Want to talk to you now about the Opening Procedure of 8-C.

This is a very, very interesting subject – a tremendously interesting subject. It's fascinating, utterly fascinating, exactly what you can do with a process which is apparently as permissive as Opening Procedure of 8-C.

Now, there's no need for me to go in, particularly, to the exact way that… It's all written up; you'll find it in Issue 24-G of the Journal of Scientology. But it is very fascinating the number of side effects which are cared for because you are processing straight toward simplicity.

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

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 follow the same procedure all over again, why he's lugging around something called "his universe" is a little bit difficult for a reasonable man to understand. And yet people do this. A thetan gives a sort of – the idea of somebody walking around with a great many clanking chains all carefully hidden away, even from himself – old tin cans, old cigar butts, so forth. And these are possessions. It looks like a kid's toy box. If you've ever looked into a three-year-old's choicest possessions, that's strictly about the order of havingness that a thetan pulls.

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.

Well, this is quite interesting because he gives them up with the greatest of reluctance. And yet he could make others. And his total health, you might say, is dependent upon his ability to make others – to have new, fresh things, to do almost anything he wants to with them. 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. Do we see that? To procure an object which was somebody else's object is what he has to do in order to have that object.

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.

Now, if we look at the four conditions of existence – the "is-es" – we will discover just exactly why. And these things are very valuable to him because they mean a period when he was actually in communication with thetans as such. And he could blame them, you see? 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 in order to blame the other thetan for something or other. In this way he would get a persistence: he would get survival, then, in terms of motion. Otherwise, it would all seem completely motionless to him.

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.

Now, again, all of these things are simply considerations. And in view of the fact that they're all considerations, we're enormously baffled as to how considerations could be so important. Remember they're only important because of the considerations which one held in common with others.

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.

Now, it'd be one thing simply to change one's considerations all over the place, and it would be quite another thing to have a series of considerations which had been thoroughly agreed upon with others. And so your thetan with his old cigar butts, torn playing cards and clanking chains – he's been in communication, one time or another, and the system of communication was established and therefore he could have an other-determinism so true and so convincing that even he, you see, would not be able to question its convincingness. And therefore nobody could possibly question the validity of these objects which he's carrying around.

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.

Now, you'll find out in some areas where thetans have been in concourse with nothing but thetans, there's such a thing as engram police. And there's all kinds of mechanisms that they use in order to steal mock-ups from each other, and it's really fabulous. They try to get an overt act done to them – in other words, get a motivator. Simply, then, they will have some reason to blame somebody else, you see, for having put that mass of energy there, and then that energy mass will persist. If they can't blame anybody else, why, it can too easily become an as-is and so disappear. Other-determinism becomes vital.

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.

Now, when we look over this problem, then, we discover that an individual can go so far on this line and become himself disabled. How does he become disabled? He begins to count on other-determinism more and more and more heavily to produce his own survival. We 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 a great difficulty.

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.

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 their point of origin, that they can be subjected to a law in physics known as the conservation of energy: Energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be converted. Now, of course, anything that lost can only be converted, you see? Unless you discover the point where it was actually manufactured. And so this universe becomes valuable. It becomes valuable because we've gone to so much trouble to lose enough things so that we then have a continuance of objects.

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.

Now, a thetan who has become upset about the various agreements and so on 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 is at fault.

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.

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 whatsoever.

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 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 communications formula. He cannot occupy the same space as an object – two objects cannot occupy the same space – so, therefore, he is a body. He is not a thetan-plus-body, he is a body.

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.

And every once in a while we run into some materialist in processing and just the barest thought, you see, that he is something else other than a body is completely, completely contradictory to him. It's utterly assaulting. You'd think that you would have held a gun on the man and asked him for his money or something. He'll become 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.

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.

This person at the same time is liable to be that person you will run into who is most concerned with God. This is real curious, isn't it? Well, he has to have another determinism for responsibility. Also his field will be relatively black. No criticism of the individual, that's just the state he's in. Why? He knows two things can't occupy the same space! So 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! That's very observant, isn't it? Well, this individual has himself mocked up as something and is being something so thoroughly that he cannot disassociate himself. So you tell him to be three feet back of his head and he can't be three feet back of his head.

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.

Now, we are processing something which has four parts. There is the the-tan and his machines – now, that's two parts. And the other parts are the body and its reactive bank. You see? Now, there are actually four parts. There's the reactive bank, a stimulus-response machine of some magnitude, and the body, which actually is capable of collecting an enormous amount of molecules and electrons and converting energy and doing all sorts of interesting things. Well, that's one unit. And the other unit is the thetan and his machines. But we're actually processing four things.

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.

Now an auditor, occasionally, makes the gross error of processing one of these things not the thetan. See? He processes the reactive bank. This is a mistake today – I mean, the technologies which we have, and so forth, do not justify the processing of the reactive bank. Just doesn't justify it. So there's that many engrams. 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 disappear? Well, if he got another body, it'd have another reactive bank. And so what we want to do is improve the thetan's ability to handle reactive banks, to be in association with them or not, at will. That's what we want to improve, not knock out a whole reactive bank. You see, that'd be silly.

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.

Now, the next thing: the body. An auditor comes along and he starts processing the body, the body, the body, the body, the body, the body. "Oh, my, our preclear. Look-it – he has a slight cold today! Uh-o-o-o-h-hh, wonderful! Now we've got something to process!"

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.

Well, what kind of an auditor would this be? It'd be an auditor who had to have something. This auditor couldn't possibly have nothing, because he's actually processing nothing – he's trying to free a nothingness. And if he can't conceive of a nothingness, if he has to go in the direction of a somethingness – even though he is making nothing out of every somethingness he runs into (you know, with energy; a not-is) – this auditor, of course, will process straight at this case of sniffles. And you know what he'll do with that case of sniffles? He 'II have it next! But what's he doing processing a body? They're easy to make, patch up, do almost anything with – if a thetan is able.

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.

All right, now, let's take this next thing: machines. Now, every once in a while some preclear has such an observable surplus of machinery that an auditor just can't stand leaving that machinery alone. He just can't stand it. He's got to get in there and get all of those mechanisms out of the road and get them all mopped up and wiped out and so forth. Next thing you know the thetan is very, very sad indeed. Because what would this thetan do? Look at all the years he's spent blaming this machinery on somebody else! Hm? He's got this little voice and it keeps piping up every time he says something, saying, "Heh, heh, that was a smart one, that was!" You know? And this little voice does this. And it's very worrisome to him. That's his mother's voice. So it's obviously his mother that's doing this. He made this machine a long time ago and put it off on somebody else. He even made a machine to make machines so that he wouldn't be responsible for it, and he even makes machines to add to his machines, the machine duplicates of other people. Oh, he's got complex machinery. But when you've gotten through processing all this machinery, what have you done? You've just processed some machinery. And it wasn't sick!

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.

So we have these four major parts. And of these four parts, what are we trying to process? We're trying to process the thetan. Well, of course, he doesn't have any mass, but he can make space and he can make energy and he can locate objects in space. And he has certain 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, well, other people's machinery and various other things. 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 mustn't – 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 otherdetermined, 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. But the auditor is not going to exteriorize him.

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.

So our point of approach here is the thetan. Now, the easiest way to approach this is simply on make and break communication with the immediate environment.

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?“

Now, I'd better define environment: environment is the physical universe, security, gee whiz 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 get looking through these things, then it's the walls in the next room and up through the roof, why, it's the air above the house and down through, it's the earth underneath the house. But this is still environment, you understand. 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.

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.

Now, we don't have the preclear in Chicago and, because he is an inhabitant of Iowa, then process him in the environment of Iowa. Now, this sounds too utterly stupid, that nobody could do this but, believe me, auditors have done this. Process him in the environment? Well, this fellow's environment was New Mexico, so they process him one state away. And what will they be processing? They'll be processing a set of facsimiles. Are we interested in this man's facsimiles? No, we're not.

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.“

Now, there's a direct ratio between the amount of facsimiles or energy masses a person has and his ability to communicate. There's a direct ratio between these two things. 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 worse off he is. It's a direct index.

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.

This fellow, he runs a concept and gets a flow past his face. You know, he feels something moving past his face. Ah, we've got a case of energy masses. 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? Hm. That would be a curious thing, wouldn't it? And yet, 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. He's as well off as he doesn't have to have energy masses. He has to have energy masses to the degree that he believes he cannot create a space and energy. See? Now, it's a direct index.

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?

So we find somebody who has large floating ridges, and that sort of thing, and this individual is having just that much difficulty – just that much; direct index. No question about it and no exceptions. Doesn't matter what manifestation we're exhibiting at the 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're floating energy masses, because everywhere he walks he's got them.

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?

Now, he's as well off as he can simply take or leave the walls and other items of the physical universe where he finds himself. See, he can take them or leave them; see them or not see them at will. Now, he's well off when he can do that.

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?“

Now, what process would you tailor up in order to accomplish this? Well, you could just simply have a preclear sitting in a chair and looking around the room spotting spots. You know, you just spot spots in the wall and spot spots and spot spots, spot spots. It's a fantastic technique; it'll do quite a bit for a preclear. Just have him sit there and look at the walls and spot spots.

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, actually, you can start adding to this the moment that you have him get up and walk around and pick out the spots and touch them and then break communication with them. And 8-C is actually a gradient scale, and 8-C's Opening Procedure is a gradient scale of getting this done.

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.

There is an additional process that could go along with this: You could make him close his eyes and have him start checking off spots in the environment. The case that has had his perception turn on very fully and then promptly turn off – and it's never been on since – has practically scared himself out of his wits. See, his perception turned on and that was too much isness; he could see everything too clearly. And this made him nervous, it upset him, it disturbed his thetan digestion; and has made him very, very unhappy.

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.

And what is this? This is just simply a case of too much, and he said, "It isn't!" See? He said, "Not-is!" and 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.

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.“

Well, what happens if we have this person sitting there in the chair with his eyes shut and we just have him look around the room? You know, have him look around and spot spots in the room. All right, a facsimile shows up. We just have him go on spotting spots in whatever he can see, which is – we're still heading at the room; 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 a 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-degree periphery of vision. There is no "Get thee behind me, thetan," situation.

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, here we have in a thetan, then, a possibility that the moment he really saw the room, he'd turn it off again. That right? He'd flinch. Well, the funny part of it is, they do. They do flinch. And then you keep right on processing the room. You see what this would be? I mean, 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 is all off. Well, you just have him find something he can perceive.

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.

If 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," yap, yap, yap, yap.

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.

You just say, "Spot some more spots."

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.

Now, in other words, we could go at this, then, on this basis: We just simply have a fellow, a preclear, close his eyes and start spotting spots in the room. And the auditing commands that go along with it, "All right," and you'd say, "Just close your eyes. Okay. Now, let's spot some spots in the room."

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.

"Oooh," the fellow says," I can – what do you mean 'close my eyes and spot "Well, can you see anything when you've got your eyes shut there?"

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.

"No! Of course not!"

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?

"Well, why don't you look around? Do you get an impression of anything?" "Hmmm. Well, what do you know! It's all black." He never noticed this before.

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.

You say, "Well, all right, how about this, now? You say it's all black. Well, is there any place that's thinner? You know, behind you, for instance, or above you or below you? Do you make out anything at all about this room?"

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,

"No."

„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.

"Well, as you're sitting there with your eyes closed, do you know the location of anything in this room?"

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.

"Yeah. Well, I know where my body is." Of course, a case like this would probably assert to you violently, if they weren't prepared otherwise, to tell you that they were a body, they had always been a body, they would always be a body, they've never been anything else but a body, that you live but once. And they would also tell you that during their study of Korzybski's Science and Sanity, they agreed with him utterly that two things could not occupy the same space. They tell you all these things. It'd 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 the two-way communication going. Then you get him doing something. "All right," you'd say, "well, do you know of the location of any object in this room?"

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?

And the fellow says," Well, there's a table right over there. I know that." "Well, why don't you look at it?"

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.

And if you don't catch him real quick, why, his eyes will pop open, of course, and he will stare at it. But you keep him with his eyes closed. And he knows there's a table over there and you say, "All right, spot some spots in it."

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.

"I can't possibly spot any spots in the table if I can't see it." "Do you know it's there?"

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.

"Yes, I know it's there. I saw it when I came in." "Well, all right. Spots some spots in it."

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 I'll have to open my…"

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.

"Go ahead and spot some spots on that table."

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.

He finally does. And it starts to get a tattletale gray around him, and then it flickers on and it 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, then he lets it turn on again, and then he shuts it off again, then he flinches in this way and flinches in that way. Why? He knows it's dangerous to look at things. He knows that. He knows, again, it is dangerous to communicate. He shuts it off before something else shuts it off. See? He's there ahead of them. But after it goes on and comes off and goes on and comes off a few times, it's liable to be more and more upsetting to him all the time. It's because it's liable to be getting more and more real. The room is liable to be getting more and more real, more and more solid.

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

Now, if you let him continually and completely fly out through the doors and the walls, and so on, and let him spot at unreal distances (such as spotting at a thousand yards for somebody who, actually, if he hadn't come to you for processing, he would have been using a tin cup shortly and a pair of dark glasses and some pencils). This character, and so forth, spotting at a thousand yards – oh yeah? 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 the first thing you know, why, the walls will start to disappear, and then they'll flicker on again and 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. 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 is 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 let go of it. You see? If he's really just spotting into blackness, and so forth, if he's really changing his perception direction, you see, why, boom! 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 I mentioned to you. And a thetan is as bad off as he has them. What he's witnessing with all of these possessions and masses of energy is his own inability to really mock up something and have it belong to somebody else. That's what he's witnessing when he can't do it. So, there is that process.

Now, out of these two processes you can do Opening Procedure of 8-C. But you can also do Opening Procedure of 8-C with the thetan, without moving the body. You can 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 of the room by more or less drilling the thetan in the room, preclear sitting there with eyes closed. And this becomes a tremendously workable procedure. Actually, its most simple form is just tell him to close his eyes. 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 example of this is a very simple one. And that is: three spots in the body, three spots in the room, three spots in the body; you have him spot three spots in the body, three spots in the room and 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 of a bunch of twenty, something like this, you will have four or five of them exteriorized – usual run of people that you run into, unless you're dealing, of course, with mystics 100 percent of the time. That's a little more difficult.

Now, 8-C done with the body, however – 8-C done with the body and with no further tricks with its most elementary auditing commands as given in Intensive Procedure's text – is the only process… Oh, please, mark this one down, please remember this: It's the only process which can be safely employed and beneficially employed on psychotics, neurotics and people with psychosomatic illnesses. Let's put that down. And recognize that when a preclear comes in with a psychosomatic illness, he has already determined exactly the processing he's going to get.

And I call your attention to the Chart of Human Evaluation, to the place where it says "Neurological and endocrine ills." Well, that's where they sit on psychosomatic ills. It's down below 2.0 on the tone scale. And they are physically off their base. And what it takes, and what will make that psychosomatic ill go away, is Opening Procedure of 8-C. And it'll cure psychotics and it'll cure neurotics, 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.

Okay.