BEING A FRIEND TO THE PRECLEAR

A lecture given on 16 July 1951

Raising Your Own Level of ARC

I want to give you one more word about the Validation Technique. It shouldn’t be called Validation Processing. It should probably be called Validation Technique. By calling it Validation Processing an auditor can possibly become confused and think that it is not Standard Procedure or something. All it is, is the other side of Standard Procedure.

I received a letter from a chap out on the coast who was here for the conference, and he said, "You need a lot more data on this because . . ." As nearly as I can figure, he was trying to lock- scan a preclear, because he said, "Validation Processing should not be used on someone below 1. on the tone scale. I scanned out these locks. . ." He scanned. He had a preclear who couldn’t scan and he kept latching this preclear up in secondaries or something. He should have been doing Validation Technique with, or at best Repetitive, and he wouldn’t have had any trouble.

What he ran into evidently was the fact that you can’t run people below 1. on Lock Scanning without hanging them up. And right away, because he was fooling with Validation Processing, he immediately assigned this to Validation Processing. That is not very good thinking.

So let’s call it Validation Technique. You just follow the Chart of Human Evaluation when using it.

Now, when I was running Validation Technique on a preclear during the conference, I said you have to check a preclear all the way along the line because he will fly out of hand on you. l You have to keep constant check on him. It shouldn’t have been left without emphasis. This means that you can’t do nonvocal Lock Scanning with Validation Technique. You would have to do vocal Lock Scanning if you were lock- scanning him. The fellow would have to tell you all the way along the line what he was doing. Don’t ever let your preclear get out of hand on it.

That is the case in any auditing. There are too many auditors who not only let the preclear get out of hand but let the preclear run the session. I dare say there have been auditors who have actually let the preclear run what the preclear said he wanted to run!

There were some famous cases in Dianetics back East. They always claimed they had altitude trouble— this is another word for circuit trouble. One of the cases progressed pretty well as long as I was processing him. But when I let some other auditor process him, he would rear up on the bed, hold up his hand and say, "No, I’m thinking about something else," and the auditor, completely crushed, would sit there and let him think about something else.

That is all very well, but it means that the auditor and the preclear can’t be in very good communication. Furthermore it means that the auditor and the preclear are not cooperating. You have to get the cooperation of the preclear and you have to have his agreement as to what is being run, but that doesn’t mean that you hand it over to the preclear to run and then sit alongside the couch and watch him self- audit! He might as well be someplace else self- auditing, walking around the corridors of the Foundation or walking up and down the street, thinking to himself happily, "Now, let’s see, ‘ Stay here, stay here, stay here, stay here, stay here. ’ Yeah, I guess that’s the holder. ‘Stay here, stay here . . .’ No, it can’t be that holder; it must be some other holder." So he starts to run another holder.

What is wrong with the auditor not running the case is that the preclear gets analytical attenuation. He starts to go into an area or is in an area which shuts down his analyzer, and then he is liable to do what the engram says to do and attribute this to auditing.

A preclear will never catch his own bouncers. He will feel that he is bouncing but the chances are that his analytical attenuation is such that he will just go on bouncing. He will run on up through the locks.

After a fellow has been bounced to present time, the engram bouncer has been left in restimulation. A preclear will do this to himself with auto- auditing. That is pretty vicious stuff. So the auditor must stay in communication with the preclear and at no time should he stay in communication as thoroughly as when he is doing Validation Technique, because there, of all times, a preclear is really liable to slip.

An auditor should always know when the preclear starts running something else and saying he is running what he is told to run. You must realize that the auditor can depress the preclear on the tone scale below the chronic tone of the preclear. He can take a 2. and, through a communication break or authoritarianism, depress this person down to a 1.0 during the session. Maybe you hadn’t thought of it, but it is quite obvious that it could happen.

So the fellow goes down to 1.0. What does a 1.0 do? He will say one thing and do another. If by communication breaks or authoritarianism or sheer ineptitude you have managed to depress your preclear. you can practically count on the fact that he is going to start running one thing and telling you something else. He will auto- audit behind a screen of pretended "being a preclear." You should expect this to happen. He will get more and more antagonistic; he will become more and more inaccessible. You can tell when this is happening best when your preclear starts getting a little bit antagonistic to you as an auditor. He is probably doing this, and he resents having to do it.

A communication break has taken place of some sort or other. The auditor, regardless of the chronic tone of the preclear. has suppressed that preclear down the tone scale, and the preclear has begun to manifest temporarily at the new, acute level. For instance, an auditor with bad, sloppy, inept auditing can take a 3.0 and throw him into 1.0 easily just on the subject of auditing and during the session.

When something like this happens— you notice your preclear getting a little antagonistic— he is starting to skid down the tone scale. Don’t think of it in terms of "This preclear is getting antagonistic now; I’ve really got to put on the pressure." That is a training- pattern response. That is what Papa and Mama did when you got mad at them. You said, "I don’t want to go to bed!" and they said, "Get mad at me, will you, you little brat! " Or "Don’t you dare get mad at your mother! What’s the idea of getting mad at your mother— and swearing, too! Now, you go to bed without your supper! " So they pushed you into apathy and then you obeyed.

You can watch a child going on down the tone scale: he will get antagonistic, he will get angry, he will lie, go into grief and then apathy. When a child gets into apathy, he is considered to be in a desirable state; then he is obedient.

Of course, you have a terrible situation there with preclears or children or anyone else. If you get some person down below 2.0, you have two choices: You process him, or you apply ARC somehow or other (this is on a long- term basis) to bring him back up the scale and get him up to where you can be reasonable with him. You can’t get him on an antagonistic basis down around 2.0 and then say, "Now, see here, you have got to listen to me and be reasonable! Now, the reason you have to be reasonable is so- and- so and so- and- so, and. . ."

This child or this preclear is below a band of being reasonable. If you talk to a child, a preclear. or someone else that you are trying to sell something to— anybody who is antagonistic— and start saying, "Now, be reasonable" or trying to reason with him, it is pretty hard to do. But you can work ARC to bring him back up the line, and work ARC any way that you can work it and preferably off the subject that you have gotten low on. Get him over to another subject that you can bring him up on. This will haul up what he went down on. You can get him up the tone scale again. Now you can be reasonable with him. But you don’t have to tell him to be reasonable.

I am using children as an example, not to say that preclears are children. So, you suppress the child about going to bed: "If you come out here one more time I’m going to slap you. I don’t care if you want another drink of water. I don’t care what’s happening."

The child gets antagonistic: "No, I’m not going to bed! It’s too early to go to bed! And besides, I don’t have to go to school in the morning."

"You’re going to bed, young man!"

The child will generally drop down the tone scale fairly fast. He will get angry. He may go down to the 1. level and say "I saw a face at the window, " or "There was a spider in bed with me," or "I have a stomachache"— any 1. level response. Or he cries, he gets hysterical: "I never get any chance to do anything I want to! Waaah!"

Then if you are very insistent you can say, "I don’t want to hear another word out of you. You go to bed or I’m going to beat your head in."

He goes to bed. He is in apathy. Look at him! Go look at his face. You can see that he is in apathy.

Of course, if you really want to get obedience and if you have to get obedience on an emergency measure or if the downward spiral has already begun, you really have no other choice than to just lower the boom, push the guy into apathy and shove him off on his duty. They found this to be very efficacious in the armed services. They don’t mess around with this at all; they just push the troops all the way through into apathy, quickly, and the sooner the better. Then the men do what they are told. They get the men into apathy by taking MEST away from them— matter, energy, space and time. If the troops are in a "good apathetic level," then occasionally by someone talking to them and getting big fight programs going and getting a lot of things happening, their morale can be raised up to a point of anger and they will fight a battle. That is high- toned for the armed services— 1.5.

If you have handled human beings you have seen that it is pretty tough to take somebody in the 2.0 band and handle him. Occasionally you can do it, but you establish ARC usually on some other subject than what you are trying to get him reasonable about. Get ARC up between the two of you and then get him thinking a little bit and you will get some agreement.

With a child this is pretty hard to do because a child isn’t accustomed to thinking; he is accustomed to obeying. He is accustomed to being pushed down the scale to apathy, so he is going to think any effort on your part to approach him is liable to wind him up in apathy. Sometimes he will just go into apathy automatically. You say, "Here, do you want a lollipop?" and he goes into apathy.

This is very interesting. I want you to just look at the cycle of the child and look at the preclear. We are not looking at the preclear because he is a child, but because we are looking at the same tone scale.

The preclear starts getting antagonistic and the auditor starts getting authoritarian. Where is this preclear going? He is going into anger. If the auditor is bigger than he is, he will skid on through anger and go into 1. very quickly, and then he will tell the auditor one thing and do another. He will even tell the auditor that he is getting well when he is not. He will try to give the auditor gifts, buy him off. He can even go down into grief and run present time grief and say it is his Aunt Mamie. The auditor, by authoritarianism, has suppressed him into 0.5. That is why ARC is so important for an auditor.

When you see a preclear getting in any way antagonistic or being uncooperative, shift the subject off to women or when he was a kid and had a penny balloon or anything of the sort. And you had better do it pretty smoothly, because if he is starting down the scale he is liable to take any effort you as an auditor make as a direct insult. Very often you get a preclear who is very low on the tone scale who is just mad all the time, and as he starts coming up the tone scale one of the first people he will get mad about will be the auditor.

Definitely one thing an auditor can do is clear the group between himself and the preclear. not constitute himself an auditor and not constitute the preclear a preclear.

Being a preclear doesn’t make a human being a lesser being. Most preclears are volunteer preclears. They are there on the couch because they, of their own self- determinism, want to get better. That is most preclears. Those few preclears you run into that you are working with because somebody else wants them to get better, you have trouble with. Their self determinism is already undermined on the subject of Dianetics, therefore you have to reestablish it. You have to show them some reason they ought to be processed. Only you had better not show them that "the reason they ought to be processed is because they are less than they ought to be." That would be the wrong line because that is criticism and invalidation of the individual.

You can show how they will lead up from this point into something else, but that is a tough one to crack. I wish somebody would really figure out a nice, smooth formula that would crack it.

Of course, there exists one— ARC.

But the auditor ought to clear himself with the preclear as a group. One of the ways of doing this is to sit down man- to- man (or woman- to- man or woman- to- woman) with the preclear and say, "Let’s try to figure this out as a team, a group that is trying to accomplish something, and see what we can do to figure this thing out. Is there anything you don’t like about me? There are a couple of things I don’t like about you."

This, by the way, always undermines a preclear immediately. If you go at it this way, you can sometimes get associative persons out of the way. Sometimes you can get various other things out of the way, such as the fact that the preclear is actually worried about a present time problem that he wasn’t going to tell you about as an auditor. But as a person with whom you are trying to straighten things out and become an auditing group, he will tell you. It is very interesting. It immediately brings up his tone. The auditor is usually sitting up and the preclear lying down, and this is a sort of an altitude differential right there, and you can just both sit up and look at each other.

By the way, the army discovered a sure way of taking two men who were fighting with each other and making them be friends. This is actually written up. This was a datum which was derived empirically, and it is written up in the infantry books. If you go back through those and look for morale and so forth you will find this example: They put them to work washing the opposite sides of a window. Naturally— you have perfect mimicry. What can they do besides establish ARC with each other? You can use that in auditing, not by going and finding a window to wash, but by eating with your preclear or ordering what the preclear orders, and you can establish considerable ARC.

The fact of the matter is, actually, unless the auditor and the preclear can find a common meeting ground as human beings, they are going to have kind of a tough time trying to find any common meeting ground or enough ARC to go through the rigors of processing. That is something for you to remember. You had better become very adroit at being friends with your preclear if you really expect to make progress.

Most of the people in Dianetics have a very definite desire to be friends to people and help people. Preclears, however, are sometimes very aberrated and fail to recognize this, so it is up to the auditor to get it straightened out if he can.