The difficulty that an Auditor gets into is normally found in his own auditing cycle.

There are basically two communication cycles between the Auditor and the Pc that make up the auditing cycle.

They are cause, distance, effect with the Auditor at cause and the Pc at effect, and cause, distance, effect with the Pc at cause and the Auditor at effect.

These are completely distinct one from the other. The only thing that connects them and makes an auditing cycle, is the fact that the Auditor, on his communication cycle, has calculatingly restimulated something in the Pc which is then discharged by the Pc's communication cycle.

What the Auditor has said has caused a restimulation and then the Pc needs to answer the question to get rid of the restimulation.

If the Pc does not answer the question he doesn't get rid of the restimulation. That is the game that is being played in an auditing cycle and that is the entirety of the game. (Some auditing breaks down because the Auditor is unwilling to restimulate the Pc.)

There is a little extra communication cycle on here. The Auditor says, "Thank you" and you have this as the acknowledgement cycle.

Now there are some little inner cycles that can throw you off and make you think that there are some other things to the auditing cycle. There is another little shadow cycle: it is the observation of "Has the Pc received the auditing command?" This is such a tiny "cause" that nearly all Auditors who are having any trouble finding out what's going on with the Pc are missing this one. "Does he receive it?" Actually there is another cause in here and you're missing that one when you're not perceiving the Pc.

You can tell by looking at the Pc that he didn't hear or understand what you'd said or that he was doing something peculiar with the command he was receiving. Whatever that message is in response, it rides on this line.

An Auditor who isn't watching a Pc at all never notices a Pc who isn't receiving or under­standing the auditing command. Then all of a sudden somewhere along the line there is an ARC Break and then we do assessments and we patch up the session and all kinds of things go wrong.

Well, they actually needn't ever have gone wrong in the first place if this line had been in. What is the Pc doing completely aside from answering? Well, what he is doing is this other little sub-cause, distance, effect line.

Another of these tiny lines is the cause, distance, effect line of – "Is the Pc ready to receive an auditing command?"

This is the Pc causing and it rides up the line across distance, is received at the Auditor and the Auditor perceives that the Pc is doing something else.

It is an important one and you find that Auditors goof that one very often; the Pc's atten­tion is still on a prior action.

Now here's another one – "Has the Pc received the acknowledgement?" Sometimes you violate this one. You have been acknowledging but you've never seen that he didn't receive the acknowledgement. That perception has another little tiny one in it that actually comes on this line; it is – Has the Pc answered everything?

The Auditor is watching the Pc and the Auditor sees that the Pc has not said all that the Pc is going to say. You sometimes get into trouble with Pcs that way. Everything at "cause" hasn't moved on down the line to effect and you haven't perceived all of the "effect" and you go into the acknowledgement one before this line has completed itself.

That's chopping the Pc's communication. You didn't let the communication cycle flow to its complete end. The acknowledgement takes place and of course it can't go through as it's an inflowing line and it jams right there on the Pc's incomplete outflowing answer line.

So if you want to break it all down, there are six communication cycles which make up one auditing cycle. Six, not more than six unless you start running into trouble. If you violate one of these six communication lines you of course are going to get into trouble which causes a mish-mash of one kind or another.

There is another communication cycle inside the auditing cycle and that is at the point of the Pc. It's a little additional one and it's between the Pc and himself. This is him talking to him. You're listening to the inside of his skull when you're examining it. It actually can be multiple as it depends upon the complications of the mind.

This happens to be the least important of all the actions except when it isn't being done. And of course it's the hardest to detect when it isn't being done. Pc says: "Yes. Now what has the Pc said yes to? And sometimes you are insufficiently curious. And that in essence is this internal perception of line. It includes this cause, distance, effect backflash here – Is the Pc answering the command I gave him?''

So with this, there are seven communication cycles involved in an auditing cycle. It is a multiple cycle.

A communication cycle consists of just cause, distance, effect with intention, attention, duplication and understanding. How many of these are there in one auditing cycle? You'd have to answer that with how many principal ones there are because some auditing cycles contain a few more. If a Pc indicates that he didn't get the command (cause, distance, effect), the Auditor would give a repeat of it (cause, distance, effect) and that would add 2 more communication cycles to the auditing cycle, so you've got 9 – because there was a flub. So anything unusual that happens in a session adds to the number of communication cycles in the auditing cycle, but they are still all part of the auditing cycle.

Repetitive commands as an auditing cycle, is doing the same cycle over and over again.

Now there is a completely different cycle inside the same pattern. The Pc is going to originate and it's got nothing to do with the auditing cycle. The only thing they have in common is that they both use communication cycles. But this is brand new. The Pc says something that is not germane to what the Auditor is saying or doing and you actually have to be alert for this happen­ing at any time and the way to prepare for it is just to realize that it can happen at any time and just go into the drill that handles it. Don't get it confused with the drill that you have as an auditing cycle. Consider it its own drill. You shift gears into this drill when the pc does something unex­pected.

And, by the way, this handles such a thing as the Pc originates by throwing down the cans. That's still an origin. It has nothing to do with the auditing cycle. Maybe the auditing cycle went to pieces and this origination cycle came in. Well, the auditing cycle can't complete because this origin cycle is now here. That doesn't mean that this origin has precedence or dominance but it can start and take place and have to be finished off before the auditing cycle can resume.

So this is an interruptive cycle and it is cause, distance, effect. The Pc causes something. The Auditor now has to originate as the Auditor has to understand what the Pc is talking about – and then acknowledge. And to the degree that it is hard to understand, you have the cause, distance, effect of the Auditor trying to clarify this thing; and every time he asks a question, he's got a new communication cycle.

You can't put a machine action at that point because the thing has to be understood. And this must be done in such a way that the Pc isn't merely repeating his same origination or the Pc will go frantic. He'll go frantic because he can't get off that line – he's stuck in time and it really upsets him. So the Auditor has to be able to understand what the devil the Pc is talking about. And there's really no substitute for simply trying to understand it.

There is a little line where the Pc indicates he is going to say something. This is a line (cause, distance, effect) that comes before the origination takes place so you don't run into a jam and you don't give the auditing command. The effect at the Auditor's point is to shut up and let him. There can be another little line (cause, distance, effect) where the Auditor indicates he is listening. Then there is the origination, the Auditor's acknowledgement of it and then there is the perception of the fact that the Pc received the acknowledgement.

That's your origination cycle.

An Auditor should draw all these communication cycles out on a scrap of paper. Just take a look at all these things; mock up a session and all of a sudden it will become very straight how these things are and you won't have a couple of them jammed up. What's mainly wrong with your auditing cycle is that you have confused a couple of communication cycles to such a degree that you don't differentiate that they exist. That's why you sometimes chop a Pc who is trying to answer the question.

You know whether the Pc has answered the question or not. How did you know? Even if it's telepathy it's cause, distance, effect. It doesn't matter how that communication took place, you know whether he's answered the command by a communication cycle. I don't care how you sense this.

If you are nervy on the subject of handling the basic tool of auditing and if that's giving you trouble (and if you get into trouble by suddenly breaking it down and analyzing it) then it should be broken down and analyzed at a time when you're auditing something nice and simple.

I've given you a general pattern for an auditing cycle; maybe in working it over you can find a couple of extra communication cycles in the thing. But they are all there and if you made someone go through each one painstakingly, you would find out where his auditing cycle is jammed up. It isn't necessarily jammed up on his ability to say "Thank you". It may very well be jammed up in another quarter.