. If he can't blame anybody else why it can too easily be As-ised and so disappear. Other-determinism becomes vital.

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 of an idiot blacksmith's helper who approached the forge, and the forge exploded, and a crowbar flew through the air and drove into 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. We find that no change occurred with regard to his idiocy. But a part of his brain had been removed and he did survive, and this is the sole authority to this day for doing prefrontal lobotomies.

Now, when we look over this problem we discover that an individual can go just so far down this line, and then he becomes himself disabled. He begins to count on other – determinism more and more and more heavily to produce his own survival. We can see this in terms of attention – an individual in this society without any attention from anybody else would not have much chance of surviving. An individual, just on the basis of food alone, would have great difficulty, but he's gotten down to where those objects really have to be solid, and so we get this physical universe, and the particles of this physical universe are so beautifully lost, so completely confused, so misplaced away from point of origin that they can be subjected to a law in physics known as the conservation of energy: that energy cannot be destroyed, can only be converted. Anything that's lost, misplaced, confused, can only be converted, unless you discover the point where it was actually manufactured.

In another case they did a pre-frontal lobotomy on a fellow, and they put him on display, and somebody asked him whether he noticed any change in himself as a result of the pre-frontal 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 anybody learns in this universe. They learn to keep their mouths shut, and it's the wrong lesson. When in doubt, talk. When in doubt communicate.

This universe thus becomes valuable. It becomes valuable because we've gone to so much trouble to lose enough things that we then have a continuance of objects.

When in doubt shoot. And you'll be very successful all the way along the line if you just remember that.

A thetan who has become upset about the various agreements in existence believes that he no longer can communicate with something. He is a nothingness, therefore he has to communicate with a nothingness, he thinks. The communication formula places him at fault.

There's no compromising with this. A thetan is as well off as he can communicate, and he's no better off than that. And when a restraint comes upon his communication, then he starts to wind up and finish up and that is the end of him. So, our preclear sits there, and he is sure that if he communicates he'll be punished. Anything he says will be used against him.

Here we have an individual who is living by the communication formula and yet cannot recover his own ability easily to follow the basic of communication, which is all things are on the same point. When you consider a consideration you find out it doesn't have any dimension whatsoever. And a thetan has no dimension. So he's gone to a lot of work, to make a universe that's as heavy as this one. And he's blamed it all on God, and he's blamed it all in various directions, and he has made what amounts to a considerable investment. He has a big investment. And now he has gone so far that having made this investment he can no longer look at it, because he has to follow the communication formula. He cannot occupy the same space as an object. Two objects cannot occupy the same space. Therefore he is not a thetan – plus-body. He is a body.

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, going to dive on it, 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. As an extremity of human duress which can be used to illustrate this, let's take the case of a psychotic. This person had a terrible obsession. It was just a fantastic obsession. He would not talk because he knew that if he said anything, the person he said it to would carefully store it up and wait for the right time to use it against him. And this was all this person would tell you! This person would utter that sentiment in one way or another – it was a one hundred percent psychotic dramatization – but it lay straight across his communication line. This person was utterly insane, could not take care of the body or perform menial tasks or anything else, and yet this person would just go over and over that record – "Well, if I said anything you would store it up and you'd wait for the right time and you'd use it against me." And then the person would clam up. Try to get him into communication again – he'd go through this same routine.

And once in a while we run into some materialist, in processing, and just the barest thought that he is something other than a body is completely, completely contradictory to him.

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 and they have it.

It's utterly assaulting. You'd think that you'd held a gun on the man and asked him for his money. He'll become very excited. "I am a body. I know I am a body. That is all I am. I am one," exclamation point, exclamation point. He gets real worried about it.

They adjudicated their own sanity by knowing when to talk and when not to talk, and it starts to peel down to a point where they know. They know when not to talk, and when to talk.

This person at the same time is likely to be the one who is most concerned with God.

And then they know when not to talk, you see, and when to talk. And then – silence. And that's the way the cycle goes.

This is curious isn't it? Well, he has to have an other-determinism. He has to avoid responsibility. His field of awareness will be relatively black, by the way.

So don't for a moment suppose that Step 1 (Get into two-way communication with the preclear) is included as just a handy way to start a session. It's processing.

That's not a criticism of the individual. That is just the state he is in. Why is he in it? He knows two things can't occupy the same space. Obviously if he is there, and the body is there, then he must be the body. That's the most elementary thing we could possibly put together. This individual has himself mocked up as something, and is being something so thoroughly that he cannot disassociate himself from it. So you tell him to be three feet back of his head – and he can't be three feet back of his head.

Your preclear is accessible ordinarily on the Third Dynamic – groups. 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. It's the thetan plus the body that can bring about an aberrative state. It's the thetan plus the Sixth Dynamic, the physical universe, that causes a difficulty, and so on.

Now, we're processing something which has four parts: (1) the thetan, (2) his machinery, (3) the body, and (4) the reactive bank. The reactive bank is a stimulus-response machine of some magnitude.

All right, we have then Two-Way Communication as Step 1 simply because it is the most difficult step. It is the most arduous step. And it is the step which was missed by everybody from the Aesculapians (Roman medicos) to the most recent psychiatry out of Wundt, Leipzig, 1869.

The body actually is something capable of collecting an enormous number of molecules and electrons and converting energy and doing all sorts of interesting things.

Around that time in Germany they got started on the first idea that the mind could be approached on a scientific basis. That was the original premise of psychology, and a good one brought up by a fellow by the name of Wundt. There was nothing wrong with this. It was a good hunch. It has never been followed up by that particular field.

An auditor occasionally makes a gross error in that he processes any one of these things other than the thetan.

Scientific methodology was actually 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 what they did was unregulated, uncontrolled, wildcat experiments, 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, and doesn't to this day. They are more and more "The Only One". They never solved communication so they don't go into communication.

So there are that many engrams? – well, does this so assault our sensibilities, that these things exist, that we must vanquish and make every one of them, one by one, disappear? Actually what we want to do is improve the thetan's ability to handle reactive banks.

They don't have Step 1.

Or an auditor comes along and he starts processing "the body". The body, the body, the body. What kind of auditor would this be? It would be an auditor who had to have something. This auditor can't possibly have nothing, yet if he's auditing he's actually auditing a nothing. He's trying to free a nothingness.

When we come to psychoanalysis we find that in that field they used various methods - originally Breuer and Freud did – to produce a two-way communication, and then they went all out, and they decided, Gee, if you could just get somebody talking – but their first approach to it was the hypnotist's and that is a very poor approach and not only a very poor approach, it's a very inhibitive approach.

And if he can't conceive of a nothingness and has to go in the direction of a somethingness he will not actually audit the preclear.

If you have ever had anybody as a preclear who had been hypnotized you would appreciate this, for instance, running 8D (8D: Standard Operating Procedure 8D, 1954.

Every once in a while some preclear has such an observable surplus of thetan machinery that an auditor just can't stand leaving that machinery alone. He just can't stand it.

Primarily for heavy cases, the goal of this procedure was "to bring the preclear to tolerate any viewpoint." See The Creation of Human Ability by L. Ron Hubbard.) Running this on "Where would a… be safe?" you could put in "hypnotist". You'd get some idea of the aberrative nature of hypnotism.

He's got to get in there and get all these mechanisms out of the road, get 'em all mopped up and wiped out, and the next thing you know the thetan is very, very sad indeed. Look at all the years he's spent blaming this machinery on somebody else. But when you've gotten through processing all this machinery, what've you done anyway? You've just processed some machinery. And it wasn't sick! So we have these four major parts, but we are processing the thetan. He doesn't have any mass, he can make space, he can make energy, and he can locate objects in space. He has very definite capabilities. Very positive, definite capabilities. And by the improvement of these capabilities we improve his ability to communicate, and so, improving his ability to communicate, we make him able to handle not just the reactive bank he's mixed up with at the moment, not just the body he happens to be inhabiting or hanging around at the moment, and certainly not his bank of machinery. We make it possible for him to handle large quantities of things – other people's machinery and anything. It's very interesting what he can do. But he cannot possibly be hung up on the basis of "two things can't occupy the same space". He couldn't be hung up on that one. Another thing he couldn't be hung up on, if you're going to separate him easily, is that it's all other-determined. You see, if it's all other-determined, then he would depend on other things to place him in space, and if he's depending on other things to place him in space, he will sit there and "wait for the auditor to exteriorize him". So our point of approach here is the thetan. Now, the easiest way to approach this is simply to make and break communication with the immediate environment.

In psychoanalysis they actually didn't solve two-way communication. They got a system by which somebody simply talked endlessly, and talked, and talked, and talked, and there was no communication from the analyst. You may have seen the cartoon where one analyst is cheerful and he had been so every afternoon at quitting time, and the other analyst said, "My goodness. How can you be so cheerful sitting there all day long listening to those patients?" and the other said, "Who listens?" Psychoanalysis 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.

Environment is the physical universe, security, it's right there, it's solid. This is the space of the room, the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the objects there, and if we happen to be looking through these things, then it's the walls in the next room, and up through the roof, the air about the house and down through, it's the earth underneath the house. And environment means how far can this individual perceive with great certainty in the physical universe. And that's what we're interested in when we say environment. We don't have the preclear in Chicago, for instance, and then because he is an inhabitant of Iowa, process him in the environment of Iowa. Now this sounds, this sounds too utterly stupid, that anybody could do this, but believe me, it has happened. And what would they be processing? They'd be processing a set of facsimiles.

It's two-way communication. What success psychoanalysis did have was just due to 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 idea of the anatomy of communication.

There is a immense ratio between the amount of facsimiles or energy masses a person has, and his ability to communicate. The more energy masses and more facsimiles which a person has, whether white, or green, or purple, or whether they're black curtains or actual apparent solid objects – we don't care what these are – the more energy mass the individual has, the less he is capable of communication. A fellow runs a concept – and gets a flow past his face. He feels something moving past his face. Ah, we've got a case of energy masses.

And we move on forward to various thoughts and philosophic endeavors 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?" and he'll say, "I am fine", Forty-five minutes later the oddity is this person says to you, "I feel terrible". You first got a social response, and then the preclear answered the question. The question sometimes, if you'll notice it carefully, will come up as non-sequitur entirely, and, for instance, forty-five minutes after you ask him how he is he tells you. And the gap in between is filled with social responses. It's just trained social response – a little machine. So that isn't two-way communication with the preclear at all, is it? You're talking to social machinery.

How did they get there? They got there by the thetan directing his attention in various directions, manufacturing energy the while – and you're going to process this case as a preclear, this thetan in such a way that he sprays out new energy masses around his body? That would be a curious thing wouldn't it? And you know there are processes that you could run – not any listed in Intensive Procedure – which would lead an individual to immediately mock up more, and more, and more and more energy masses in the vicinity of his body. You could actually artificialize his condition.

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 then you wake up with a great shock to discover that you have just been arguing with somebody, or been trying to make somebody be better, be nicer to you, 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, he comes up with some completely disrelated remark, although he seems to have been agreeing with you. He seemed to have said "Yes, that's fine, I'll be a better boy," or something of the sort. You just never reached an agreement, because the actual truth of the matter is if you'd reached an agreement with him he would have been a better person. You weren't talking to anybody. You were talking to some social machinery. Well, that's just in the social world.

He's as well off as he doesn't have to have energy masses.

How about an auditor? Should he be able to spot this? Well he 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 we 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? It's a nice thing to have a very, very high on the Tone Scale attitude toward preclears, but there's one point there where the column (Chart of Attitudes) reverses, and that's where it's Trust at the top and Distrust at the bottom. 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's concerned, and it's a remarkable thing how many times you can actually crack a case 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?" Once in a while you'll find there's a File Clerk (File Clerk: Dianetic auditor's slang for the mechanism of the mind which acts as a data monitor. Auditors could get instant or "flash" answers direct from the "file clerk" to aid in contacting incidents) or something of the sort 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 will sometimes do this to the exclusion of any answer himself. Well, these are social responses, and that is not a two-way communication.

A preclear has to have energy masses to the degree that he believes he cannot create space and energy. That's a direct index. So we find somebody who has large floating ridges and that sort of thing and this individual is having just that much difficulty. No question about it and no exceptions. It doesn't matter what manifestation he's exhibiting at this particular moment, a person is as bad off as he has these energy masses which are not placed but are floating. You could say they are "floating" energy masses because – everywhere he walks he's got them. Now he's as well off as he can simply take or leave the walls and other items of the physical universe wherever he finds himself. He can take them or leave them, see them or not see them at will. He's well off when he can do that.

That's 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 1 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? One of the ways to do it is to talk about his problems. He's fairly interested in these, and you get away from the social responses.

What process would you tailor up in order to accomplish this? Well, you could simply have a preclear sitting in a chair and looking around the room spotting spots in one location after another. It's a fantastic technique. It'll do quite a bit for a preclear, just to have him do this. And actually you are applying this further when you have him get up and walk around and PICK OUT the spots, and TOUCH them, and then at will, BREAK COMMUNICATION with them. And SOP 8-C is actually a gradient scale, and 8-C's Opening Procedure is a gradient scale of getting this done.

And he's there because he's being a problem, so we get step 2 as an assist to Step 1.

There is an additional process that could go along with this. You could have him close his eyes and start checking off spots in the environment.

Step 2: Present Time Problem. But of course Step 2 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, and if you don't ask whether or not he has any Present Time Problems, you'll miss sometimes, and have a whole session, or two or three sessions, wasted. I remember processing somebody who seemed to be rather frantic, and he finally came up with an astonishing fact. The case was not making progress, you see, and I got very interested in this and the 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 there anything that is occurring that I should know about," and so on, because the behavior of the case just simply said that this case is so restive and so upset that he just doesn't seem to listen to my auditing orders and he seems 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 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'd been processing him. And he would leave there and go down and talk to his lawyers and he wanted to keep this very secret, and he thought there was something very horrible about this, and so he wouldn't even tell his auditor about it. Now, you see, he's punished for communicating, and thus we get right back to that. He doesn't impart the data about what's going on because he'd be punished for communicating.

The case that has had his perception turn on very fully, and then promptly turn off and it has never been on since, has simply practically scared himself out of his wits. His perception turned on and that was too much Is-ness. It was too steep a gradient, he could see everything too clearly, and this made him nervous, it upset him, it has disturbed his thetan digestion, and made him very unhappy – and what is this? This is just simply a case of too much, and instantly he said "It isn't". He said "Not-is". He took a look at all this environment and said, "Dull down. Get real dull. It better be unreal around here, it's just too bright, it's too loud," and so on.

Occasionally you will run into someone for whom medicine could do something. The person has an acute illness of one sort or another and is so afraid of any possible treatment that would be offered to him medically, because medical treatment may not be particularly kind, that he has not told anybody about it.

Well, what happens if we have this person sitting there in the chair with his eyes shut and we just have him look around and spot spots in the room, and a facsimile shows up? We just have him go on spotting spots in whatever he can see. We don't suddenly stop and say, "Oh, you've got a lot of blackness. Let's spot some spots in the blackness". No, you just keep hounding him for some sort of perception of the room. That's what you want. And he keeps spotting spots in the room and spotting them and spotting them and spotting them and spotting them. Just that and no more. Spotting them behind him, above him, below him. If you don't watch him a little bit he'll spot them all in front of him. You've got to direct his attention behind. A thetan has a 360 Deg periphery of vision. There is no "behind", or get thee behind me thetan.

This again will be giving him a sufficient Present Time Problem that he would not gain well in auditing, and is the most important reason why you do not audit a person who should be getting a condition handled medically which can so be handled. But it is the fact that in this universe he is punished for communicating that makes this something to watch for and to see to it that a medical situation is handled medically before you do any auditing.

Now, here we have in a thetan, then, a possibility that the moment he really saw the room he'd turn it off again. He'd flinch. And then you keep right on processing in the direction of the room. You see what this would be. They'd flinch, their perception would go off, and you just take it from there and have him spot spots in the room. So he says his perception's all turned off – well, you just have him find something he can perceive. He says, "I think it's a facsimile. I don't know what it is, really. It doesn't seem to me to be terribly real…" You just say, "Close your eyes. Now spot some spots in the room." The preclear says, "I… what d'you mean close my eyes and spot…" "Well, can you see anything when you've got your eyes shut there?" "No… of course not." "Well, why don't you look around. Get an impression of anything?" "Mmmm. Well, what do you know. It's all black." He never noticed this before.

In order for any gain or release to take place by reason of communication alone on any kind of subject there has to be a two-way communication, not one-way communication.

You say, "Well, all right. How about this now – you say it's all black – well, is there any place where the black is thinner?" Behind you for instance, or above you or below you? Do you make out anything at all about this room?" "No." "Well, as you're sitting there with your eyes closed, do you know the location of anything in this room?" "Yea, well, I know where my body is." In course a case like this will probably assert to you violently, if he wasn't prepared otherwise, that he was a body, had always been a body, would always be a body, had never been anything else but a body, and that you live but once. And he would also tell you that during his study of Korzybski's Science and Sanity he agreed with him entirely that two things could not occupy the same space. He'll tell you all these things. It would be a very informative conversation if you let him proceed. You only let him proceed on such a conversation, by the way, long enough to keep two-way communication going, then you get him doing something.

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.

"All right," you'd say, "Well, do you know of the location of any object in this room?" And the fellow says, "Well, there's a table right over there, I know that." "All right. Look at that table." Probably his eyes will pop open and he will stare at it – but you have him keep his eyes closed. You'd get an exchange something like this: He knows there's a table over there, and you say "Spot some spots in it." He says, "I can't possibly spot any spots in the table if I can't see it." "Do you know it's there?" "Yes, I know it's there. I saw it when I came in." "Well, all right. Spot some spots on it." "But I'll have to open my eyes." "Go ahead and spot some spots on that table." He finally does. And the blackness starts to get a tattle-tale grey around him, and then it flickers on and flickers off, and perception comes on and all of a sudden he's aware of the fact that it's all real, and then he convulsively shuts off all of his perception, and then he lets it turn on again, and then he shuts it off again, and then he flinches this way and flinches that way. Why? He knows it's dangerous to look at things. He knows that. He knows, again, that it is dangerous to communicate. And he shuts it off before something else shuts it off.

Communication is opened first and foremost by any sensory perception. Any sensory perception. Get the preclear to touch something – you have opened communication with the preclear. 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 ahead of 'em. But after it goes on and off and on and off a few times, it's likely to be more and more upsetting to him for the time, because it's likely to be getting more and more real. The room is likely to be getting more and more real, more and more solid.

He's there. His trouble is inhibited communication, and the trouble you're going to run into is getting a two-way communication started. Any perception can be used in a two-way communication. Just 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. If we define communication by: awareness across a distance, no matter how minute that distance is between the preclear and the auditor, we discover that starting a two-way communication is actually much easier.

Now you don't let him completely fly out through the doors and the walls on this process, and let him spot at unreal distances – spotting at a thousand yards, when a thousand millimeters would be much too great and three millimeters is about what he can tolerate. So we keep him in the immediate environment, and we mean the physical universe when we say environment, and we mean objects that he's fairly sure are there, and we just work him on that basis, and then, the first thing you know, the walls will start to disappear on him and then they'll flicker on again and then they'll flicker off, and it gets more and more real, and he gets upset about it and then he becomes calm about it and he goes through a lot of variations – and doing what? Just sitting right where he's sitting and you don't care where that is, spotting spots in the room whether the room is black, green, purple, or whether he's got facsimiles that he's really spotting or not. We don't care what this preclear's doing as long as he continues to spot spots. If he's got a facsimile sitting there, and he shifts his attention on the facsimile he'll go of it. He gets rid of some of this mass.

Continuing with examples – "the worst it gets" type of situations – not that these are what you'll be auditing – if you want to start a fairly perfect communication, of course, you would simply physically duplicate what the preclear's doing. He's lying still – you just lie down and lie still. You'd 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. 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 bottom-scale level of entrance into communication – mimicry – because of course duplication enters into the formula.

If he's really just spotting into blackness, really changing his perception direction, you see, then Boooom, he'll start looking through the blackness. If you have him look at the blackness and spot spots in the blackness you are validating these masses of energy which a thetan is as bad off as he has. What he's witnessing with all these possessions and masses of energy is his own inability to really mock up something and have it belong to somebody else.

But if your preclear is sitting there in complete silence, do you think that if you pour out a great flow 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 likely to stir him up into a communication. If you will sit there silent while he sits there silent, sooner or later you're going to go into communication. You can make a preclear enter into communication with you simply by doing whatever the preclear is doing.

That's what he's witnessing.

Now it's necessary for you to turn around and have the preclear register a communication back. 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 because he knows how. It's harder for the preclear to do it. Time spent at the beginning of a session just getting a two-way communication going until you really know you're talking to the preclear and he's talking to you is some of the best time you ever spent.

So there is that process. And out of this basic you get Opening Procedure of 8-C. But you can also do Opening Procedure of 8-C with the thetan, without moving the body. You could have the thetan touch things in the room. But actually you don't have him touch things and let go, you have him look at and look away. And you can carry through all the steps by more or less drilling the thetan in the room – preclear sitting there with eyes closed, and this becomes a tremendously workable procedure.

Opening Procedure 8-C is a considerable assist to this. Improvement of communication is the key-note of all auditing.

Actually its most simple form is to just tell him to close his eyes, and if he knows of any object in the room at all while he has his eyes closed, spot spots in it.

Now the classic Group Processing example of this is a very simple one and that is "Three spots in the body, three spots in the room". Have them spot three spots in the body, three spots in the room three spots in the body, three spots in the room, back and forth and at the end of this time, at the end of an hour's group processing on perfectly green people, you'll have four or five out of the twenty of them exteriorized – the usual run of people you run into.

8-C done with the body, however, and with no further tricks, its most elementary auditing commands as given in Intensive Procedure, is the only process – please mark this one down, please remember this – it's the only process to use on the very, very low or difficult case. Let's put that down, and recognize that when a very low level preclear comes in he has already determined exactly the processing he's going to get. It's down below Two on the Tone Scale, and what it takes to handle this case is Opening Procedure of 8-C, because in essence it is a purity of communication and is a very simple process to use, but that doesn't mean that you don't have to be an artist to use it.