The auditor will encounter many cases which resolve very rapidly. These account for fully 50% of the people who come to him, but he will also encounter many people whose cases are resistive, and he will encounter a small handful who wouldn’t let anything happen if the auditor used a shotgun on them. These last are classified as “Circuit Cases.”

Here are two answers to correspondents which are of interest to other auditors:

The characteristic of these cases is that they are occluded — which is to say that they are studying the significance of things, that they always think before they look, that they want to know before they go, that they are relatively motionless in space, and that they are holding motion in many ways.

The resolution of such cases as outlined in PAB No. 12 is not difficult, but there is a trick about these cases which the auditor should understand.

“You write about a preclear that cannot persist for more than half a second. You say that it does not matter whether he is attempting to do a mock-up, a concept, a matched terminal or a feeling. I have not had this complaint from other auditors, but there is a general type of case known as the ‘non-persistence case. ’ This is a gradient scale, of course, which starts in with the preclear who puts up a mock-up but, due to blackness, the thing disappears almost immediately. It disappears so fast he cannot see it. Of course, he himself will go on putting up mock-ups as long as you tell him to go on putting up mock-ups, and soon he will have one that he can perceive. The energy he puts up there is too slight when in contest with the tremendous saturation abilities of the blackness with which he is surrounded. Now your statement here is quite unique. I would say offhand that this person is in extremely bad condition and is actually a Step# I would start in training this person on reaching and withdrawing from MEST, and I would keep him on this until he had a wonderful sense of reality about being able to hold on to MEST. Just use Step VII as given in Issue 16-G.

I would no more audit one of these people without an E-Meter than I would use psychiatry on them. For this case very often pretends to run one thing when it is running quite another, and only the response of a needle will tell the auditor whether or not the case is doing anything. The case merely might be lying there agreeing about it and thinking.

“The basic trouble with this preclear is, of course, in the matter of location. If you recall the Prelogics, theta locates things in time and space and creates space and things to locate in space. Close order drill for a military squad on the part of the sergeant eventually places the sergeant in the position of being able to evaluate for every private there. This is probably the only reason privates can be made to attack machine gun nests. Now the trouble with your preclear is impersistence. He cannot locate anything anywhere, but actually he cannot stay anywhere. He is racing around in his mind at such a mad rate that he is unable to take a stand anywhere against anything. This sounds like a very severe dispersal case running on enough fear to defeat the Russians. His solution is to keep running. You are asking him to stand still and hold something. He knows he cannot hold anything. The obvious thing to do with this preclear is to give him some close order drill yourself until you are able to evaluate enough for him to make him start evaluating a little bit for himself.

The Iroquois Indian had an illness which he called “the sickness of long thinking.” The auditor would do well to keep this illness firmly in mind when processing resistive cases. These cases are sick of thinking and they will go on thinking and go on computing until they are quite dead, for they cannot be brought to look without rather extraordinary means. Acceptance Level Processing is quite welcome to these cases. Formula H is extremely welcome to them and these, indeed, get the case up to a point where it can be run on such things as SOP 8.

“The way I would handle this case would be to have the preclear move to various parts of the room and stop still while I counted ten. Then I would move him to another part of the room and have him stop still while I counted ten again. In other words, I would move him around until he would listen to me. He would do this with his physical body well enough, and after that one could tell him with some effect upon him that he should do this or that. Now I would have him take his hands and reach towards the realest thing in the room to him and pick it up and examine it and then put it down and withdraw from it. I would have him go and pick it up and move it to some other part of the room and withdraw from it again. I would have him do this with numerous objects until he was perfectly confident of being able to reach and withdraw from MEST. I would keep this up until this preclear was stable beyond stable. Only then would I go into processing with him. I would have him do mock-ups and then go straight into SOP 8. He could use, of course, ‘remembering something real’ and so forth with great effectiveness.

The auditor knows he is looking at a circuit case when, during auditing, the case does not demonstrate a physical reaction as a result of the auditor’s processing; that is to say, the case does not move around. In old-time Dianetics the case which said it was running a prenatal and yet which had no tendency to curl up in a ball, no matter how slight, was actually thinking about running a prenatal.

“This brings to mind the fact that the occluded case is too fixed, he is fixed in position and does not conceive himself able to move. He also could use a lot of reaching and withdrawing, but in the case of an occluded case who tended to persist too long and was very slow in his replies, who insisted on holding his mock-ups endlessly, I would ask this case to put himself in various parts of the room or the yard, and I would move him this way and that, until he suddenly realized he could control his own body. The occluded case really does not realize he can control his own body. A very funny and effective method of bringing him into this realization is to have him sit down and flap his hands vertically up and down with considerable violence, and simply to keep on flapping his hands until he realizes fully and completely that it is he who is flapping his hands. You would be surprised at the reaction on this even when used on a very sane individual.

I wish to state this very strongly about such cases: they are often very convincing and can be mistaken by the auditor for a wide-open case. On reviewing a number of cases in processing which have been reported to me as wide-open cases and on looking at these cases themselves, I find that the auditor was actually auditing a Resistive V, which yet had learned enough patter to go on and run things.

“In closing let me assure you that when you hit on work in any form, run best with Expanded Gita in brackets, you are heading into the center of what’s wrong with a human being.”

Some cases which actually did have sonic and visio were another type which falls into the same category. These are what we call the “wide-open case.” The wide-open case is actually a psychotic who duplicates continuously and psychotically.

Anyone has a time track and anyone duplicates. The wide-open case is thoroughly sure that it is duplicating, is actually under a compulsion to duplicate, but doesn’t duplicate. It doesn’t look at things enough to duplicate. It dubs in an entire track.

“An interesting variation of ridge processing is to consider the ridge, as preclears often do, as an entity or a being with a life of its own. This is generally used when the preclear says that he has a spirit or a guiding angel or is haunted by a dog at his throat or some such thing, which the auditor knows is only a ridge activated by the preclear himself.

We have today very little concern with all this beyond a very important fact. The auditor is there to audit the preclear. The preclear is there to be audited. At that point where cases become difficult, this is what is happening: the auditor’s auditing the preclear, and then the preclear is auditing something else. The preclear isn’t being audited; the auditor is doing a second-hand audit of a circuit. This doesn’t get a case anywhere. The auditor in this wise is actually sitting there watching the manifestation of self-auditing.

“Instead of trying to disabuse him of the idea, the auditor makes the preclear process the ridge as an auditor, which is to say he makes the preclear into an auditor for the ridge. Circuit cases and occluded cases are always sitting way up above the case processing something else as though they were an auditor, and an auditor auditing them is actually an auditor auditing a person who is auditing a ridge. Hence the slow progress of such cases.

In Six Steps for Self-Auditing we have more or less licked the problem. An individual can now with some success audit his own case. But this is still difficult on very low-toned cases, for these people will put the Six Steps for Self-Auditing to work so remotely from themselves that they will actually find the two upper corners of the room with a ridge; and, indeed, I have discovered a preclear doing this. I asked a preclear after nothing had happened for ten minutes what he really was doing and made him go into it in detail. (Any success I have in auditing is the result of communicating with the preclear, a procedure which is recommended.) The preclear finally permitted it to be beaten out of him verbally that he was taking a ridge which was across his chest and had put two corners of this ridge up to the two corners of the room and was making the ridge hold on to the two comers of the room. Astonishingly enough, this did not entirely defeat processing because this ridge consisted of overt acts and motivators and these were flowing off and the preclear was sitting there looking at them. But this was not auditing the preclear, this was auditing via the preclear a circuit in which I was not even vaguely interested. The preclear is so used to being employed by life as a servomechanism that he will very often simply relay the commands he is given to a something else; and this is the condition for which an auditor must be alert.

“In any event, in this method of handling ridges, the auditor has the preclear make the ridge find the two upper corners of the room, just as Step III in SOP 8, and make the ridge hang there from the two upper corners of the room and not think (that is to say, the ridge isn’t supposed to think). The astonishing part of this technique is that it will generally show up some sort of a double overt act mechanism. This will immediately come to view. The auditor should resist the temptation to audit the overt act but just continue with this process. The ridge may turn into some kind of a bird, or some horrible figure with a gruesome face, but after a while the preclear loses his fear of the thing. After all, he does have it hanging up there, black and ugly though it may be, on the two upper corners of the room. The preclear may have removed this thing from his own eyes or from his mouth or from his chest or from his stomach and hung it up.

Back in 1947 I was using anything that worked and was employing hypnotism and psychoanalysis in addition to what I had learned about engrams and other factors in life. The psychoanalyst learned from Freud that there are some cases who simply stand back and look at themselves and who do not participate in the activities. The homosexual, according to Freud, is one of these. I do not know as to that, as the finding has not been borne out in my own work, but I do know that I had many preclears who did not actually participate in the process of being processed. I solved this in some of these cases rather drastically by misdirecting the preclear’s attention. One case I remember of a young man who never seemed to audit anything I asked him to audit and who was far too alert to his surroundings to be interested at all in remedying his attitude towards those surroundings. I put a vase of flowers on my desk and knocked them off with a crash and immediately said, “You’re perfectly safe; now let’s really run through this.” I know now that this Indian technique of getting immediate attention snaps the effort of the preclear which is being devoted to holding an engram at bay away fast enough for the engram to collapse. Good or bad, the young man got well. It is not a process I would particularly recommend. On a test case using this, about a year ago, I had a preclear have a ridge blow up with a considerable explosion which immediately thrust the preclear into apathy and it took me about three hours of heavy slogging with what I knew then to bring the preclear back up to normal. At least, however, the preclear was not in the same attitude.

“After the ridge has been suspended there for some time (for ridges of this character do not easily dissipate when grounded), the auditor then has the preclear move it all around the room, turn it upside down, put it behind him, put it under his feet, until the preclear is at length entirely contemptuous of the thing and bored with it, at which time he will throw it away.

If you have any reason to suspect that you are auditing somebody who is auditing somebody else, all you have to do is to get into very close contact with the preclear and guide him through very carefully the Six Steps to Better Beingness as contained in PAB No. 7. This can be varied with PAB No. 1 2’s cycles of explosions. Just be sure the preclear is actually doing what you want him to do and do it in such a way that the preclear actually gets interested in doing it and you will find the case advancing rapidly.

“This does not resolve the case but it takes considerable pressure off the case and is one of the steps of upward progress. There are no instances on record yet of the ridge exploding when treated in this fashion, and no particular reason why there should be such instances.”

If the condition still continues, use Step VII of SOP 8. You will find that it is very productive and should be used on such a case for a rather long time.

THE ENTIRE PURPOSE OF THINKING IS TO COUNTERACT THE LOSS OF THE ABILITY TO GENERATE FORCE. ONLY IN THE ABSENCE OF FORCE IS THINKING NECESSARY.