GENERAL DISCUSSION OF AUDITING

A lecture given on 31 August 1950

Emphasis on Standard Procedure

I have seen errors being made such as this: The preclear was saying, "I can’t see; I have bunions. Dogs are all green."

And the auditor said, "Now, go over it again."

"I can’t see. Dogs are all green."

And the auditor (the word auditor is used in a very advised sense here) said, "Is this erased?"

"Yep." So he brought him up to present time and said, "Now, you see, that’s an example of an erasure." Anything like that is, of course, very bad auditing. The auditor was running phrases and calling them engrams.

Once in a great while you can erase a whole chain of phrases by using Guk. But that doesn’t keep one from running an engram with Standard Procedure. You audit a preclear just like it says in the Handbook, and like these examples. We depend more solidly on the file clerk than the somatic strip, but it is still Standard Procedure. All that Guk does is make a case more alive. It is nothing magical, except that the engrams come up more easily and swiftly, and sometimes they will come up in whole chains. This doesn’t mean that anything strange or unusual has happened to these engrams. Guk does not particularly capitalize grief. It makes the incidents more accessible, but you still have to work for grief. It won’t come off automatically.

There is no transition from Standard Procedure into Guk Procedure. You just finish Standard Procedure normally, bring the preclear up to present time and give him a canceler. (Your responsibility is every bit as great if you have the person on Guk as when you have the person off it.) Then you can start what we call "freewheeling." We use the word freewheeling to distinguish between freewheeling and autohypnosis in which people talk about running automatically. It certainly is not autohypnosis or auto.

So, what one does, then, when Standard Procedure is all over is to start the person freewheeling by saying "The file clerk will furnish somatics. The somatic strip will sweep the somatics and erase them, and the analytical mind will stay in present time." And then you just walk off. Every once in a while you check this person to find out whether or not somatics are turning on and off. If he is going for a couple of hours without a new somatic turning on, he is not moving on the track. What is supposed to be happening is that occasionally strange little aches and pains should be turning on and off throughout his body. Once in a while he will have a sunburn turn on so that his face will get very hot; some people say this is the effect of niacin. It is very interesting that niacin can be so effective as to stop tingling immediately at the waistline, just above the trunk line, and then start again on the thighs. It is not necessary to know when it took place. All that is necessary to know is, are the somatics turning on or off? And you get the report from the file clerk on a yes/ no basis. You can say, "Are you moving?" or something like that.

He says, "No."

So you ask him for a holder. He gives you a yes or no. Bouncer? And so on through the procedure. Get a yes or no on any one of these things. If he gives you a no on everything, he has got an engram that says "No." So you run "No" out. You simply take the holder and repeat it two or three times, and then you ask him, "Are you moving now?" and you get a yes or no. If you get a yes, leave him alone. Now he can walk around, drive the car, go outside, do anything he wants to, except that I would advise against going swimming in areas where one is apt to be out of sight of immediate aid because of somatics which are restimulatable, and someone might have had a cramp in swimming and it might turn on.

If he gets a sudden somatic while driving a car, he should pull over to the side of the road until it runs itself out. This is not dangerous, it is just mentioned because one should have a good grip on himself when he is driving. A person taking Guk is still a human being, subject to circuitry, subject to valences and so forth.

On Guk, the case which is badly out of valence can be found moving on the track, but what he is running is a shadow of a somatic which was worn by the valence. Of course, that is borrowed from his own engram bank, but he will run these little somatics that don’t amount to anything. He has to stop and feel really hard whether or not he is running a somatic.

The ordinary course is that he may do this for two or three days if he is just freewheeling, or after he has had some Standard Procedure run, or anytime, with the same somatics turning on and off, and he doesn’t really know what is happening. Once in a while his face will be hot, and then, maybe about three days later, he will get several somatics that are slightly tougher. He is getting into his own valence a little bit more. The somatics will be quite variable, but he doesn’t have to stand still and feel for them anymore. He knows they are there. Then they get tougher to a point where he is liable to be sitting in a chair and talking to you saying, "Well, last night— ouch!" He won’t get very many of those, but they are his own somatics. He may find something sharp and clear occasionally like a knitting needle going through his stomach.

Now, it happens that in freewheeling, unconsciousness quite often comes off the case with the engram. So, a person will find himself going along and all of a sudden feel dopey and start yawning. When the yawns are over, the dopiness disappears. That was just the unconsciousness coming off an engram. That doesn’t mean you have to force it or pay any special attention to it. So, if you feel tired or your tone level goes down, don’t say, "It’s all over now, I can’t go on." Be cheered up.

Another thing that happens occasionally is that the person will have a whole series of somatics in one area. For instance, there may be a whole series of injuries in the mouth including an exodontistry; so he will run some in the leg, some in the arm, and then, all of a sudden, another one of these mouth somatics. It will last two or three minutes and then he will run one in his foot. Or maybe he will find himself going around all day long running stubbed toes. These are just shadows of the real injury, but they are quite unmistakable.

When one is badly out of valence, it is not possible to get freewheeling to occur with Guk unless the person is moving on the time track. So, the important thing is to get him moving. To achieve that, one can use Straightwire as the Standard Procedure. You reduce what you can lay your hands on, bring the preclear back up to present time again, cancel it out and reinstall him on freewheeling. It is a completely different operation and must be treated as such. Don’t for a minute consider your responsibility any less with or without Guk. The auditor is responsible for reducing all these engrams and for making a good case out of it.

You should put in a canceler for the freewheeling. You will occasionally find some auditor who doesn’t put in a canceler in general auditing. He is either (1) very careless or (2) he is so accustomed to observing people that he can take a look at them and see they are not in any kind of a trance and decide to chance it.

But, failure to install the canceler is a breach of the Auditor’s Code because it falls under the heading of not sufficiently safeguarding the preclean The canceler does work; a person does not have to be hypnotized to have it work. It works anyway and is particularly efficacious when somebody has been way down the bank someplace in a deep dope- off. Then when he comes back up to present time, if there is still material on the case and you give him a canceler, it will remove that material.

Another problem is the case of a loud noise occurring in the vicinity of your preclear. He may be right in the middle of running an engram, but because the noise has now been planted at that point on the track where the engram was to a certain degree, you should make him run that noise.

For instance, a telephone rings. You say, "Go over that telephone ring," and he will go over it, because he might have gotten quite a shock out of it. Then run him back through it again.

Or somebody rushes in and slams the door, and you say "Shhhhh."

"What’s the matter? You auditing somebody?" Such people have to be taught that loud noises are undesirable in the vicinity of an individual who has analytical attenuation.

Light will give a little bit of a shock, but nothing like noise, and the light has to be very bright to really kick. For instance, every time one of these flash bulbs hits me in the face, I have to click back over the thing and knock the attention out of the eyes again because they hurt.

Any intense perceptic can cause analytical attenuation— a tiny bit of unconsciousness— and if you go back over it again you will find that there is quite a bit of pain in it. It is the same way with sound.

Sometimes you run somebody whose sonic has lately turned on and who isn’t aware of the fact yet that having sonic has some liability. This material has been there but has been masked, and now you turn loose his sonic and you find that many of the noises which he has heard in the past which are painful will turn on, and he will have to flick through them. You can actually go up and down the bank and knock out the noise chain. You go to the earliest time he ever rode on a subway and you get the first couple of instants of it.

Any of these noise somatics is just like any other engram. You just have to get the first few times it happened. Let’s say we have got someone with a firecracker going off, and the first time he ever heard a firecracker it almost blew in his eardrums. Well, knock out that first firecracker, then knock out the next firecracker even though they all happened the same day, and the next firecracker and the next, because you will find that all the noise somatics are latched up on the first firecracker. But by the time you have gone through ten, the rest don’t bother him.

I had an interesting experience happen to me. I was sitting down quietly minding my own business, going over a couple of minor things by myself, and somebody started talking about kamikazes and the war, and so on. Then he asked me some sort of a question and I flashed up to this moment where there were 5- inch guns, 40- millimeters, 20- millimeters, and so forth, all going off at once. And it was quite a shock! I realized that there was an experience there whereby that impact of sound had made me deaf for about four days. You might say that unconsciousness had taken place in the eardrums to a point where they wouldn’t register. Their resistance to sound went way up and then held there. I had run unsuspectingly into the middle of this, and I had never recognized before how vividly sound can hurt!

A little child’s ears are peculiarly sensitive. The worst sound engram I ever picked up was Papa trying to shoot Mama with a .45 pistol. He missed, but the .45 was close to her abdomen. She caught the muzzle blast of it and she got some burn on it. Of course, the blast of the .45 was accompanied by emotional shock and the suddenness of it. That incident was recorded as a pool of sound there on which practically all sounds of the child’s whole life had latched up. And it, in effect, was the primary reason for the sonic shut- off in this case, because one didn’t turn it on as it was so thoroughly painful. It didn’t even say it was painful.

It was just painful. So that sound had come forward and it had somehow or other registered in the ears, although the child at the time of course had no ears.

Then there is this common engram. Some poor baby is put into a nursery with all the other babies wailing. The first time you take somebody back to the area and he hears all this sound, he usually makes a complete mistake as to what the sound is. He doesn’t realize it is right after birth. He gets put in the nursery and hears all these strange animal cries, and some nurse may pick up one of the little newborn babies and show it to one of the incoming babies and say, "Well, here’s your new roommate," but the child records this as a ferocious beast making horrible sounds, which has just appeared before the eyes.

Now, I am going to tell you once more about Standard Procedure. Standard Procedure is a method of taking a case step by step and bringing it through to a logical conclusion. The existence of Standard Procedure is owed to the fact that many cases are left hanging because the auditor doesn’t know what to do next. So, there is a chart of Standard Procedure which tells him.

Standard Procedure starts with an inventory, goes through the running of engrams, goes into Straightwire to locate analytical demons and valences, back into the running of engrams and so on, back to the inventory to find out who is dead and to run some more grief. In other words, you resolve this case.

You should never make the mistake that Standard Procedure is not Standard Procedure. It is what it says; it is exactly what is in the bulletin. It’s no more than this. There are no techniques by which one suddenly erases a whole chain. If a whole chain starts erasing the instant that you pick up the bottom phrase— as will happen sometimes if you have got it— that’s fine. But that is just an added bonus. You run the engram until it erases, and it erases when you have the first moment of pain in it, all the first moment of paih. You run the engram all the way through, then you go back to the beginning and run it all the way through again. Yawns will come off, the somatic will disappear and nothing else can be found in this engram.

A person can bounce out of an engram with no yawns, and the engram won’t be there anymore, but this does not mean that he has erased it.

Some cases will believe perhaps that everything they are saying is imaginary, but that is the rarity, not the ordinary. There are two things wrong with cases that do this: The central engram or the grief charge has not been contacted. There is a tough engram in that case somewhere along the line that is holding it up, and for some reason or other the file clerk can’t give it to you. Try to open up a case as much as possible with Straightwire, if you are working Straightwire.

We all want a "royal road" to clear, but anybody who believes that full progress to clear is a short and easy one is making a mistake which will cause him disappointment. What you should realize is that about half the way up from release to clear the case is deintensified to such an enormous extent that the person has to think a couple of times to remember that he is still a therapy patient. He gets up so high that sometimes it requires somebody else’s attention on the subject in order to take him all the way through. The material no longer even interests him. The whole engram bank is deintensified, and you have to keep alert to the subject if you want to get the case all the way through. The person feels good. He doesn’t get tired. He feels able to cope with things.

We never used to think anything of a 500- hour or a 1,000- hour case. Someone with dub- in may have taken 1,200 hours. Now, with Guk, we have speeded this up tremendously. I don’t know how fast we can make a clear with Guk. We haven’t any representative cases that have come through. We simply know that we can speed up cases, but that doesn’t excuse us from using Standard Procedure.