
5512C01 THE LOWEST LEVEL CASE

A lecture given on 1 December 1955

Haven't the least idea what I'm talking to you about tonight, but 
according to my watch, it's the 31st of November. Can that be true?

How did it ever get to be the 31st of November?

Female voice: It's the 1st of December.

Is it the 1st of December?

Female voice: First of December.

It is?

Female voice: I only just found out myself.

Is that right?

Audience: Mm-hm. Sure.

No kidding? This Earth time fouls one up something abominably.

You must realize at this time we are trying to settle down the Six 
Levels of Processing into a highly static form. Our goal in this 
particular case is to level out these processes in such a way that we 
won't have to touch this for some time to come. The Six Basic Processes 
were stable for a very, very long time; and then when we started cutting 
loose from them, however, we went straight up and straight south and 
around and about and changed things about and changed things 
considerably.

Now, why would we ever change a process in the first place? And that's 
what I want to talk to you about tonight. Why would we change processes? 
We would find more workable processes; that's why we would change 
processes.

But when we find more workable processes, what happens? Immediately that 
we discover something that we consider more workable here, there and 
everywhere, what else do we discover? We also discover eight hundred and 
sixty-five auditors that can't make it work. Instantly, you see. We 
discover five or six hundred that probably could make it work and eight 
or nine hundred that can't. And therefore, we have to say to that 
process, "Bye-bye. It was nice to have you around," and we tip our hat 
to it, and that's that.

So we get this thing called a gradient scale of workability from the 
standpoint of the auditors themselves. I start running somebody on a 
process, and I am running the process. I don't run anything else and 
don't let the auditor interfere with the preclear, you might say, and I 
don't let the preclear's case interfere with the process. I never do 
this.

If I'm running a process, that's just too bad. Preclear is comm lagging 
and cogniting and so forth, that's just too bad. I mean, his case can 
pop up there every once in a while, and I say, "That's fine," and "How 
interesting," and slap it back down again and go on running the process.

It's very, very remarkable, but this works. After a while a case goes 
into apathy, and we have a Clear. Maybe this has more to do with it than 
we think.

All right. Having run this process one way or the other and very often 
having had it run on myself, I decided this is a pretty good process. 
It's not very often that happens, but it does happen every now and then.

These far south processes I have an awful hard time testing. Maybe I'm 
farther south than they are, but for some peculiar reason I don't have 
any trouble with them. And somebody tells me do this or do that and so 
forth, and I do that and that's fine. So I say, well, of course, just 
like everybody else, I can do this process. And just like me, everybody 
else can do this process too. That's a natural consequence, isn't it? 
And it naturally follows, so therefore it's a very basic process.

Such as - such a thing as, "All right. Now, be out of this universe. 
Mock up a universe. That's fine. Populate it. Solidify it. Start its 
time track going," you know. Easy process. "All right. Find another 
universe of comparable magnitude to that universe."

Simple. Nothing to this. But for some reason or other, we always find 
somebody dragging his heels that can't do this.

Well, then about the next chaps that have any crack at this process, 
whatever it is, is the - usually, if an ACC is going forward - it'll be 
the ACC student. And he has a fine time with it one way or the other, 
and he complains about it bitterly or thinks it's fine. And we patch up 
the various broken hearts and cases that result occasionally from such a 
process and keep going.

And the next people that have a crack at it, and the first people that 
do have, when an ACC course is not running, are the staff auditors. And 
these poor chaps are -they have cases and these cases are saying, 
"Bitterness, bitterness, bitterness," you know, "It's all bad over 
there. Nothing is happening. Too much happens." They're saying various 
human things, you see. And they're pounding on the staff auditor to get 
the show on the road and so forth, and there sits a new process.

Well, the staff auditor is torn between running something he has had 
work on cases, which quite often is - his main test of it is, it worked 
on his case. And he then is torn between doing this and sailing 
forthrightly ahead with the preclear and running this process. And devil 
take the engrams, havingness or anything else, we just run it on out.

Well, this is all very well when we are interested in further south 
processes. When we have a process series and when we are working on 
things which appertain to Level One, this is all right. See, this is 
fine. Then the staff auditor can take the process, process almost any 
preclear who walks in and get some sort of result with it. But when 
we're running higher echelon processes, this isn't so easy, such as 
"Match-terminal the MEST universe with the next adjacent Psi Universe, 
81." This is not so easy to do.

Preclears seldom have a reality. They know that this universe is the 
only universe there is, they know that they are the only person who is 
alive, and they know that robots are much more reasonable and easy to 
work with than human beings. They know these things; these are set 
things with them, and such processes disturb these considerations. And 
of course, we don't want to disturb any of a preclear's basic 
considerations in such a way as to give him a forthright lose. We don't 
want him to lose right off the bat, so we have to run a gradient scale 
to these things.

So the higher-level processes then have a tendency not to get spread 
around the way these lower-level processes do. We actually have a 
considerable number of processes which have been developed over the past 
few years which are terrifically high. Every once in a while somebody 
looks at me and says, "How do you run an Operating Thetan?"

And if I've got a little time I'll tell him but it's just not general 
information. I mean, there s hardly anybody knows this particular 
bracket of process. It's a complete span that lies above, you might say, 
what you would ordinarily consider a human Clear. It's a stunt. He has 
to work on his abilities.

And right now, by the way, I'm working on a process of how do you get 
somebody to mock up live forms that walk up and down the street and that 
people tip their hats to and are polite to? It's an interesting thing, 
and it'll probably take a long time to work this out.

I'm working on another one much more germane to the situation, which you 
might find much more interesting, and that is processes which 
immediately and intimately restore abilities. We take some specific 
ability which the preclear has once had - let s say he once was able to 
play the clavichord. If he could play the clavichord someplace down the 
track, there is no reason why he couldn't play the piano. He should be 
able to play it. I'm sure that he could still find in some museum and 
get photostat copies of clavichord music. He could probably even read 
the music and so forth. But he has lost this ability. How do we restore 
it to him immediately in such a way that he can suddenly wish off on the 
body he now has, the ability to play a piano? How do we take somebody 
and turn him into an expert linguist? How do we get him to speak German, 
French, Spanish, Italian and so forth? Well, he undoubtedly knows these 
things on the backtrack. How do we rehabilitate this information, 
restore to him abilities which he already has?

And that, by the way, is my primary target in research at this moment. 
It is not the furthest south case. The case that is furthest south 
ceased to be of a great deal of interest to me personally the day when I 
found -this sounds awful -the day when I found that I wasn't having 
any trouble with them.

People keep coming up to me and saying, "We're still having trouble with 
black Vs." And I say, "Yes, yes. That's very interesting," acknowledge 
their communication. But it doesn't make too much sense to me for this 
reason, for this reason -haven't had any difficulty changing a case for 
a long time.

But we do get them on staff. We do find people that won't sit still long 
enough to be changed. We have people that walk around in small circles 
and scream. We have people that sit there and complain and complain 
about how nothing is doing them any good and so forth. And we have to 
coach them up.

Well, almost on a spur of the moment we pick up processes which will 
reach, more definitely, into these specific cases and more broadly into 
these cases, and right now Level One is in such a state of flux. We are 
trying to settle it down and select out processes which will reach 
rather deeply and widely into this bottom-level case and get it moving. 
That is a problem right now. It's not my problem, it is a problem of a 
group and it is a problem of the HGC staff right here at this moment and 
auditors who are around and about the place.

This is -we're still testing; we're still testing. When we get all 
through testing and we more or less have made up our mind to this thing, 
then we will have Issue 6 or 7 of SLP and hope that it is the one that 
rides along.

But we're not paupers on processes that get cases moving. That's what I 
want to talk to you about this evening. We have a considerable wealth of 
processes which move cases. You always have R2-45.* You have various 
other things which more or less move a case along the line.

I dare say that the most broadly workable technique of which I have any 
great cognizance, as far as a far-south case is concerned, is two-way 
communication, properly done. This is quite remarkable. It, however, 
requires a considerable skill on the part of the auditor. And where we 
concede that all auditors have this skill, then we would merely say, 
"Two-way communication is what you ought to run on these far-south 
preclears until they get to moving." See, we'd say that very bluntly. 
But unfortunately, the facts of the case are - is by the time we run 
clear on out to Istanbul or someplace where an auditor is sitting there 
and he reads about this two-way communication (he's never been trained 
on it, particularly; his own communication level is rather down) - not 
so workable.

We go even further out and get to South Kensington, we are liable to 
find an auditor or two who would like something more spectacular than 
can be done with two-way communication. Two-way communication, we 
concede, has this liability: it is a grind. It is rather nerve-racking 
to sit there talking to a post. We don't quite know what this chap 
thinks he is, but he certainly thinks he's something else than what we 
think he is, and there's a bit of disagreement there somewhere. And he 
has definite blocks on his goal lines and things like this.

And it's a very, very funny thing. A very clever auditor can talk to 
this chap for a while - not just yak-yak-yak, you know. It's got to be 
the old two-way communication, just right, fishing up the 
acknowledgments, making sure that the preclear knows he has been 
acknowledged, making a great deal out of the preclear's origin of a 
communication.

Preclear finally says, "It's foggy today" - origin of communication.

Now, a person who isn't trained in this would say, "Well, the preclear 
finally said, 'It's foggy today.' It's not significant at all." As a 
matter of fact, it's terrifically significant. This is the first 
communication the preclear has originated in session, see. So boy, do we 
make a lot out of that, you know.

And we get this preclear talking. He suddenly changes his consideration, 
little wheels and gears - he probably is using those things to think 
with - and these little wheels and gears go click. And he says, "Do you 
know, I might possibly be able to say something else along this line 
which would be equally startling and prone to admiration?"

And he finally thinks for a long time and he says, "I'm sitting here." 
You know something like this, something brilliant. But the guy has 
originated a communication.

Now, we have to find out what kind of communications people will 
originate and steer the conversation in that direction and get them to 
know they're originating it, and it's rather neat to do this.

Give you some sort of an idea of this: I processed the head of one of 
the largest and most important committees in the Congress of the United 
States, and when they get up that high, boy, are they nuts. The motto of 
the judiciary, of course, in all lands is "Stop that motion." And if you 
don't believe me, look at the normal action of police. A police solution 
is always "stop."

How do we clear up traffic? We stop it. How do we keep burglaries from 
occurring? We stop burglars. Any way you could think of to stop things 
would be that.

Now, the judiciary has gone below stop, and they simply wait. And it's 
very interesting how long they can wait. Dickens spoke of a case that 
was in chancery - people got born into this case, and they died out of 
it, and it had been going for ages and ages and ages.

Well, you take some chap who is intimately concerned with the judiciary 
- laughingly so-called, because it has some meaning like "justice" - and 
we start to process this chap, and we know we're processing a low-toned 
case. We just hear who the fellow is and we say, "Oh, no. This could 
happen to me," you know?

And sure enough, this was the state of the case. Had automatic recalls 
which gave him "yesterday." He always got "yesterday."

You say, "Can you recall something real?"

He'll say, "Yes. Yesterday."

"Well, what part of yesterday was real to you?"

"Oh, why, yesterday about this same time of day."

"Well now, can you recall something else that was real?"

"Ah, yes, yes. Yes. Yesterday."

You say, "Well, can you recall some particular point, some moment of 
time in yesterday?"

"Oh, yes. Yesterday."

You say, "Well, can you recall a time when you were younger than you are 
now? and..."

"Yesterday."

You can imagine how some chap, some auditor who knows that he better 
remedy this chap's havingness, and he's started out on the recall line 
to do so - you say, "Remember something real" to somebody over and over, 
and they will make havingness out of it, actually. They will alter-is 
(remember) the not-is of forget and get a knowingness which they 
consider havingness. And you make them do this operation lots of times, 
and they'll have more havingness.

And I was going to run this on him, but I finally just - daahh. So what?

So I got him to talking about his epiglootis. And here was a fascinating 
man. His conversational powers were bounded on the north by epiglootis, 
on the south by epiglootis, and on the east and the west by 
superepiglootis. And this was the extent of his conversational powers, 
is what was wrong with him.

And he sounded so proud of it. He sounded so proud of it that, by 
two-way communication, I actually got this chap to dig up other things 
he could be proud of, which is to say I got him talking about other ills 
he might have, too. And you know, he just got prouder and prouder and 
happier and happier.

I introduced the question into it that it might not be possible, 
someplace in his anatomy that he might have some hitherto unsuspected 
bacteria which was gently and carefully carving away upon his bone 
structure or on his tendons or something of the sort. There might be 
some other illness in his life that he didn't suspect.

And he got to thinking about this, and he just had a wonderful time. His 
level of pride and dignity there was coming up all the time.

Now, you think I'm merely being facetious, but I found the associated 
data to what he fixedly was talking about and made him talk through and 
beyond what he was talking about and broadened his view in the line of 
associated data, which is always a very reliable method.

This chap is talking 100 percent about how horrible the air force is. 
Get him to admit that the army is horrible too. And then get him to 
admit that the navy has its faults. And then get him to admit that as we 
go out along these lines, military services of other countries might 
equally be in a mess. And he is broadening his scope. We are unfixing 
his attention by making him talk about data of comparable magnitude to 
his sphere of interest.

And when you know this little trick, you could practically talk a guy 
well. You make him talk himself well. Up to that point, if you didn't 
know that trick and if you weren't willing to get in there with a 
steering oar, and if you weren't willing to navigate the shoals and 
channels with a very firm hand on the helm, you would have free 
association. And it's very difficult sometimes to get somebody to tell 
the difference between a very expertly carried on two-way communication 
by an auditor and a free association.

We make the original mistake: Let the guy talk. That's what we say: we 
say, "Let him talk." Uh-uh. If he's talking too much, shut him up, and 
it's an upstride on the case.

How can we shut him up? We acknowledge what he said. How do we 
acknowledge what he said? We get him to find out that we acknowledged 
what he said. And this in itself might be a great jump in the case 
itself. We don't ever let a fellow go on and talk and talk and talk and 
talk and let his mind wander around to this and that.

In the first place, it might work for a few hours that he would feel 
better, but certainly after a couple of sessions of this sort of thing, 
he'll start to talk himself under. And after a great deal of talk, he 
actually could worsen his case by free association. Don't doubt this for 
a minute, because they very often do worsen their cases.

Here's where free association had an accidental: It's the analyst's 
ability to get that obsessively communicating person aware of the fact 
that the analyst has heard what the fellow said. See? And some analysts 
had this, and some analysts didn't have that, so we had all kinds of 
oddities there. One chap, everything was fine. Another chap, couldn't 
get to first base.

We can take this accident out of auditing. In the first place, we're not 
going to let anybody free associate. We're going to talk with him. We're 
not going to talk to him, and we certainly are not going to be talked 
to.

One poor auditor, who is a very lovely lady, has had a very rough time 
of it with me, from time to time, because she comes in and says very 
proudly that she has just done thus and so. And she operates amongst 
people who are quite famous, and is occasionally dismayed that after 
I've acknowledged that she's done this, I ask her why the hell didn't 
she audit the person?

And she says, "But I was."

"No, you weren't. Now, when next time you see this person, do so-and-so 
and so-and-so."

Now, this person has called me long distance across some of the larger 
stretches of the world to tell me, "What do you know, that was what was 
wrong." But she should have known it sitting right there talking to the 
person.

The first time she got bawled out thoroughly was she let a very, very 
famous personality talk to her for three days and three nights - without 
stopping. And she said it did her so much good; did her so much good. 
She had to have somebody to talk to.

Well, why didn't she get a maid or the butler or somebody and talk to 
them, you know? Why talk to an auditor? Three days and three nights. It 
did her so much good.

So I said to the auditor, "Next - I know this preclear," I said, 
"already. And the next time you get this preclear in that kind of a 
situation, if you can't get in something that sounds like auditing at 
least once every hour, you're losing." And got this auditor to go back 
and acknowledge firmly what the preclear had just said.

Preclear would say, "Gabbledy-gabble, yak-yak, yakety-yakety-yak."

And the auditor would say, "That's fine!"

And the preclear said, "Yakety-yakety. . ."

And the auditor said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute."

And of course, this grande dame of high society - of course, anybody 
saying "whoa" to her or "wait a minute," this was quite startling, and 
this stopped her flow and arrested her attention.

And the auditor at this time said, "I said, 'Fine.' You know, you said 
so-and-so and so-and-so, and I said, 'Fine.' I said, 'That's fine."'

She did that, and this grande dame sank back and said, "Whew! Well." 
Changed her whole case. First time she had ever been cognizant of 
anybody acknowledging her for years.

We've had this happen often, you see. We've had this happen often with 
preclears, so we know this works. The obsessive outflow isn't the 
preclear talking. It is a machine the preclear finally had to set up to 
go on saying what the preclear had already said without acknowledgments, 
you see? So the preclear said it once and didn't get it acknowledged, 
and then he goes on talking and doesn't get it acknowledged and doesn't 
get it acknowledged.

One would almost say that those things which haven't been acknowledged 
certainly persist, and they persist until they're acknowledged. So the 
mechanical aspect of acknowledgment is something a fellow ought to 
understand.

Do you know that if you were to say to the preclear, "How glad I am to 
see you. I am very glad you are here. I'm very glad you are here. Did 
you hear me?"

"(mumble) - what?"

"I am very glad you are here. I am happy to see you. I am very happy to 
see you."

Now, you'd think this would be a crazy preclear that would have to be 
talked to this way. Oh, no. It's somebody who floats in on the gay wings 
of the social machinery, you know. And they say, "How are you?" and "I'm 
very happy to be here," and they sit down. "Well, we're all set for a 
session now. Yakety-yakety-yakety-yakety-yak. "

You say, "I am glad you're here."

And they say, "Yakety-yakety-yak."

And you say, "I am glad you are here. I'm glad you arrived for the 
session. Thank you for coming for the session."

They say, "Mmm - what's he talking about?"

And you say, "Thank you for coming for the session. I'm glad you are 
here."

(sigh) "Yes. Well, ha, yes. Yes, as a matter of fact."

This will work more often than you think - more often than you think.

Now, if you were to run this technique on this preclear, you would find 
something fascinating, find something fascinating: "What statement 
wouldn't you mind hearing?"

Now, these people with their shut-off sonics turn them on with that 
command. And it's an interestingly simple command - that is "What 
statement." You're not talking about sound; go a little bit downhill. At 
least let them sit in the symbol band.

And you say, "What statement wouldn't you mind hearing?"

And he will tell you from what person and so on. And he will inevitably 
come up, if he's having any trouble with his case, with statements such 
as this, Mama: "You're a nice little girl, and I'm very glad you're 
here." From Papa: "You're a nice little girl. I am happy you are my 
daughter."

And this goes with the preclear, wow! Now, these - these are the 
acknowledgments they're waiting for. You approximate any of those as an 
auditor, and you will get an immediate result in the preclear. So 
two-way communication has an awful lot to be known about it.

If you just approximate anything that you believe the preclear is 
waiting to hear and say it to them, they get into communication. What 
kind of guesswork, though, does that take on your part, hm? Well, not 
really any. There's the mechanics of two-way communication itself, and 
they carry you along a very long distance.

Now, supposing you wanted to turn actual two-way communication into a 
thoroughgoing repetitive-type technique? You would patch up various 
significant origins and acknowledgments on the track.

"What statement wouldn't you mind hearing?" and "What statement wouldn't 
you mind stating?" are very interesting. But you know, you don't have to 
carry along a duplicative-type question on a low-level preclear. You can 
handle any concept in Dianetics and Scientology on a two-way 
communication basis. You throw it on the table and talk it over with the 
preclear. That is sort of the way it is.

Preclear has some sort of an inkling that this or that might not or 
might be true in life, and he has sort of adventured it, you throw it on 
the table, too, and you talk about it for a short time, you're liable to 
get a terrific upsurge.

Now, this chap who is the head of the judiciary committee could run only 
two-way communication, but he couldn't run two-way communication until I 
looked him straight in the eye and said, "Do you know that I heard you 
say that?" And he looked like he'd just been caught guilty of chicken 
thievery.

I said, "I heard you say that."

This is something he never intended to have happen. First place, he was 
talking way back in - about two feet back of his head. He was two feet 
in front of it, and he was talking two feet behind it, just hoping that 
as he made statements, nobody would notice. He was running "hiding" on 
sound, "hiding" on meaning and significance. He was a master of 
obscurity of statement.

See, he was trying to obfuscate the whole issue that he was 
communicating, and I finally brought him up gently and gradually into 
the admission of the fact that he was communicating, that a 
communication was going on, that he was talking to somebody, that 
somebody was listening to him and so on. And this all by itself was a 
tremendous case gain.

Now, you say you can't make any case gain in an hour and a half with 
somebody who can't even run any Straightwire at all. That was the total 
length of time I processed this chap, and he lost his chronic somatics. 
I processed him an hour and a half, and I ran him on Two-way 
Communication only, on a discussion of what other diseases might be 
chewing on him.

I broadened his view and lifted his attention off by showing him there 
was something else of a tasty nature to look at, such as he might have 
cancer of the brain, who knew? X-ray machines can't look into the brain. 
He might have cancer of the brain? Might have. You know, this interested 
him terrifically.

If you'd listened to this, you would have thought maybe I was evaluating 
for him or something, when I would occasionally come up with a 
suggestion. Oh, but really, I was just originating the same kind of 
communication he was originating.

He'd say, "Well, I don't know. Maybe some of these horrible things which 
are occurring - maybe these horrible pains I am getting when I wake up 
in the morning, you know, maybe they really mean something else that's 
much worse."

And I said, "Well, you probably at the same time when you wake up in the 
morning have a kind of a fuzzy feeling in your head. Is that right?"

"Oh, yes. Yes." The man drunk like a fish all the time, you know. Of 
course, he always had a hangover. And I'd say, "Well, something like 
that, you know, could betoken - could betoken a much more serious 
neurological condition. You know that nerves rot, don't you?"

"Oh, yes - do they? Is that right?" you know.

Well, that would have been a dizzy-sounding auditing session, but 
actually, it was working all the way. His comm lags, his actual 
acknowledgments were there. He was in there closer and closer. He was 
much less hostile about life and so forth and people. As a matter of 
fact, I think he finished it up feeling rather benign about the whole 
thing. He could have a whole walking menagerie of ills. Wonderful, 
encouraged him; there was some hope. He could rot clean away.

Now, as we look over - as we look over the low-level processes, then, 
let me assure you, we already have one. Well, what's its trouble?

Well, I don't have too much time with some pcs, and if I'm merely 
picking one out of the hat to run, I always pick this one out of the 
hat: Two-way Communication, you know, and then steer it around in some 
direction, broaden his span of attention wherever it's fixed (that's the 
secret of it; if you find it's fixed someplace, broaden it), and just 
accept that tone level for the pc. It doesn't matter where he's fixed.

He's fixed on effort, work, or maybe he's at the south side of work: "I 
work so hard, and nobody ever appreciates it," or something like this. 
Broaden his span of attention on the thing. Call to his mind that nobody 
ever probably thanked all those poor slaves that worked those pyramids 
and, you know, get his attention off and around and moved around. You're 
really not telling him things of any great magnitude. You're saying some 
tiny gradient sometimes of what he just said, see, only you just come 
upscale a little bit more.

He just got through moving a tremendous number of boxes. Well, you 
suggest that it might have been stones. You see, you have to be careful 
not to outflow against him too much more than he's outflowing against 
you, which puts comm lags on the thing.

But you know, if you sat there and looked at a preclear long enough, 
he'd finally originate a communication. That's the other thing that an 
auditor really has to know to run it. If you just sit there and look at 
him long enough, it's sometimes very trying on him. He gets upset, he 
gets nervous, he gets - so on.

Now, a pc, he keeps presenting you with some sort of a problem. We know 
a pc right now who has squiggles in front of her eyes. It's fascinating 
what you do about squiggles in front of somebody's eyes. That's 
fascinating. What do you do about squiggles in front of somebody's eyes? 
You're not going to sit up here and run a process that's going to 
eradicate these squiggles, are you? And yet the pc keeps talking to you 
about them and keeps mentioning them. All right.

Now, we just question her. "Are you sure they're not squaggles?" You get 
the idea? "Have you ever had - have you ever had a condition where your 
sight was slightly blurred? Oh, you have?" You see, "Isn't that 
interesting. Well, did you ever have any - did you ever really get your 
eyes upset? Have you ever had any disease in your eyes or anything like 
that?" you know, anything you want to say.

And then they all of a sudden start to give. And believe me, they will 
discuss this subject with you for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. And 
then all of a sudden it's an exhausted subject as far as they're 
concerned, and they go off of it, and we never hear any more about these 
squiggles. Maybe they're still seeing them, but they don't interest 
them. You get the idea?

All right. So we do have a process; we do. It has a liability, however, 
of requiring skill. It can too easily become free association. It can 
too easily become some sort of an evaluative technique, which is exactly 
the reverse of free association. It is the person talking to the 
patient, and the patient never gets a chance to say anything, see. All 
right. It's too easy for it to degenerate into something and have no 
plan.

Well, the plan of two-way communication rather goes this way: You know 
that you're at liberty to discuss any point or knowingness in the entire 
field of Dianetics and Scientology. You can just throw it on the table 
and start talking about it, and you're going to get some kind of a 
result from the preclear. That's an interesting thing, because you're 
talking about their case.

Now, we take some fixed problem of the preclear, and by any mechanism 
whereby he invents problems or tells you lies or any other mechanism, we 
get him to get some attention fixation of comparable magnitude. What 
else might he fix his attention on, we are almost asking him. "What else 
might you fix your attention on that would be just as bad as this 
horrible case of wifosis you have, huh? What - what else? What else 
would be as bad as that?"

And if you ask him too bluntly, you kind of shatter his ARC. But you can 
broaden his attention. He's telling you - he's telling you that his 
lungs have been in terrible shape for a very long time, and you ask him 
if it's ever affected his heart. Get the idea?

What is the exact mechanical operation under what you're doing? You're 
asking him to broaden on a gradient scale his fixation of attention. In 
other words, we don't ask him to unfix it, ever. We just simply ask him 
to fix his attention on some other things too.

"Could those lungs ever affect your heart? Do you ever have heart 
trouble?"

Now, many a doctor does this sort of instinctively. He's in there doing 
a diagnosis, and he's tapping and doing all sorts of things. It's quite 
interesting. I don't know, he may feel that he knows what he's doing, 
and he may only be diagnosing. But it's very often true that the chap 
does have this as an immediate result: the patient feels better.

The doctor thinks, "Well, it's on the basis that he was diagnosed, and 
he is now - his mind is at ease concerning it." Well, his mind would be 
much more at ease concerning it if the medical doctor had discovered 
whether or not any other area in that vicinity was also affected.

If I were doing a diagnostic-type auditing, see, and the chap were 
complaining about his shoulder, we would wind up with the possibility 
that actually - we were talking about his left shoulder - that his right 
big toe was possibly being affected by the same condition. And in other 
words, we would just broaden his attention out, as far as the body is 
concerned.

Then we would ask him whether or not other members of his family or 
associates are ever affected this way, just to find out whether or not 
we have an epidemic. And the chap would go away, and in a large number 
of cases, why, he would just feel fine. But of course, it'd take about a 
half an hour or an hour to do this type of diagnosis.

We would impress him that we were diagnosing by having a lot of shiny 
things around that we did things with and clattered occasionally but 
none of which resembled operational instruments, you understand. I mean, 
we'd have meters, and we'd have small weighing machines.

And we'd say, "All right. Now, your shoulder feels bad. Now, how about 
your hand? How about your hand? Your hand ever feel bad at all? Have you 
ever had any trouble with your hand? Well, all right. Now, put your hand 
on this little machine here now." And you'd carefully read the scale.

You could do a diagnosis. You would become - you'd become absolutely 
fabulous to people because so many people would walk in the door and 
walk out well.

Now, you're treating somebody, mind, let us say - let us use this 
horrible sort of comparison, because the second we say, "treating the 
mind," we think of minds full of diseases and all sorts of things. Minds 
are - if minds are full of anything, they're only full of disabilities.

So let's take a look at this. And the chap starts talking about his 
disabilities, what he can't do. Well, let's find out how whipped he 
really is. That's the direction he's usually trying to go. Now, that 
sounds funny, but a preclear will sit there and talk to you about it 
very glibly. "I can't play a piano, either, you know. Can't ride a 
horse, you know. Can't ride a horse or play a piano or..."

Very often they can't eat, either. Yeah, having an awful hard time 
eating. And you'll find some preclears that will take the greatest 
satisfaction in these things if you just start talking about it. And 
that's the preclear you ought to run it on. Preclear isn't really 
in-session, having a rough time, doubtful of the auditor, asks you lots 
of questions concerning your experience as an auditor.

Kick their shins when they do something like this, you know. I do. I 
mean, it's just literally - they say, "Now, have you ever had a case 
like mine?" and so forth.

I look at them right between the eyes, and I say, "A case like yours? 
Well, what sort of a case is yours?"

"Hm, is that right? Well, I don't know. I might have had cases like 
yours. Any other members of your family have cases like yours?"

And here we go. In other words, just let's broaden this scope, and let's 
get it off of that subject. And you'll find out that once they find they 
can - here's the whole secret of it - once they can find they can 
communicate with more things than the things they're communicating about 
or with or at, they then feel that they no longer obsessively have to 
hold on to that thing, you see?

There is no such thing as an abundance of communication; it's an 
unattainable, on any subject. When you learn that real well, you know 
two-way communication. You see?

You say, "Well, there's such a thing as too much communication with the 
tires of a lorry," you know.

Well, for a body, there is. What are you doing processing a body? Aha. 
To a thetan, he might just love the idea of thousands, millions, 
billions of bodies in intimate communication with the tires of lorries 
on the underside.

You process the thetan, you'll find out that you're usually processing 
something which at least reacts on a lower tone level, quite ordinarily, 
than the body. And this is the case you have trouble with, the case 
that's - is, as a thetan, much lower on the Tone Scale than the body. 
And you get this case, and he hangs fire and nothing he thinks has any 
effect at all on anything that happens. You got that?

Now, that is the toughest case there is. There is no tougher case than 
that. You can process this fellow forever. For instance, if you think 
hard at your shoulder that you have a pain there, you, being in pretty 
good shape, probably can bring a pain there, see? I did it just now, 
hurts like hell. All right. Now, an effectiveness of postulate is what 
I'm talking about, see?

You say, "Boy, what a terrific pain I've got there, you know. Just got a 
pain there, that's all there is to it." In other words, when you think 
something, something happens. You got it?

Well, the case you have trouble with, when it thinks something, nothing 
happens. And in the next-to-the-last paragraph of his twenty-eighth 
lecture, Sigmund Freud mentions this case as totally uncurable. "Not to 
be cured by us," he says. He calls it a level of detachment.

That's the case, level of detachment; the person is detached from life. 
In other words, what we could say is this individual makes a postulate 
and nothing occurs. He gives an order, nothing happens. Get the idea? He 
says, "Ridge move," no ridge moves.

And when he gets down totally to a point of where he's absolutely 
convinced nothing will ever occur, you've got yourself an interesting 
state of affairs. You have somebody who will bring the body on a kind of 
a stimulus-response mechanism into the auditing session. But then you 
run concepts, you do this, you do that, you do something else. You ask 
them to run problems. You ask them to do this, that, anything, and 
nothing happens as a result of this. You actually don't even stir the 
case up.

You could ask this chap with complete impunity to repeat after you "It's 
a boy. It's a boy. It's a boy." You know what would happen to almost 
anybody? They'd go - any male would go, almost - well, some high 
percentage, would go immediately into the birth engram, see? Repeater 
technique doesn't work on this person. That's the person who has no 
change, and that's the person that you worry about, and that's the 
person whose case you are trying to crack on these low levels. So open 
thine ears, and we will give you the hot dope here - at least, warm 
dope.

Do you understand this as the individual who, as a thetan, dead in his 
head, can say, "My right foot is gangrenous. It hurts. It's going to 
hell," anything he wanted to say, and there would be absolutely no 
consequence whatsoever of his having made the statement? You got that?

So that he believes there is no consequence to any of his actions in 
life, and he goes out and he does the damnedest things. He goes out, and 
he runs through crosswalks with cars, and he robs aged ladies and kicks 
babies off parapets, and anything and everything you could think of he 
does, because there's no consequence. That is the state of mind into 
which he has developed himself: There's going to be no consequence.

So you ask this individual, "What would happen if you got mad?"

Oh, he can run this by the hour. There's only one thing he knows, is 
that there's no consequences to anything. So he can behave the way he 
wants to. You have your insane person, your criminal, these fall into 
that classification - your homosexual. There is no consequence to their 
action. That is the action back of their actions. They say, "I don't 
affect anything."

They could stand there with a sawed-off shotgun and - fully loaded - and 
pull both barrels at your chest, see the bullets go in out of those 
barrels, see you drop to the floor, dead and blown to pieces, and they 
would not think anything had occurred.

And the police are going to do something with these guys? You know, 
somebody is going to pass a law to make these people more law-abiding? 
They can't.

Well now, at a little higher level than this - not your criminal, 
criminal is not a type - he is merely a fellow who has picked the third 
dynamic out for his randomity. An atheist is another kind of criminal in 
another age. He has picked out God for his randomity. You see, he's not 
a criminal, though; he's a heretic.

All right. So you could pick out almost anything for one's randomity, 
you see, and have no consequence in action because of this thing. One 
knows that he cannot create an effect. And let's go back and look at the 
first of The Factors and find that there, and that hasn't moved any, and 
it's right where it was. Prime purpose - prime purpose, cause to effect. 
That's the way it is. That's the way you get universes, everything.

And we find out that this individual can stand at cause-point and scream 
like hell, and nobody will ever hear him. He could fire off rockets, he 
could shoot cannon, he could distill the most insidious poison in the 
world and put it in a chute down toward the effect-point, but there's 
only one thing he knows: It will never reach the effect-point. Get the 
idea?

So when an individual believes that he no longer can reach an 
effect-point on this cause, distance, effect line, you have then a case 
who hangs up in processing. His postulates don't work, is one way of 
expressing it. When he says something, it never arrives.

Now, does two-way communication seem to make a little difference to you 
now?

Audience: Mm-hm.

You see what this is?

You say to this lady, and she's going, "Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, 
yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap," see? And you say, "Bzzzzt-whoa, 
whoa, whoa, that's fine. Good. Whoa, whoa, whoa, I heard you."

"Huuhhh!"

What happens there? This individual actually realizes that they have set 
some words in motion which did register on another living being, and you 
shortly afterwards will start to become alive and become real to this 
person. Do we see this?

With two-way communication, we establish the other thing: that they can 
receive a thought. Now, it goes both ways. The individual who cannot 
cause any effects is the most surprised person in the world when he gets 
over to E prime. When he is over there, he says, "What's going on? What 
could possibly have happened? I can't be an effect."

He's very surprised, you see. He can't cause anything, he can't be an 
effect.

One of the ways he keeps from being an effect is not to cause anything, 
and he's got this all worked out. And he'll hang fire on this beautiful 
little equation till the end of time. He can't cause anything, therefore 
he never reaches any other effect, and therefore nothing ever reaches 
him. So on two-way communication you show him at once that you can say 
something that interests him.

He's struck by this as being very, very fantastic. He doesn't believe 
there's any such thing. Nobody could possibly talk to him about anything 
that would interest him. He knows this. Any interest in the thing, he 
generally knows more than anybody else in the whole world, anyway, and 
he hasn't got any reason to listen to anybody. They have nothing to tell 
him.

This is quite often his computation. It's fantastic, because it's a 
highly aberrated computation. You mean, somebody else isn't going to 
invent - will never invent something that you then won't know about? 
Uh-uh. You see, that's an impossibility; that's an impossibility. You 
mean, there's a writer down here writing in a book, and every word he 
writes in that book you're going to know all about before you ever read 
that book? Uh-uh. See, it's really not going to happen that way, not on 
a two-way communication basis.

So this chap believes implicitly that there is really no real fun to 
living, but he'll go on living, anyhow. He'll sort of humor himself. 
There's nothing to have an effect on him; there is nothing he can cause 
an effect upon. And you've got a hang-fire case. His postulates don't 
work. Other people's postulates, too, don't work on him. They go off in 
other vias.

See, you say, "Put your hand on your head," and he crosses his legs. Get 
the idea? He does not reach, and he is not reached, and that is your 
case.

Now, instead of plowing around with a bunch of figure-figure processes 
one way or the other or trying to get him to do this or trying to get 
him to do that, let's just look right bluntly, right straight in the 
face, this situation: This individual's postulates do not work. 
Furthermore, no consequence ever occurs to him. He's gotten himself 
nulled down to a point of where he gets no consequence for his acts or 
anything of the sort. Therefore, his level of responsibility for the 
society is very poor.

That is the extreme of this case. That is the extreme case that 
psychoanalysis couldn't help. That is the extreme case that will walk in 
and sit down. A person who is not in this extremity can be run on any of 
the processes in SLP Issue 5 - a person who is not in that extremity, 
and that person will get better.

So how do we remedy this one thing? First way to remedy it is two-way 
communication. The individual says things and you hear them. This is a 
great surprise to him, but he finds out at length that it's true, you 
did hear him. And you say things that he hears. Fantastic! But once 
you've established this fact, the individual discovers he can cause an 
effect. So we've disabused him of his most basic computation, and we 
demonstrate to him that he can be an effect without necessarily dying in 
his tracks.

So that's how two-way communication works, and that is the first edge in 
on one of these chaps. If you know exactly what you're doing and know 
exactly what's wrong with him - and that is exactly what's wrong with 
him - you can then solve him.

Now, you can give him things to do which produce interesting results on 
him. There are many things you can give him to do. I have told you some 
recently about telling lies. Have him tell lies about the environment, 
invent problems about the environment - various other things you can 
give him to do.

But there is one technique which is not a new technique, but which is 
not in general use, and which is a very fascinating one. It's a 
possibility with this technique that you'd drive him immediately into 
apathy, but we conceive that you've already stirred him up and got him 
going with two-way communication. And then we would concede that you 
knew your case wasn't in too bad an ARC with you, and then we would 
start to run him on something like this: "What would obey you?" And we 
would ask it as a repetitive question.

Asking it as a repetitive question might almost drive him mad. 
Duplication is too close to communication. But you could ask him this, 
and he's liable to have a line charge, he's liable to go into apathy, 
he's liable to do almost anything. But the point is, you will be running 
the technique which is most intimate to his state of case. See, that is 
right on the button.

Now, the other side of it is "What wouldn't you mind obeying?" He'll 
find out there are a lot of things that can order him around and he 
wouldn't mind it at all. And you get him to discover those two things.

If you took then this detached case, if you took then this case which 
has always been called the failed case, in any psychotherapy, if you 
took this case that is the hang-fire case that is a long time in 
processing with us, and if you observed this fact in this case, if you 
would yourself get some reality on it - this fellow makes a postulate, 
and nothing happens; you make a postulate, and nothing happens. So the 
common denominator of the case seems to be "nothing happens" or "always 
too much happens, and it's the wrong thing." Equally, you see.

All right. We would look at this case, and we would say right away we 
have something here with which to work. This individual, on a two-way 
communication basis, must discover that what he is saying is being 
heard, and he must discover that he can hear what you are saying. That's 
the first thing that you'd have to establish with this case.

And you would establish it. I don't care by talking about what or 
anything, you'd just establish those two things: that there was a C-E 
line in both directions, see? He gets the acknowledgment, you see; he 
gets your acknowledgment, he does hear what you originated. He can 
originate something, which you then respond to. This you establish, on 
whatever subject we don't care.

But having established that, we then would get him to - if we were in 
extremis with this case - to address the one pin in the case that must 
be solved before you can run any figure-figure technique, before you can 
do anything else with the case at all, and that's simply - well, you can 
get him to tell lies, you can get him to do a lot of things, you 
understand? But if you were right up against it on there and you were 
hitting the one technique that would be right to battery on this one 
point, is "What would obey you?"

You don't ask him to make a test of it. You just ask him, "What would 
obey you? And what else would obey you?" Now we turn around the other 
way to, and we ask him what he wouldn't mind obeying. And we'd run it as 
repetitive questions. We'd run it with good two-way communication. We'd 
run it in such a way as to get him cognizant of his own command over the 
universe in general.

And when you've rehabilitated that command somewhat, then you can run 
any figure-figure process, then you can run any computational process. 
You can run any idea, no matter how abstruse or - and get the result 
with the preclear. You could have him examine all of these ideas.

But to ask somebody to run something who has not immediately learned 
that he can cause an effect and an effect can be caused on him is, of 
course, going to result in a failure, no matter how tricky it is, no 
matter how well thought out it is or anything of the sort. There is the 
center of these cases.

And I want you to look this over, and next time I see you, I'm going to 
ask you if you've run into anybody like this and if you have had any 
kind of a conversation with anybody whose postulates did not produce an 
immediate effect on life. See if you can't integrate this a little bit 
and see what this detached case is of Sigmund Freud. See what this 
"nothing happens" or "too much happens always," - this highly automatic 
case of Dianetics and Scientology-and see if you can't just trace it 
back to this: His postulates don't work, and postulates don't work on 
him. Get yourself some reality on this, and then we can go on from 
there.

Thank you.
