GRADIENTS OF ACCESSIBILITY

A lecture given on 18 January 1951

Importance of A R C

There are probably hundreds of possible techniques in Dianetics; we have developed many of them in the past year. So far, however, all of the new techniques advanced have been a further amplification of Standard Procedure.

Standard Procedure is not a specialized technique. It consists of using the best we know in order to get the most results with the least spins. Furthermore, Standard Procedure has this in its favor: it can be communicated. And the experience which is gradually gained on the communication of a technique is not to be neglected as part of that technique. Most people overlook this factor.

If we were to work out, from the knowledge we have in Dianetics of engrams and locks, all the possible processes there are, we would probably find out that there were quite a few techniques which were so confoundedly complex that they couldn’t be communicated.

Just prior to 1950, what was then Standard Procedure had been only to a very slight degree communicated, and very little experience had been gained in communicating what it was. It had been communicated to about two or three people. But as I did that, it had to be modified and codified. I had been working mainly on people who had no knowledge of Dianetics, had no idea that a science or anything very precise was being employed, and as long as one could work engrams, that was the only thing of interest.

There is quite a bit of data which is overlooked in the techniques we employ. For instance, there is a technique of gradually organizing the case and giving it a computation. You are not doing a tremendous amount of reduction, but you work the case up, trying for basic- basic continually, and what you are really looking for is one of these seven- hour or ten- hour, two- day, four- day or seven- day line charges. They can go that long.

After a line charge of this length and magnitude, a preclear is in pretty good shape, depending of course on the shape he was in previously. There is a push button somewhere in cases, and by working with a case to a point where one of these line charges is triggered, the person will become much better and be easier to run. There is a push button in there someplace— just what you do to create what.

There was another technique. Occasionally we would run into a case that wanted to race up a chain of locks after he had run the engram— in other words, run out the effect this thing had had on his life. We weren’t telling preclears to do that; they would occasionally just start it. I used to encourage this once in a while, but I found out that if it was encouraged too often, the fellow started running into other engrams. Occasionally very strange things would happen, such as the preclear running into a grouper and having about two thousand phrases collapse on one phrase, then he would let out a pale scream and have a terrible backache for a week or so. But we always managed to find out what had happened and patch it up.

In developing these things and working with this and that, we discovered an awful lot of data. Standard Procedure is a codified group of data which, when practiced as written, will produce the maximal results that can be produced at this time with the minimal danger to the case.

There is, however, the fact that as it goes on along the line being communicated to more and more people and being used by more and more people, the material amplifies. And practically every time I give a series of lectures, there has been a gap of a month or six weeks since I gave the last series, during which time I’ve been talking to people, occasionally working on people,

getting ideas and so forth. And I take what comes up and find out exactly how it fits in Standard Procedure and add it in. It doesn’t alter Standard Procedure very much, but usually adds another trick or two where one was necessary.

These additions are what I usually take up first when I go into one of the Professional Auditor schools for a series of lectures. The poor instructors sit there for the first day or so thinking "What the hell! There he’s gone way off over the hill. What’s happened to good old Standard Procedure?" I started off the last course in Los Angeles by lecturing for three days on the subject of accessibility. The Director of Training kept giving me dirty looks all through that time.

What I was talking about was the less accessible cases, the people who were very difficult for the only relatively skilled auditor to touch. I was trying to take the necessity of genius out of it and bring it together so that someone who is normally skilled could crack the tougher case— in other words, handle the problem of accessibility.

The Standard Procedure Chart has in the past carried a little banner, "For Accessible Cases," but in no place have we told you what to do about an inaccessible case. This can be very embarrassing, to start in working on a case, sometimes for many hours, and have nothing happen. So what we are going to cover is the expansion of Standard Procedure into the realm of the more inaccessible case.

An inaccessible case is one which, when it does run anything, says, "Well, that wasn’t an engram anyway." It is the case who is stuck on the time track at the age of four, completely occluded, out of valence, with sixteen years of solid grief charge lying on top of it, who has so many control circuits that he wouldn’t possibly cry about anything, and who may even get his flash answers in the form of a traffic signal with an arm going up and down signaling yes or no, and sometimes gets his data with the words printed on the traffic arm. There was one preclear who used to have the sentences that appeared in his engrams brought to him on a model railroad, with each word sitting up in one of the little cars so that as they went by he could read off all the words! Cases can get pretty rough.

Now, the conviction of the individual that something is going to happen and that you can do something for him always makes processing easier. An auditor who does not believe he has ever run an engram is not as good an auditor as one who knows he has, irrespective of whether or not the running of that engram did him any good. There is a conviction involved there, and a concentration which ensues. It is very much in your interest to get some result on a case as early in the case as possible, because a preclear’s basic personality will be patient and cooperate with you just so long and beyond that point will not.

This conviction technique is even usable when you are telling people about Dianetics. A terrible spot for an auditor to put himself in is to start telling somebody about Dianetics and have the person say, "Oh, is that so? Well, run an engram out of me."

"Okay, close your eyes and go back to the incident necessary to resolve the case. Go to the beginning of the incident. What words occur to your mind? Did you get any different sensation?"

"No. Go ahead, show me something about Dianetics."

And the auditor continues valiantly, "Okay, go to a pleasure moment."

The person now winds up in a boat someplace, he thinks, but he is not sure, and then it turns out that he had been seasick in that boat for a long time. But he just remembered it and it was all straight memory anyhow, and he says, "Well, what’s so different about Dianetics?"

The auditor has run into an inaccessible case. And the strange thing is that every time one feels it necessary to really make things tick in Dianetics for somebody, he is probably talking to an inaccessible case. An auditor contacts dozens of preclears who work beautifully, and he doesn’t really care whether they believe Dianetics works or not until he comes across that one person— who is probably the head of some municipal health service or some such— on whom nothing happens.

Not too long ago I was rather irked by a sneering lawyer who knew nothing about Dianetics; he had merely read a nasty magazine article. So I said, "You know, it’s a remarkable thing. What if somebody just brought into the society something whereby if you said a few words to a person and snapped your fingers he would roll up in a ball and fall on the floor?" I was somewhat excited at the moment or I never would have said such a thing.

He said, "Well, I would say that that was really something, but it couldn’t happen to me. Could you do that to me?"

So I said, "All right." I hadn’t taught him any Dianetic terminology but I said, "The file clerk will give us the first contraction. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of it. Contract!" Bang! He was in it. This fellow was an accessible case!

There was a very famous author who had been worked, first by his wife. She had run him back into a case of measles when he was about two years of age and then looked at the next page of the Handbook while he waited there. And she had given up.

Then another book auditor stepped in on the case, and he was the type of person who is just too busy working people to ever find out how. He really messed this writer up, as much as an auditor ever does— he was made a little bit uncomfortable— and I got called in to fix him up.

He took the most unusual position on the couch, and went back to the measles in which his wife had latched him up. Here was a case of British self- control. If such things as past lives exist, this man had probably been British for the last hundred. He was also genetically British, if genetic pattern has anything to do with it. His family was very British, and the only words that were ever spoken to him between the ages of zero and ten were probably "Control yourself" and "Keep a grip on yourself, old boy." On top of the self- control, unfortunately, he was going blind.

I felt badly about this case, and I couldn’t do anything about it right away, so I started in with a regulated Straightwire, one that goes in an exact routine. I went back and saw him a couple of days later and went through exactly the same routine.

I’m trying to punch up to you the necessity of having such a routine, rather than a random Straightwire, because in a couple of days a preclear’s memory will refresh. If he hits incidents on Straightwire on Monday, by Wednesday ordinarily he will be able to get more on them, and by Friday even more. And you can keep it going, particularly if you are asking questions on the same subjects.

Two days later we found Mama’s pet control circuit, and he blew off a little line charge. I didn’t work on him very long, but I came back a couple of days after that and went through the same routine, about an hour of Straightwire, and we got some more of it. This was one of the checks on the work I was doing on accessibility, because this man was really inaccessible. Trying to pick up, then, the level of accessibility, I straightwired out the previous auditing and got him moving on the track, and he was running very nicely after only about six hours of auditing.

We have to reconsider our definition of accessible. Did you ever have the experience of trying to talk to somebody about a subject that you had to talk to him about, and have him not pay any attention to what you were saying but just keep changing the subject? That man could be said to be inaccessible on that subject. A person who says "Well, I don’t believe anything like that exists" when you try to tell him about Dianetics is an inaccessible case on the subject of Dianetics.

You can pick up that person’s level of accessibility if you can establish communication with him, but you obviously have not established communication with him if he is not receiving it. Perhaps you have to couch it in different technical terms for him, or perhaps he is an occult scientist or a psychiatrist or someone like that, who is relatively inaccessible from the real world. You have got to get things couched in such a way that he will understand them. That is communication. Furthermore, he has to feel that you are not after his daily bread and that you are not going to cut his throat, so there has to be a certain level of trust in you, which is affinity. You have to establish a little affinity with him. And in order to get any reality at all across to him, you have to get into agreement with him. If you obey the rules of ARC and utilize these laws with regard to ARC, you will find out that a psychiatrist becomes accessible while in the course of conversation.

If you have ever in the past failed to be able to sell somebody Dianetics convincingly, you have failed in the one tiny quarter of gaining accessibility to the individual.

Practically all there is to salesmanship is gaining accessibility to the idea that the other person has a need which you can fill.

So, where do we start with accessibility? Should it start with sending the preclear to basic- basic? Should it start with Straightwire? Or maybe it should start with the fact that you might be able to do something for him. How about a psychotic, who is awfully inaccessible? How do you get contact with him? That is the level of inaccessibility we are shooting for— the person who is raving mad and the person who, though not necessarily classed as psychotic in the past, is nevertheless just as thoroughly raving mad. There are people all over this society who are very, very psychotic. They only lock up the ones who are dangerous to their fellow man or destructive to themselves. A psychotic can have a dramatization which says "I am taking care of everything. I am doing my very best for you. Everything I do is in your interest, and you must listen to me because I can help you," and his manners may seem to be extremely well adjusted to the society, yet the person is nuttier than a fruitcake!

For instance, you tell Grandma, "I’d just like to go to a show, and I thought maybe you could stay for a few minutes with the baby."

And she starts out, "Well, I’ll do the best I could but, you know, the position of parents . . ."

To the society, you have a model individual— until you test the accessibility of this person to anything!

The primary test of psychosis is the ARC of an individual. Where they plot on an ARC chart is the measure of their aberration. This is a far more workable definition of psychosis, neurosis, normal people and other insanities than such strange words as "This person is a schizenoid parazoic with a left lumbar region," which means nothing. If you can describe in such a way as to immediately indicate the cure, you have really got a description that can be used.

People do not think of the incoming and outgoing of ARC. They are liable to wonder "Does this person feel affinity? Does he agree with me?" One of the portions of it is whether he can make you agree with him, which is also part of his reality. A person’s ability to adjust the environment around him is a big portion of living. This is not "being a well- adjusted person"; that is not even fifty percent of it. Man, as a race, would be dead if he had adjusted to his environment continually. How can he adjust you? That is part of the reality level.

The next point is communication, incoming and outgoing. There are people around who can really communicate to you and tell you what they want, but when you start to talk to them it just doesn’t register. They have the incoming communication blocked. And there are people around who smile very beautifully, then stab you in the back. There is something wrong with their affinity. People feel affinity, but whether or not they can make you feel affinity too is also part of the affinity level. There is incoming and outgoing; it is a two- way circuit. Where these things break down indicates immediately the blocks on the dynamics.

The dynamics are composed in some measure of ARC. We are dealing with theta, thought, which has certain laws. It behaves, when it starts running into MEST, in accordance with ARC. Affinity, reality and communication form a tone scale in themselves, and the extent to which these things are blocked gives you a very good measure of the overall aberration of the person.

There is acute and chronic aberration. A person’s ARC can either be stopped down momentarily, which is acute aberration, or continued for a long time in a stopped- down state, which is chronic aberration.

There is also acute insanity and chronic insanity. The person who flares up into a rage and murders somebody and then is perfectly sane the next day is crazy. He is nuts, to some degree. It is relative.

The position on the scale of ARC will measure the chronic state of the individual with regard to incoming and outgoing affinity, communication and reality. Can he make you feel affinity? Can he feel it himself? Does he agree with you? Can he make you agree with him? And as far as communication is concerned, does he talk to you and does he listen to you? Can he see, and so on? These are the perceptic lines. Does he record what he sees? Can he tell you about what he sees?

So we have solved the problem of inaccessibility to a large measure with the Accessibility Chart, because we can see exactly how someone is inaccessible and exactly where he is inaccessible, and it indicates to us immediately what we have to do to make him accessible.

The beginning of the Standard Procedure Chart now is ARC. It no longer says "For Accessible Cases." It assumes that if you are going to reach anybody at all, you can now reach him using this Accessibility Chart.

A person without sonic is out of communication with his own past on the one line of sound. If he does not have any visio, he is out of communication with his own past— he has an ARC break with himself in his own past— on VISIO.

There is an ARC on the first dynamic, one on the second dynamic, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth and the seventh.

There are people around who have an ARC break with MEST. They are out of communication with it. They look at the world and say, "Boy, that’s a pretty messy world. It’s sordid." Show them a flower and they say, "So what?" When they were children, they looked at a flower and said, "Oh, gee," and they went out and looked at some scenery and said, "Gosh! Beautiful world!" They were younger and the aberrations had not kicked in. That bit of dew upon the tiger lily was dew, a sparkling diamond. Later on it is just a little bit of sooty water. That is nothing more nor less than broken ARC with MEST.

There is another way that a person could break with MEST. MEST may not have surrendered to his molding. Theta has as one of its missions the conquest of MEST, and if he was unable to mold this MEST around the way he should have and the MEST molded him instead, that alone could be a secondary engram. For instance, if a little boy was trying to mold MEST in some fashion, and he tried and tried, and he failed, each one of those times was a little break with MEST.

Breaks with one’s fellow man, with women, and with various things all mold into breaks on the ARC level.

At what lightness of break are we going to enter a case? Can we go into an engram where there is terrific enturbulation between theta and MEST? Or can we go into a grief charge where the grief is accessible and can be taken off the case? Or do we go into it on the level of finding some ARC locks? Or do we go in on the level of being able to remember just the incident of having breakfast this morning? Or, if it is somebody that we can’t talk to, do we go into it on the basis of establishing our ability to talk to him? In other words, you have a gradient scale of ARC right up the line.

Where do you enter a case? Obviously if you are having trouble getting some agreement out of a person about what you are trying to do to him, you have not established communication with him. ARC goes in a bundle of three. If you pick up affinity, you are going to pick up communication and reality; if you pick up reality, you will pick up affinity and communication; and if you pick up communication, you will pick up the other two automatically.

I can talk to a class over a period of two weeks, and at the end of the two weeks all is very beautiful and we are very definitely friends. I can talk to a member of that class a long time afterwards and we are still friends, particularly if he has been able to contribute anything to me and we have had a two- way communication. Any time this two- way traffic picks up, affinity picks up. Also agreement picks up. Just a duration of communication has an effect, as long as there is interest in that communication.

So, where can we pick up the inaccessible case? For instance, a person is skeptical, he can’t run anything and he is covertly hostile to us, but we have to work this case. We keep talking to him, but it is silly to talk on a disagreement subject to an individual who has a low level of reality— reality and agreement being much the same thing.

You keep on talking to him and say, "Well, you’ve got to lie down on the couch."

"No. I don’t want to lie down on the couch."

"Well, you had better lie down on the couch and close your eyes."

"Oh, no. I don’t like to close my eyes in the daytime."

"Well, it won’t take very long, and now please, please do it." And you could get persuasive and talk for a long time along this line, getting more and more persuasive, until you either get through or you have become pleading with the case.

All of a sudden he says, "Well, all right, I’ll close my eyes." So he closes his eyes and you go into what might laughingly be referred to as processing.

The reason he finally closed his eyes was not because you were persuasive, it was because you went on talking to him. The arguments which you advanced probably had no bearing on the subject at all. It was because you were in communication with him. After you had been around for a little while, he had a chance to look you over and he decided that you were not dangerous, so he closed his eyes. It is just the business of communication.

In a very inaccessible case, you can talk golf or anything that you can find any level of agreement on at all, in which you are really interested. Don’t sit there bored to death. Did you ever try to get anything off a case that you were bored with? Try to cover it up— you aren’t going to. If, while running an engram, you stifle a yawn and tell the preclear to go over it again, you have broken affinity with the preclear’s case, not because you have said or done anything to the preclear, but because you are not putting out affinity to him. It requires an affinity. So the preclear’s communication level and his ability to communicate with his own past immediately go down. You can actually do this to a case and turn off his sonic. You can turn off his reality level about what is happening to him.

The inaccessibility of the case is something that you have to be able to estimate correctly. There are cases who never listen to a thing anybody says. You can talk to this person for a long time, and he will answer on a completely disrelated subject.

For instance, you might say, "I had a Ming teapot once which my grandmother gave me."

And the person says, "How cold was it yesterday in Boston?" Non sequitur! He is not receiving any communication from you, and in addition to that he is disagreeing with you. The reality between you is low, therefore affinity drops. But if you just talk to this person for a while, and test his level of agreement on any subject, you will find that it is about the same with you on each subject you take up, unless you can talk about a subject which is as close to him as it is to you. Now the reality is there, and the rest of it will follow.

Don’t try to work a "doubter," like the young man who says "You know, I don’t think there is anything to this Dianetics." Who cares what he thinks about it? He generally gets you at a moment when you are busily rushed and so forth, and he has to tell you about it right there!

I have run into this young man three or four hundred times; he is just a duplicate. He goes out of his way to come up to me and tell me that he doesn’t believe in this kind of thing because he hasn’t run this or that. There are two reasons why he does that: one is so I will process him and the other is that he has to disagree on a subject.

Now, if one of these people has just heard a few minutes of talk and he comes and tells me that, this is an interchange in which he is engaged. He has disagreed with what I said and he has to express that disagreement. It’s so mechanical that there is no use becoming upset about it.

I have even asked some of these people, "Did your father have red hair?" The answer about fifty percent of the time is yes, because it is a personal thing that has thrown the agreement out. Don’t spend a long time talking to such a person. Just kick the factor out with Straightwire and then go on into communication with him and you will find out that he no longer has these objections to Dianetics. Clear up the conversation in a hurry rather than waste any time on it.

Clear yourself up with the preclear as a group before you start to worry about processing him.

Now, this young man, under these circumstances of disagreement on the subject, says "I don’t think this will work."

There is a terrible thing you can do— terrible! You say, "What do you think about psychiatry?"

"I don’t think it works."

"What do you think about dentistry?"

"Well, I don’t know— doesn’t work."

"What about psychoanalysis?"

"Well, it doesn’t work."

"What do you think about biology?"

"Biology? Oh, yeah. It doesn’t work; it’s a dud."

"What about arithmetic?"

"That’s terrible." (This guy doesn’t go for that.) "It has a lot of abstractions and so forth. We shouldn’t teach children arithmetic that early."

"What do you think about the public library?"

"Well, they threw me out last time I was down there."

You are getting a monotone reaction, straight across the case. Note this when you start to talk to a person about Dianetics.

Don’t consider that you are being completely challenged by this individual because of Dianetics. Let’s find out how much agreement there is on some other subject. Don’t tell him so. Just shift the subject over to something else and find out how much agreement there is on that. You will End a point of agreement somewhere on the band; your agreement will start an interchange. It is not that the point of agreement will improve particularly, but affinity will pick up, which will improve the agreement. And then communication will pick up, which again enhances both agreement and affinity. Just start working him up with ARC, and then swing it back on to Dianetics.

This is really throwing the fellow a curve, because if you work it on the band back and forth, you pick up his level of agreement. Then you can talk to him about Dianetics. You will find out that his accessibility has picked up as far as you are concerned, and that is what you are working for.

A salesman who picks up ARC on anything before getting over to the subject on which he wants agreement will be able to sell. He could probably sell the Brooklyn Bridge to the United States Government if he did it well enough.

All of this is enormously applicable to processing.

A psychiatrist, Frieda Fromm Reichman, put into my hands a processing manual for psychiatrists, which gives the new psychiatrist a lot of tips on how to practice his profession. She did me a lot of good in that moment, because she gave me a tool to use in case the fire gets too heavy. I can quote from it. For instance, it says, "The psychiatrist should restrain himself in his tendency to sleep while treating a patient. Most psychiatrists tell themselves that they will wake up if the patient says anything of importance. However, this mechanism should not be relied upon." It assumes everybody in psychiatry goes to sleep. There is a long section on that.

Then it says, "A psychiatrist should not look to his woman patients for his gratification— always."

This thing is priceless! However, I honestly appreciate Frieda’s work. Out of the whole field of psychiatry, there are a few very stellar lights, and Frieda is one of them. This old girl has patience and courage to spare. She takes some raving maniac, without anybody to protect her, and works with him for a while. Soon the person is talking to the guards very rationally. Wonderful! Her main stock in trade is that she gets affinity and communication by agreement and reality. In establishing the reality, she does not want the psychotic to accept her reality, she accepts the psychotic’s reality. If he jumps up and down on a stool, Frieda will jump up and down on the stool, and so on— not in mockery, but in perfect agreement with this person— and soon he is perfectly willing to converse with her. In this way she gets his ARC up above the psychotic point— a process which requires considerable imagination. It also requires a lot of nerve.

Although it is not the subtlest form of agreement, man’s first learning pattern is mimicry. That means a similarity. That is agreement, and if you get enough agreement you will get a reality. Mimicry is one of the levels on it. I worked for about a month on one young man who stuttered before he found out that I don’t stutter!

Another thing you should recognize is that you and the preclear exist as a group. Don’t have bars between you of various sorts. If any exist and you have to work a particular preclear get rid of them. There are two questions that can be used to handle this: "What objection do you have to me as an auditor?" and "How can you help me with my auditing?" That last one produces some remarkable results. You have been contributing to him all along, and one of the rules of a group is that there has got to be contribution both ways.

For instance, the reason audiences applaud is that by applauding they are contributing to the actor, the dancer or the musician. An audience is rather dissatisfied at the end of a talk or a performance if they have not had a chance to applaud. If the performer or something else cuts off the applause, no matter how good the act is, the audience leaves relatively unsatisfied. They have not been able to contribute. So a performer has to let the audience give their contribution to the group.

An auditor and a preclear form a group of two. They had better mutually contribute, one to the other. The auditor contributes to the preclear thinking about his woes and pain, and that can get up to a point where the weight of obligation will throw it over and the group will go out of balance.

One of the ways this was prevented in old methods of psychotherapy was by transference

The auditor could set himself up as a control unit to which all troubles are to be transferred, and encourage a dependency upon himself. But that would be an authoritarian state. (Did you ever see a sane populace under a dictator?) He could work his preclears into a level whereby they all ask him whether or not they can blow their noses! You want to set people’s self- determinism up as high as you possibly can, but if you do it without then permitting them to contribute to you in some fashion, the group is not a group; it is a totalitarian state and you don’t want it.

In summary, the more inaccessible the case is, the more humanly you have to establish relations. Pick it up on the ARC triangle. If you can establish affinity, you can get communication and reality, and by doing just this, if you were good enough, you could turn on the preclear’s sonic without Straightwire or addressing engrams. By validating the person as a human being it is possible to get him to a point where he would believe in himself as a human being, and at that point he could start running some very nice, smooth engrams.