The effectiveness of auditing, according to records and results, tests and hours in session, has increased enormously in the past thirty-four years(1947/1981). This is due to research – a casual estimate of the time I have put in on this approaches now a hundred thousand hours and half a century. In that time, as could be expected, there have been breakthroughs and breakthroughs and it can be expected that, because of these, the line-up from time to time would change. It is probably remarkable that the Grade Chart has not changed more than it has.

Improvements in auditor training as well as technical revelations have contributed to these refinements.

In the final analysis, it is the individual who receives the benefits from this. Increased percentage of results, shortened time to obtain them, more stable gains, broader application.

But it probably has not occurred to anyone that for the past thirty-two years, I have been researching downwards. That’s right. Remember that I myself was producing results thirty-two years ago. So what has been happening?

As broader and broader numbers of people were being addressed, more and more types of cases had to be handled.

Meanwhile, the society itself was going downhill. Outside the perimeter of Dianetics and Scientology, the level of cases was declining. More and more problems were being generated by the Establishment for its population: The psychologists were let loose on the schools and educational levels began to collapse; the doctors and psychologists and psychiatrists began to flood drugs into the culture; assisted by the FBI, crime statistics began to go out the roof; crushed by tax people, the economy began to generate more and more problems for the individual; the psychiatrist stepped up his program of injuring people and then compounded the Establishment tolerated felony of covering up his crimes by drugging his patient and keeping it a secret from him that he had been electric-shocked; soldiers began to be brainwashed, not just by the enemy but by their own governments. No need to go on, even if there are hundreds more, for this is not a rabble-rouse, it is just a brief comment on the society’s decline and because members of that society were being audited as they came in and because each year the average case found was rougher than last year’s cases, it affected the line-up of the Grade Chart. 1949 is not 1981.

The key word of all this is undercut. In research, whatever other considerations existed, there was always the necessity to go into a lower undercut of the cases.

Book One, Dianetics: The Modern Science Of Mental Health, contains the bulk of the elements and philosophy that we use today.

Of course there have been many breakthroughs that were not downwards, but upwards. However, the bulk of work has been devoted to finding where current cases were at and undercutting them to get positive results.

Don’t be unduly alarmed by what I am saying about the social decline as it may influence Dianetics and Scientology: We are way out ahead of it. As the society went down, our percentages of successful handlings were going up and up. And this shift in the Grade Chart is part of a program to keep it so.

The main change in the New Grade Chart is that Dianetics and Scientology have been switched around. One gets his Scientology, per this chart, before he gets his Dianetics.

Chronologically, then, Dianetics came before Scientology; and it would seem natural that one would give Dianetics to a pc before he gave him Scientology auditing. But wait, Scientology ARC Straight Wire and Grades were developed as an undercut to Dianetics.

It was Dianetics that made the first Clears. Scientology Grades do not make Clears, even though they sometimes exteriorize a person.

So this has now been made real on the New Grade Chart. Lower Scientology Grades have been placed below NED.

There are other technical reasons for this change: The pc usually needs a lot of work on his life, his relationships to his environment today before he has an easy time confronting his bank as in NED. By giving him Scientology first, things are made much easier for him when he sails into NED and when he goes Clear.

The Scientology Lower Grades unburden an awful lot of bank and environment when properly applied to a cooperative pc and can give him wins, wins, wins in his normal life.

This makes, too, for a happier end result.

In most cases, it shouldn’t add to time in session, but on the contrary, can shorten it up.

Also, there should be no particular reason to give lower grades after a person has gone Clear if his life problems have already been unburdened.

What is happening, with this New Grade Chart, is that one is correcting the relative positions of NED and Scientology lower grades.

I trust we can look forward now to even more Clears coming off the line.