The main difficulty of the preclear is other-knowingness. An auditor auditing a preclear has before him someone whose last stronghold of owned knowingness is his engram bank and various mental phenomena. As much as possible, the preclear should be permitted to discover the answers to this phenomena through the process of auditing. What the auditor is doing is steering. If he tells consistently what is to be found or what will happen, the preclear will not get well. The steering, of course, is a covert but highly acceptable method of inviting the preclear to find out. Giving a process’s commands is an invitation to this discovery. The auditor is working from a body of knowledge as to how all minds and spirits function. The preclear could even be trained in this high generality without harm, and certainly can be audited in such a high generality, but its particularities and peculiarities, the phenomena which occur, must not be “telegraphed” to the preclear before they occur, and when something has occurred to the preclear the auditor should not then come up with its explanation. This was the entire failure of psychoanalysis. The preclear would say something, and the analyst would then tell the preclear what it meant.

The auditor should confine himself to giving the proper auditing commands and engaging in enough “dunnage” (extra and relatively meaningless talk) to maintain a two-way communication line.

After a preclear has informed the auditor of an incident in his life it would be a fatal error, so far as the preclear’s case is concerned, for the auditor, using other data, to inform the preclear that he did not have a proper recall on the incident. This is the main trouble with husband and wife auditing teams, and why they normally do not work. Both have been present under various circumstances, and the husband or the wife doing the auditing on the other may find it impossible to repress his or her own version after the other one has delivered up an incident. Today’s type of auditing enters incidents minimally; therefore opportunities of this kind are not as frequent as in earlier days. Verbal invalidation is, of course, the symbolic manifestation of force. Invalidation, when expressed in emotion and effort, is force. When the preclear is invalidated he feels as though he has been struck by some force. One of the lowest levels on this line of invalidation is criticism. Lacking the effort or energy to hit somebody, a covert person criticizes or otherwise invalidates.

In a series of tests conducted to discover why certain co-auditing teams had failed to effect an improvement, it was found that the auditor in each of these failed teams had been auditing out of the preclear what should have been audited out of the auditor. Top- flight Scientology processes minimize this difficulty, for they audit the common denominator, as nearly as it can be approached, of the difficulties in any and all minds. Nevertheless, auditors have a tendency to do to the preclear what should be done to the auditor in the way of processing. Furthermore, there are processes which effect improvement only after a great deal of auditing, and although this might be considered remunerative, it is actually not efficient since an auditor tying himself to one case is not benefiting the society as a whole, and is so defying his own third dynamic.

Many a case has failed, not because of processing, but because the auditor was so irregular in keeping appointments that he introduced into the case an anxiety about waiting or unpunctuality. By failing to keep an appointment the auditor is actually telling the case that the case is not important, therefore not interesting, and the case will not run for an auditor who will not keep appointments. If an auditor has, himself, difficulty in keeping appointments, then he should not make specific appointments.

Utilizing all the experience of four years, it has been discovered that items 5, 6 and 7 of the Auditor’s Code were the only actual causative agents in spinning preclears. Whenever a preclear markedly worsened under processing, the process itself was found to be guiltless, and it was discovered that items 5, 6 and 7 of this Code had one or all been present. In every case where a psychosis or neurosis was restimulated by bad auditing, all these factors, 5, 6 and 7, were present. Because the body is built of cells which contain in their experience line, evidently, the pattern of plankton, energy level actually drops after sundown, but for a while there is a certain franticness which can be mistaken for energy. In other words, when the sun went down the source of energy was no longer present, therefore auditing during any of the dark hours is not as effective as auditing during daylight. However, a person can be audited safely up to 10

p. m. regardless of the state of his case. After 10 p.m. the curve of ability to handle energy drops quickly and hits its low at 2:00 a.m. But any auditing after 10 p.m. has been found to be at least ineffective, and might as well not have been done.

It is an unhappy thing that occasional hidden factors such as lack of sleep, lack of food, or an urgent present time problem may defeat the efforts of an excellent auditor. The best process will not benefit a preclear who, still interiorized, is being drained down as a thetan by a body which is badly in need of food. Every bit of energy which the thetan puts out is being absorbed by the body, which is improperly fed. A body suffering from malnutrition, or even lack of a proper breakfast, will thus inhibit auditing.

Sometimes a preclear who has come from a distant area to be audited is sufficiently short of cash that he will attempt to subsist during the week of an intensive upon sandwiches and coffee. He might as well have stayed home, for his body, being hungry, will pull in engrams, which are after all edible energy, will drain down every beam which a thetan throws out, and will in general defeat processing.

An improperly fed preclear demonstrates on a basal metabolism test, even when sane, the same oxygen burning rate as a psychotic. You can take any preclear, have him omit eating breakfast, and a psychotic, and test the two of them, and you will discover their metabolism and breathing behavior to be similar.

It is not prescribing a diet to demand that your preclear eats as a normal human being should during an auditing intensive or before any auditing. Preclears who are not adequately fed can be spun if bad auditing and some other factors are added into the session. This does not mean that a body can get so starved that it cannot benefit from auditing, but it does mean that a proper diet, as is normal with the preclear, should be observed during an intensive. Diet, by the way, is nowhere near as large a factor in the recovery of cases as nutrition “ads” would have you believe, and today no HASI auditor is allowed to prescribe diets if he is to continue in the protection of the organization. However, number six must be observed during auditing.

Although it is almost impossible for a case to escape having two or three auditors, when the number gets up to six or eight over a relatively short space of time, such as a few months, the case is seen to suffer by reason of the change. As much as possible a case should be run by one auditor. The basic reason for this is that one auditor running a case has a better chance of completing what he starts. A frequent change of auditors nearly always means a frequent change of estimates of a case, and a frequent change of processes none of which get finished.

There are three ways of handling those who need help. The first and most senior of them is to be effective and remedy the condition once and for all. The second method would be to make the person comfortable. If you cannot be effective, and you cannot make the person comfortable, only then would you be justified in giving the person sympathy. At the same time cases can be retarded by the auditor’s being far too domineering, but if one has to err, err in the direction of being too domineering, not in the direction of being sympathetic. Sympathetic auditing invites the preclear to dredge up more data about which the auditor can be sympathetic, and finally becomes a mutual sympathetic society.

With such processes in existence as Opening Procedure by Duplication, it becomes important that the auditor carry through what he starts. You will discover that a preclear very often will get up to a point where he desires to fight the auditor, and then will walk off from a session. It is the auditor’s responsibility to bring the preclear back and to finish the session. Sessions end when the auditor says they are over, not when the preclear says they are over. However, in order to continue the session it is not legitimate to abuse the preclear or disobey any other sections of the Code.