This past week has been an eventful one in research. It has culminated a four-year search for the factors which lay behind what is called IQ, or Intelligence Quotient. We have been taking tests here for many years and these tests were mainly used to establish change in preclears. We care nothing about the significance of the test. We do care, however, that these tests mirror change.

Someone may say that a test taken twice will, of course, get a better answer than one taken once. This is not true, since everybody in the MEST universe is on a “mustn’t happen again” and we automatically figure that a test taken twice would get a worse grade the second time. We have two different tests marked A and B which are supposed to give identical results. I have been waiting for the people who devised this test originally to say, “Well, you can throw the results in any direction you want to with these tests.” But we have given a considerable amount of testing to many, many people and we do find that a test will hold constant on a given person in the absence of processing. If a person is not processed the variability in the profile and IQ is very slight. Somebody who is not getting any results from any treatment or processing will register the same, test after test which is quite unusual.

Testing is a very old subject. It is not newly developed in modern times. One of the first examples of testing that we find is in the early Chaldean times. Testing of all kinds, sorts and descriptions as to honesty, intent, reliability, ability and so forth, have been with Man almost as long as he has been on Earth. In modern times these tests have been more standardized and reduced to writing.

Here, for example, is a test I heard about, from the 18th Century down in Georgia. It was a guilt test. Somebody had stolen something, so they would have all the negroes on the plantation line up and put a rooster underneath a big black kettle. This was a witch rooster or something of the sort. And they would say, “The man who stole it, when he touches the black kettle will make the rooster crow.” All the negroes on the plantation would go by the kettle and then the overseer merely had to go by and look at their hands. The negro who didn’t have any soot on his hands was, of course, guilty.

All tests, however, have had an end goal, and they of modern times are more or less as covert as this rooster under the black kettle.

Modern tests were originally devised in the total belief that Man could not be changed. From year to year people would get changes of one kind or another from childhood on, which would demonstrate the year’s IQ which might be higher or lower than another year’s IQ. They maintained that people advanced in IQ because of age, yet at the same time said that IQ could not change, would never change and could not be influenced by any particular factor.

I am rather astounded to discover that when a person is happy and takes the test, and when this same person is unhappy and takes the test, he practically gets the same curve on his personality profile with the same IQ. It does have a constancy. It was this constancy and an inability to understand the mind prior to 1950 which made people say that it was not possible to change Man or his IQ. A stupid man was stupid and a bright man bright and that was it.

People knew, however, that personality and IQ were not the same thing and were distinct from one another. So there are tests to measure personality and tests to measure intelligence. One of the ways one would observe this would be to take three or four men who had more or less an equal personality. The result of testing would show that they had more or less similar personalities but that their IQs differed. Or one could take men of the same IQ and test them, only to find that their personalities were completely different from each other.

I have known this ever since 1950 when the first testing was done. We either changed their personality or changed their IQ. Very often with a very successful case we changed and improved both. This created a mystery and we wondered why it was that when we ran an intensive on Joe his IQ changed and when we ran the same intensive on Bill his personality changed but not his IQ. In view of the fact that all of our processes were mixed to a large degree, including such things as havingness, 8-C, thinkingness and significance processes, and in view of the fact that auditors were different from one another, we had a sufficient number of factors in each one of these test representations to make it impossible to sort out. I could not sort it out.

Then I started on a project with the HGC auditors last week and wound up with the answer to this problem when I had no intention of doing so at all. It was just accidental that I found the answer.

Here is what happened. We wanted a process that we could write up in a book and send to ministers so that they could counsel easily and well, since the minister is doing a tremendous amount of personal counseling. If he could just sit down, according to these rules as he read them and get some sort of a result we would have been very happy. We called this project “Process July.”

We knew one thing about Process July: It was slanted in the direction of getting people to unburden their souls. We wanted to get the overt act-motivator sequence off the case. So we would have the minister write down the names of everybody the person knew and then pick out the most likely candidates and ask just one question about each one of those until we got this person straightened out. It would have been a straight wire question on a present time basis, such as “Tell me something you could do or say to valence.”

We do know that an overt act-motivator sequence is a reach-withdraw situation, therefore we had to test “withhold” since we obviously had this withhold situation to consider. (Now earlier processes already indicated this, and particularly “Recall a secret.” Don’t confuse this with withhold because they are not the same process at all. We merely wanted the person to open up and talk to the auditor when we were recalling secrets and if we did anything with it, it was totally accidental. But we did learn here about withhold.)

So the first question the minister would ask would be, “Think of something you could withhold from.” Now one of the discoveries that led to this question is that divulgence and confessions had nothing to do with raising anybody’s IQ or improving his case. It wasn’t the fact that he confessed it or divulged it but the fact that he erased it.

We started running this “withhold” command for a couple of days and then went over to “What could you say or do to ,” varied that question around for a couple of days and returned to “Think of something you could withhold from (valence),” and found that the latter was the question that was producing the results.

Withhold is a games condition on communication and is a partner to the process, “Mock up somebody denying communication.” People are in an obsessive games condition which they have to play, although they are not aware of it, and on the subject of communication they are naturally going to be withholding obsessively.

We tested this process carefully and found minimal personality changes, but found that the IQs of the preclears changed remarkably. An old lady’s IQ went up from 84 to 105 and everybody knew that her brains were atrophied. It was an “impossible” jump for a person of her age. Another person quite advanced in years, between 70 and 80 years old, got an IQ raise from 109 to 133. An invalid’s IQ went up from 98 to 121 and a student’s from 101 to 126. There was an IQ change on every case on which this process was run.

The theory behind it seems to be this: The individual gets his mind so involved with the problems of some game with some valence or person that his computers are all tied up on that particular subject. When you restore self-determinism on this level you free the individual’s ability to think. An obsessive games condition is to withhold communication from somebody. When we take that off automatic and put it under the control of the preclear so that he is doing it, all of the involved mechanisms start working out.

That is why psychotherapy never worked. You have never seen before and after tests, whether IQ or personality, on a Freudian analysis. It is the ability to withhold communication which advances IQ and makes a person feel better, not the ability to divulge it. We’ve been told all our lives that all we had to do was go to somebody and confess. If we were to confess to our mothers and fathers that we did those dirty, nasty little things we would feel so much better. It isn’t true. You probably only felt better to the end of getting your pants spanked. This is an enforced communication and as an enforced communication would break through a games condition, in which a person found himself. It would demand that one communicate with the enemy and would depress one accordingly. Obviously, then, it is not true that divulging or confessing did anything for anybody, because the only improvement he got would be if he regained the ability to withhold that information without being upset about withholding it. The only disturbing element in secrets is the guilt which accompanies them.

For example: You took your old man’s car and it got a wobbly wheel. You put it back in the garage and he came out the next day and looked at it and said, “I wonder how that happened?” You stood there innocently, saying nothing. But you felt guilt. At length you felt as though you were going out of communication with him when these incidents piled up too high. Psychotherapy’s whole answer to this is that you had to throw yourself at your father’s chest and confess all whereupon all would be well. It wouldn’t have done a thing for you. What the bent wheel did was to overcome your ability to withhold communication by making you feel you ought to communicate. It interrupted your self-determinism on the subject of communication.

This is the reach and withdraw mechanism, of must reach, can’t reach, must withdraw, can’t withdraw and these are the two pairs which create the sensation of insanity. As an example, you must run away from the bogey man that’s chasing you through the treacle. He is coming like a mad express train and there you are stuck. That is a nightmare. You must withdraw and cannot withdraw. The glee of insanity is only composed of this. People in asylums are stuck in this so they must withdraw and can’t withdraw, must reach and cannot reach.

All of the past psychotherapies are aimed at getting a person to outflow, and what do we find here? We find that intelligence increases and neurotic personality traits get better when we run withhold communication from valences. It is a fantastic reversal. We found this to be the case: that people from whom one felt that one could not withhold anything were the most aberrative valences on the case. We thus have a new definition for aberrative valences, namely the “cannot withhold from” valence, who is the most aberrative valence on the case. As you run it the preclear will say, “Well,” unreality, unreality, “I don’t seem to be able to withhold anything from Aunt Grace at all.” Ask a criminal what he could withhold from jail and he will find that he cannot withhold anything from jail. He will see facsimiles and other electronic phenomena sweeping towards some spot he considers jail since he is unable to withhold anything from jail.

We are looking at the basic anatomy of the track and the basic process by which one would run a track. You could be sitting in the middle of the trap and just dream it up for a while and say, “How did I get in here? I don’t know.” The only way anybody could keep you in a trap would be to give you the idea that you had to surrender to the trap and the way to undo this would simply be to think of something you could withhold from the trap — or track.

The other side takes care of itself. I don’t know how a thetan can keep from communicating with everything unless he feels he should withhold everything from everything. Remember, you are not trying to erase a lot of things. It is the regaining of the ability to withhold that you are working toward. It is a certainty process, the preclear selectively withholding things from canvas, typewriter or aberrative valence with certainty, because an individual has been in a games condition with the canvas, typewriter, drill press or the valence. It has absorbed all of his ideas and thinkingness and everything else, and they are all stuck and bunched up on the track. He is trying to think, “How can I communicate?” since communication is composed of selective withholding.

One thus gets this kind of activity. One has individuals in a games condition with their highest common denominator of a games condition, and that action is communicate, and they are trying to withhold communication from their opponents. Wherever they have considered an opponent to exist they have withheld communication from the opponent. Having decided to withhold communication from the opponent they now decide to communicate with the opponent because they have to, and you get a denial of self which is, of course, the basic aberrative pattern. We take this circumstance, look it over and discover that the individual has been made to break his own postulate — ”I am withholding it” — because he considered this person an opponent and then he said, “I have to talk.”

When you can no longer withhold from a valence you become it, and we have the basic mechanism of valence closure, because what is the one thing that you don’t withhold from something you have become? Yourself. So here is a gradient scale of withholding.

One would run “withhold” this way: You would take an inventory of valences, their professions and habitats. A habitat is a place where the preclear has lived and couldn’t pay rent. In other words, the old homestead, his childhood home. There are a number of tricks by which one can isolate these valences without asking the direct question on the basis of comm lag or the fact that he didn’t mention at all in five people the two most aberrative people or valences on the case.

One would then establish a session with thoroughness and with questioning find out if there was a present time valence with which the person was very deeply involved and run that out with Problems of Comparable Magnitude. One would then move into the session and sandwich valences with Locational Processing. The command here is: “Think of something you could withhold from (valence),” not “Recall something.” The preclear would say, “Oh, yes, I can think of lots of things.” Now beware of an automaticity. He might strike a games condition on an automaticity that says, “I can withhold something from (valence).” That has to be flattened. Get to the point where he can withhold rather ordinary and routine things at his own discretion one at a time and that would be the ability to withhold regained, the only thing you are interested in.

When the preclear finally decides that he can withhold things from the valence, go into Locational Processing to orient your preclear in present time, and to command his attention. Then run the next aberrative valence. This one should be a little more difficult than the last one and so on to the next valence which should be stiffer than the last.

One should then pick up the preclear’s professional tools and run these on a similar gradient scale — the easier ones first and gradiently to the difficult ones — until he can withhold anything from his childhood home.

Flatten CCH 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 fairly well before you embark on this and then use ample Locational Processing for the remainder of the intensive and Lord knows what his IQ will be if you went for broke to this degree.

But remember that the process will not do anything unless you have some goals as to where the process is going, and the goal is to restore the preclear’s ability to withhold. This will bring the preclear out of all traps and is quite evidently IQ, and it changes valences only to the degree that it totally snaps the preclear out of that valence.

I hope this information is as valuable to you as it has proven itself to me and the HGC auditors who assisted me with this project.