STANDARD PROCEDURE

A lecture given on 1 October 1951

A Step- by- Step Procedure

I want to make a statement on what standard processing is. This is Standard Procedure, Self- determined MEST Processing.

An axiom we are working on is, The mind makes observations in the present, compares it to the experience of the past and postulates action for the future. That is in the first book— again, not stressed with enough importance. Here is its evaluation.

A psychotic is a person who is concerned solely with the past. A neurotic is a person who is struggling to combat the present. A healthy person is one who is thrusting efforts into the future.

What is the definition of sanity? It is ability to postulate futures. What is the definition of neurosis? It is simply a concern with the problems of the present— so you could have a temporary or a continual neurosis. And the psychotic is concerned only with the problems of the past.

The tone scale is a graduated scale of futures. If you look at the first drawing of the tone scale in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, 1 you will see that it shows survival plotted against future, and it shows as you rise up the tone scale that there is more and more future postulated. The statement didn’t quite have the right emphasis on it, but it is there. The right emphasis simply says that a person’s ability to postulate the future points up his position on the tone scale, and his position on the tone scale demonstrates to you where he is going to occupy the time track. If he is below 2.0 he is in the past, if he is around 2.0 he is in the present and if he is above 2.0 he is postulating futures. It is that simple.

Now, we take a psychotic and we want to get him up into a neurotic state; we don’t have to get him into a neurotic state but most of them go into one. The first step of Standard Procedure, 1 October 1951, is the estimation of where the main effort of this individual is— past, present or future. This immediately gives you a diagnosis: psychotic, neurotic or sane. These are not absolute terms; there is a gradient scale here.

The remaining steps concern themselves with how you process at what level on the tone scale— the lower levels of inaccessibility and so forth. These are steps that are used from the bottom of the tone scale on up.

So if you get a person occupying the psychotic band, all you do is try to generate enough ARC around him to snap him into a recognition of the present. That is all you can do for him.

One of the ways of establishing communication is through physical communication— patting him on the arm, rubbing his shoulders or something of this sort— although this is just one method of communication and is very far from uniformly workable with psychotics. I am simply pointing up that communication is just plain perception. If you can get the fellow to see you, you are in communication with him, so you use ARC to get him up into present time.

One of the staff auditors told me that he was processing psychotics all right by running engrams out of them. He was sort of growling at me because I had said that you shouldn’t run engrams on psychotics, and then right in the middle of trying to tell me this he interrupted himself and he said, "I use lots of ARC." Of course, he is then processing a neurotic. The preclear might have been psychotic the moment the auditor left, but while he was there the fellow had an ARC- level communication. So the auditor was just boosting the case up. That is the best example I can think of, of Step One, low- level cases. This applies in Effort Processing or anything else. It is about all you can do with the low- level preclear as far as we know at the present moment. You bring him up to that.

There is no sense in trying to go in exclusively on the structural side with a psychotic. That is the trouble with him— the environment has been monitoring his switchboard instead of "I." If you give him authoritarian or structural processing exclusively, you are just monitoring the same board. What you are trying to rehabilitate is "I," not the structure.

Now, with a person who has a present- time concern— a neurotic or something like that— all you do is give him Validation MEST Processing. This clears up what he observes. It evaluates the physical universe around him; it puts language in its proper place; it gives him on the validation side of the ledger some concept of motion or something of the sort. In other words, you can put him in contact with his present. You don’t have to do very much of this when you get him up to that point, because all you are trying to do— and all you are trying to do when you go into any case— is groove him up for some Self- determined Effort Processing. The next step is Validation Effort Processing. This consists of discovering moments when the preclear is successfully approaching goals, when he is successfully exerting an effort, when his self- determined effort is winning. These are the moments you want to find— when his self- determined effort is winning.

The next level is to just start knocking out the entheta efforts on a switchboard level, not a somatic level, wherever you can. That is the last step on this procedure, and you just continue that through till you have a theta- MEST Clear. It might take you hours and hours and hours— twenty- five hours or something like that.

Your biggest problem is in trying to get somebody up to where he will at least worry about present time— in other words, to break a psychosis into the middle of the band with ARC. You want to break him into 2.0 and get him into a position where you can use Validation MEST Processing, then use a little MEST Processing, then go on up the line with some Validation Effort Processing and then Entheta Effort Processing— hitting at moments when he was unsuccessful and knocking these things out and getting the efforts for them. It is rather simple and not very hard on the auditor.

This is Standard Procedure as of this moment, and a very simple Standard Procedure it is.