basic elements of processing 13 5.10.54
BASIC ELEMENTS OF PROCESSING
A lecture given on 5 October 1954
I want to give you here the basic organization of any course.
By this I mean that in Scientology or Dianetics, I don’t care which subject, there is a basic course from which we take off. And until we have that basic course in very, very, very good shape – I’m not now saying that the basic course is now a professional course. This is actually the HCA-level in-formation which has to be known, and thoroughly. And unless we have this particular set of basics thoroughly known, we just go on drifting and floundering and stumbling around from there on out.
Now, I can tell you this, that I’m talking from experience on this particular line in training auditors. Heretofore, there weren’t processes which could be easily done, precisely stated, and which got good results that we could do this with. So you see, the advance of the subject itself took care of the training.
Now, there are certain very, very definite basic things that we have to have, that we must know, that we must know very, very thoroughly, and that somehow or another we must accomplish before we can go on into anything like theory. And therefore, these first days of this course we’re going to stress these things very heavily. I’m going to expect each one of you to become very expert in these things.
Now, the items which an auditor must know if he’s going to get anything done in any preclear anywhere – which he must know today – are only seven in number. There are only seven of them.
And they’re in this order, by the way – the order is quite important. Number one is a two-way communication. He has to know two-way communication. He has to have the basic idea about it, the basic material behind it. More important than that, he has to understand two-way communication and how it fits in an auditing session. If he doesn’t understand two-way communication, believe me, he’s never going to be able to audit.
Now, right under two-way communication comes commlag. When you study two-way communication, you study comm lag also. These two subject sare inextricable, and as they exist, so you audit.
Now, if you just knew this, if you just knew two-way communication and comm lag and you didn’t know anything else, you would still make some progress with cases. But more important, you would be able to understand every preclear you confronted; you’d be able to understand what they were all about. It would be on this adjudication: on a two-way communication basis,
and the comm lag which they demonstrated. And you could – as you walked down the street, as you looked at people around, as you tried to live with people and so forth – you would understand what they were all about. See that?
If we understood this and nothing else but this, we could look at a group of people and we could know who in that… Let’s just apply it on a beautifully broad business basis: We could look at this group of people and we would know who in that organization was gumming the wheels of that organization. If we just knew this: two-way communication and comm lag. If we knew nothing else but this, we could walk into an organization and we would appear to a business executive to be an absolute magician.
We could talk with this one and that one, and circulate amongst the groups and ask a few questions, and the next thing you know, you could say, “Well, your business volume would increase in your sales department if you would fire Jones, Smith and Spiegel; and if you would put Mr. Dameron in charge of sales.”
“No! How did you know this? Jones, Smith and Spiegel have the most horrible sales record; they have lost more equipment and lost more orders. How did you know this?”
Now, here then is a terribly important subject all by itself. So this one we just have to have nailed down, I mean, with spikes, as an auditor. He’s got to know this. He knows that a communication lag is what it is, and it operates as it operates.
There are two ways that communication lags can operate, and one is an outflow and the other is by no response. A communication lag is the length of time between the question and the exact answer to that question; see, that’s the lag. Now, it doesn’t matter what happens in between; it’s all lag. Whether the fellow is talking like mad, raving, screaming, crying or is si-lent, see, the lag between the question and the answer – whatever happens inbetween – 15 the communication lag of the person.
And some of the worst cases you’re ever going to process are people who evidently have no communication lag. Well, they talk all the time, don’t they? And yet they never answer the question that you ask them. And you walk around though life, and you’ll find people do this. They don’t answer the question you ask them.
Once in a while somebody does this for a gag – he teases people. On a line, they ask him some question. He believes this is kind of a foolish question, so he gives them some razzle-dazzle. This comes under the heading of a sense of humor, not a communication lag.
But in the normal course of human existence, you’ll find out that the communication lag is the easiest index by which to recognize people. But more important, if you don’t flatten a communication lag, or if you don’t flat-ten the lag on a process that you start to audit on a preclear, your preclear isn’t going to recover – he’s just going to bog, bog, bog, bog – until you’ve dropped him in innumerable communication lags, and never got your question answered. You always want to get your question answered. That is the subject of communication lag.
A lot more to this, particularly there in practice; it’s a terrifically important subject. But here we have it as number one – not because it’s the most important subject – because it’s the first thing we have to know. All right.
Let’s get the second one, number two of this list of seven things. Number two is Elementary Straightwire. The most elementary Straightwire there is, is “Something you wouldn’t mind remembering; something you wouldn’t mind forgetting.” That’s the most elementary there is.
But the idea of sitting down and asking somebody questions, of course, brings up the idea of a two-way communication. So you have to know about two-way communication before you know about Elementary Straightwire.
You’re asking somebody to research his past, and if you don’t know about communication lag, and if you don’t use communication lag in re-searching his past, if you don’t keep asking the question until the lag is flat – you know, “Something you wouldn’t mind remembering. Something you wouldn’t mind remembering. Something you wouldn’t mind remembering.” You keep getting the answer to this, no matter what distances there are between the answer, and you’ll find out at first it takes him ten seconds to answer, then five seconds, then fifteen seconds, then three minutes, then two seconds, then forty-five minutes, you know, on one of these questions.
Well, you don’t change the question as long as you’ve got a communication lag. As soon as you’ve got a nice flat lag and he’s answering it at a routinely regular spacing, and so forth, you leave it alone. You go on to the other question – ”Something you wouldn’t mind forgetting” – and you ask him this.
It’s not uncommon with this Straightwire question to run head on into a communication lag of an hour or two. In fact, I’ve run into one – we have one on record – of twelve hours on “Something you wouldn’t mind forgetting.” But it was communication lag.
We didn’t go off to some other subjects, you see, or some other process simply because this was boiling this long. As an auditor, the person was foolish enough to ask this question of the preclear, see – just foolish enough to ask this question of the preclear. So the second he asked it, the auditor was stuck with it. He had to get that question answered. And day after day he was still expecting an answer to that question – mostly because he had an Instructor riding the back of his neck, making sure that he carried that communication lag through. And when the preclear finally answered that question, he heaved the most enormous sigh of relief you ever saw heaved. Oh, it was tremendous, see. The fellow had been obsessively remembering every-thing his whole life, and this was really what was wrong with him – obsessive memory. “Something you wouldn’t mind forgetting” – there was no such thing. Well, here was a question of communication lag and two-way communication. That’s Elementary Straightwire.
Why do we have to know Elementary Straightwire and why is it such a big subject? Elementary Straightwire is a big subject. It’s because if you know Elementary Straightwire – the general form of Elementary Straight-wire – a thousand codified processes fall into place. But if the auditor has not crossed this one bridge right away, if he doesn’t know how to administer Straightwire, he’ll fail with these processes. He’ll fail with every darned one of them.
It just won’t matter. It won’t matter at all how clever the process is, how clever the auditor is, what tremendous insight he has into the length of the ingrown toenails of the preclear. If he does not know how to administer – you see, the mechanics of administering Straightwire – if he doesn’t know this perfectly (and of course, then, if he doesn’t know two-way communication perfectly), and if he isn’t at ease in administering Straightwire, then the brilliance of these processes mean nothing. And in that alone is the failure of an auditor, and was the failure of any auditor who did fail on a case in all of Dianetics.
A good auditor can simply administer… This is also included in Elementary Straightwire, which is called ARC Straightwire. Well, “Recall some-thing that’s really real to you” is the first of it; it’s in the back of Self Analysis. You know that they’ve had that tool since 1950? And if you just went on using that – you just went on using it – people get well.
In fact, a psychotic will break through to neurotic, or a neurotic will break out into sane on just that Straightwire. But these boys did not know how to administer Elementary Straightwire, and their failure to administer it properly caused the process to fail!
See, it’s all very well to have this list of questions and ask them, but believe me, that’s not Straightwire. Straightwire is an art. Because you’ve got to hold that preclear in two-way communication with you, you’ve got to measure that communication lag and you’ve got to flatten that communication lag with every question you ask; you don’t go onto the next question. You get a flat lag, completely flat, so that you get an even spacing of reply from a preclear, and when you’ve got that, you’re all set. That person will feel much more at ease.
Elementary Straightwire even remedies havingness. It’s a very interesting process. I had a test auditor, by the way, audit “Something you wouldn’t mind remembering; something you wouldn’t mind forgetting” on a preclear until the guy was Clear. He was a rough case. He was a Black Five. Took him eighty-three hours. The fellow finally realized that he could remember every-thing back to his entrance in the mest universe. So what? You do much Ele-mentary Straightwire and the fellow starts to fall through into earlier lives anyhow. You can’t help but stir up material.
It’s all right for the society at large to agree that we only live once, but then they didn’t have a process that they had to make work. The second you try to make a process work, the fellow falls through this flimsy agreement that we only live once and starts going off in other directions to a conclusion that he is immortal ...
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