This chapter is reproduced from notes taken by a student on the course in 1950. No recording of this lecture has been found, and without the actual tape recording we have been unable to verify the accuracy of the notes. The same material appears in a more condensed form in the book “Notes on the Lectures”.

Rules for the Advancement of Cases Cases that are stalled or bogged down have been bogged down solely because of breaks in the Auditor’s Code. So this is where we begin.

The code is not there just because it is nice or because it is the thing to do or because I had an idea and wrote it down. When it is not observed, cases do not advance and sometimes they get into a remarkable state of affairs.

The auditor should be courteous in his treatment of all preclears.

The auditor should be kind, not giving way to any indulgence of cruelty toward preclears, nor surrendering to any desire to punish.

The auditor should be quiet during therapy, not given to talk beyond the absolute essentials of Dianetics during an actual session.

The auditor should be trustworthy, keeping his word when given, keeping his appointments in schedules and his commitments to work and never giving forth any commitment of any kind which he has any slightest reason to believe he cannot keep.

The auditor should be courageous, never giving ground or violating the fundamentals of therapy because a preclear thinks he should.

The auditor should be patient in his working, never becoming restless or annoyed by the preclearno matter what the preclear is doing or saying.

The auditor should be thorough, never permitting his plan of work to be swayed or a charge to be avoided.

The auditor should be persistent, never giving up until he has achieved results.

The auditor should be uncommunicative, never giving the patient any information whatsoever about his case, including evaluations of data or further estimates of time in therapy. BE COURAGEOUS. That is very important. You are going to have cases that explode in your face. In fact, back in Elizabeth I had a little of that on the first Saturday night class that took the Basic Course there. Everyone was cool and collected, then I put a preclear on the couch and started out, “The file clerk will select the engram necessary to resolve this case. The somatic stripl will go to the beginning of the engram. When I count from one to five the first phrase of the engram will flash into your mind. One-two-three-four-five (snap!).”

He ran through it twice calmly, then he leapt several inches off the couch, let out a piercing yell, and I could see the whole class’s hair rise on end as I took him through the engram, complete with sobs and screams.

But an auditor can back out of an engram and then wonder why the next morning the preclear is found in a corner of the room in a fetal position.

So, no matter what you hit, ride it through, no matter how hard you may think it is. Never get sympathetic.

There are three levels of healing:

1. Be efficient and do something.

2. Make the patient comfortable if you can’t do something about it.

3. If you can’t make him comfortable, sit there and hold his hand.

There are a lot of cases that are not advancing because people are holding hands. I wish to stress this point. Any auditor who says “This poor fellow!” had better get his own engrams picked up. There is some engram which inhibits his going into the engrams of the “poor” preclear.

This can be a very rough thing, perhaps, but the end is calmness. If you can get line charge off the case, if you can get tears by actually running an engram, you are going to get results from that preclear but if you find yourself holding off from a case because this case may explode in your face, you are not going to get results. It takes nerve.

For instance, a young man brought a psychotic girl into the Foundation for auditing. On the couch she started to run birth with all its screams, begging all the while “Please let me come up,” and suggesting I ask the file clerk to do such-and-such. But I wouldn’t let her out and I ran birth all the way through, got all the charge and somatics off it, and the young lady got up off that couch with a very sane light in her eyes. It was extremely tough and I had to go upstairs later and run the sound volume out of my ears. At times like that it can seem as if somebody has been working on you with pneumatic hammers.

So, be courageous when you go into one of these cases. Don’t quit, and don’t let anybody fool you. The preclear may say, “I think I had better run that incident when I was burned.”

Maybe his wife is auditing him, and session in and session out they avoid anything which will do him any good. The auditor should make up his mind what he is going to do and then carry it through.

Unless you have run a screamer you haven’t any idea what a screamer can do to you. You can feel your own engrams rising up, but sit there and ride it through. A person can rise above his own engrams if he is auditing. I see people doing it. They are running engrams similar to their own and are ready to pass out, and yet they go on.

One young man was not quite this determined, however. He and another student had been working each other, and the group had left them alone late that night. Somebody came back at about two o’clock in the morning and found the preclear lying on the couch moaning and the other fellow sitting in the corner holding his stomach. They had been like that for three hours! It was mutual restimulation and the auditor did not have nerve enough to carry it through birth and the prenatal area. This is not good Dianetics. The moral of the story is, Watch that one in the Auditor’s Code about being courageous.

Another point is so vital I do not think it necessary to tell you what it is: Don’t evaluate the preclear b case for him. And out of that evaluation the most important thing is DON’T INVALIDATE HIS DATA. You will have him in a very sad state if you do. His mother may be fighting off three Zulus and maybe to you it is impossible, but never as his auditor say, “You know that didn’t happen!”

I saw this softly said one time, and immediately afterwards saw that preclear knock his auditor practically cold. That cured the auditor, but I don’t want you to have to have this kind of experience.

It doesn’t matter what the preclear is running. Don’t suggest by word or gesture that you believe it is dub-in. Handle him very calmly, let him run through it, and then see if you can’t find a valid engram, but let him come to his own decisions. Invalidating a preclear’s data will stop his case. It is the most deadly sin in Dianetics. Right beside it is leaving an engram unreduced.

Dianetic research keeps going on. More and more gets known. If 30 days pass without Dianetic processing making definite advances, the people at the Foundation think something is wrong. So, keep in close touch with the Foundation when auditing, because things happen which are enormously valuable.

Just to illustrate, about two months ago I had been puzzling about the question of what communication had to do with reality. It happened as I was giving a lecture. Something flashed into my mind and I would have liked to stop right there and study it, but of course the show must go on, so I just stood still and thought for a few moments and suddenly something congealed. That is the way these things come up.

Communication, reality and affinity are a vital trio. I could give you a three-hour lecture on this. Affinity is that part of the living force which coheses man. You can call it love.

Affinity is the term used by engineers. It is more expressive than love, perhaps, which has been slapped around a good deal by Tin Pan Alley. This force is a kind of Q-factor — the cohesiveness, the love of man for man, the affinity of members within the social group.

And this social feeling must be very strong, otherwise you wouldn’t be here today; destruction would have overridden this force and that would have been the end.

Let us see how man senses reality. If we look over the function of reality, some things seem very real and others not so real. But to say there is an absolute reality is something no physicist would do. He talks in terms of time, space, energy. There has been much written and talked about these things, but what do we know about them? We know only what we see, feel, hear, taste, touch, and so on — our communication. That is our touch with reality, and we call a person crazy only because he doesn’t agree with us.

So, here is our affinity about a reality with which we are in communication by our perception If you break any one of those three — affinity, communication or reality — you break the other two.

There is a lowest common denominator behind those things and I hope one day we may find out what it is. But you can use these facts in your auditing. Break down the affinity with a preclear and his sense of reality diminishes. Break down his reality and his ability to contact his engrams disappears. You can very subtly break down these things until a person won’t believe the outside world or anything else.

Take a person who is wide open, with full sonic recall, and simply by breaking down his sense of reality you can cut his sonic off and in that way block his sense of reality and affinity.

Now, straight line memoryl is very important. It depends on picking up certain points and freeing attention units, as well as locating valuable data. Therefore, if you take a preclear and have him recall when his mother said “I don’t love you,” you have connected up just that much of his sense of reality. Those whose recalls are bad have a very bad sense of reality. The person may be contacting engrams but he will say, “I don’t believe it is happening to me,” and so on. Such a person is badly aberrated, and it is the auditor’s task to find the time when somebody broke affinity.

The loss of an ally causes grief. It is the breaking of an affinity. The dirtiest trick an ally can play on a preclear is to die. If you pick up some of these deaths and discharge them as grief engrams, this person’s sonic recall may go up, and his tone and sense of reality certainly will go up.

What are the various emotions? You can consider pleasure an emotion. A child has joy just from being alive. As a person’s joy rises, his ability to feel, see and hear rises as well. You have pleasant emotions in singing, in eating well, in living well and feeling that you have very much in common with all of life.

But sometimes when you take a so-called pleasure and relive it, the charge on it becomes pain. There is loss right there; pleasure is turned backwards. When somebody breaks affinity, somehow or other you get pain. Every terror is actually a fear of loss. Abject fear is fear of the loss of one’s own life. We drop down the tone scale from infinite survival to death. Infinite survival would be infinite pleasure. Getting down toward death, we get into the area which blinds a person’s ability to perceive. Communication cuts off. There is a break of affinity. “As far as I am concerned, this situation doesn’t exist,” he seems to say. It is this you try to straighten out when you clear a person.

You try to pick up pain because the real breaks are reached by physical pain. Maybe a boy is running and he falls over a rock. Immediately his reaction is to kick the rock; this is broken affinity. As he goes on through life, his dynamic pushes him toward survival. He grows older. Rocks are against him, and perhaps his mother isn’t so nice. Somebody else doesn’t like him. The more the boy is hurt, the more he is blinded. Perhaps he can survive all his experiences on the analytical level easily, but how about the bruises he got from the rock? That is pain. Something became painful to him, then on top of that he met the other breaks. But the basic break is physical pain with communication closure. He becomes cautious about rocks; he inspects them carefully. Rocks are quite real to him, but in terms of pain.

You can attack these incidents of broken affinity, reality or communication anywhere and you can come up with results. You might have a preclear who told the truth when he was a little boy and somebody came along and said, “You know you are lying!” That doesn’t hurt him much; he knows he is telling the truth. But then he is punished and forced to admit that he has lied. That puts in physical pain.

If you find any such incidents back along the track, you are going to have some severe affinity breaks and a person who doesn’t have a very great sense of reality. His perceptics will be shut off.

This whole proposition — communication, affinity, reality — works in using Straightwire. If a person doesn’t have sonic, his sense of reality has been broken and one has to reach these incidents in his life and free attention units. This gets the pressure off his life and then he can be processed.