6406C16 SHSpec-23 Communication, Overts, and Responsibility People who have been in processing for some time can forget the degree to which other people are wrapped up in and in contest with, their environments. This is the direct key to the case! Your first job, as an auditor, is to find out what the PC's environment is. You should also be able to recognize that PCs can get down to the level of where their only concern is to handle some problem in their environment. This PC is not going to OT, just to a sigh of relief. A contest is not necessarily fisticuffs. It is just that there are different ways of reacting to the environment. At lower levels, anything the PC is doing is an effort to handle the environment. This effort could even amount to catatonia or complete immobility. The method is not necessarily smart. But down to the lowest rung, the person is still in contest with his environment and trying to handle it. A thetan never gives up. The methods he uses are solutions. Their frailty is so great that you can unsettle them quite easily. The more irrational the solution, the more easily it is unstabilized. It is amazing that this fact hasn't been realized much sooner, by earlier practitioners. An irrational solution has more points to it. Therefore, it is harder to maintain. A madman works at staying mad. The only requisite to unstabilizing this solution is communication. There has to be contact to do it. A probable reason why earlier practitioners didn't see how easy it was to unsettle the irrational solution was that the first step, getting into communication, was so difficult. A person could have so much trouble with this point that he forgets that if he could communicate, would be simple to unsettle the aberrated solution. Psychotherapy parks on the subject of communication. Therapists get so frantic that their efforts to achieve communication get more and more frantic and brutal, culminating, eventually, in electric shock and prefrontal lobotomies. Part of the trouble is that the psychotherapists think that they can reach the patient by doing something to his brain. [Gestalt and "touchie-feelie" therapies satisfy this same need of the therapist's to reach the patient, in a less destructive, but equally ineffective way.] To do anything for a person, you must be in communication with that person. You must be reaching him and receiving comm from him. Don't assume, however, that communication solves all. Communication is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for helping someone. In the lower levels, where scientology breaks down, it is in the area of effort to communicate to the being. That is why the auditor gets weird notions about what he should do to and for the person. That is where every psychotherapy breaks down, and it is true for scientology too. You have to keep acknowledging the PC and giving the next auditing command. That is what you have trouble getting across to lower-classed auditors, and that is why you work on keeping the comm cycle in. You are working along a communication channel, in order to accomplish a result with the PC, so you must keep the channel in good repair. What makes a level, in scientology, is a gradient scale of what communication can be entered in upon with the PC. For instance, at Level 0 a PC can't yet be talked to. Once you are reaching the PC and he is responding to you, you can take up the goofiest solutions he has for his environment. You are trying to alleviate his contest with his environment. The fact that he is in contest with his environment barriers communication from his environment. A person solves his environment by withholding from it. He will eventually solve the fact that he is being communicated to from his environment during auditing by moving you out of his environment. The PC is having trouble with his environment. He is not having trouble with you. Therefore you can't be part of his environment. You are thus no longer part of his normal environment. Hence, he will talk to you, even if to no one else. He says, "There are human beings and I don't want anything to do with them. And then there are auditors. They are different!" So the auditor takes on holy proportions. [This seems to be the real explanation of "transference".] Similarly, attacks on scientology make scientology supernatural to justify their overts on us. [Scientologists can't be considered normal people, or the overts would not be justified.] The Melbourne Inquiry goes along this way. The organization has taken on a supernatural aura. If you can reach and talk to people when others can't, you will immediately assume some special status with the PC who is aware of this. Don't bother to deal with this issue with the PC. [Unlike psychoanalysis, which dwells on the "transference".] Once you have your communication line in, use it to handle whatever contests the PC has going with the environment. You can use whatever you know of the communication formula to get some communication established, then gradiently improve it and move into other processes. Just getting into comm with the PC is likely to give him some benefits, but don't stop with that. Communication isn't the end-all. It is merely the channel. Now you are set up to do something for the case. Scientology is the only discipline that can uniformly: 1. Accomplish a comm line. 2. Use it to increase communication. and then 3. Do something for the individual. Don't stop when you establish communication, even though the mere establishment of a comm line is beneficial. The PC will look better around you because he is in ARC with you, so don't forget that he may still be batty around others. If you don't do something for the PC, you may find that, while he is calm and sane in your vicinity, he is just as nutty in his environment as ever. You may feel that you have cured his battiness, when it is only resolved around you. So you don't believe him when he talks about how bad life is. Don't "make the mistake of saying, 'I've cured him because I can now talk to him.'" All you have done is to set him up to now do something for him. Communication is the beginning, not the end. Now, after establishing communication, you must find out what, in his environment, is dangerous and menacing, and what means he is using to combat these elements. You shouldn't use "Problems and Solutions" too long, beyond the opening part of the case, or you will restimulate the problems and solutions in his GPM's. Problems and Solutions isn't the basis of his activities with his environment at all. It is what the PC does to solve his environment that keeps him obsessed and pinned-in against the hostile elements in his environment. How do you know that you haven't handled the PC's PTP? He is going to do something about it, so it is not handled. That is the biggest index you have. So you want to find what the individual is continuously doing in his environment. This falls under the heading of O/W, not problems, because the more he does about the problem he is stuck in, the more he will be obsessed by it and the more he will be stuck. What brings about an undue concentration on a subject and a conviction that a person has a tremendous conflict with his environment? It is because he doing something about it all the time. For instance, a person who is hung up on the U.N. must be doing something to or about the U.N., this lifetime. A person's way of fighting some part of the environment can take innumerable forms. He feels that he had better not communicate with the environment because he is going to commit overts. He is mucking up his communication with the environment, therefore, because his communication with the environment is a series of overts. So therefore he has to not communicate with the environment, because it is an overt against the environment. So he had better have some kind of wild solution, so he won't have to communicate with his environment. [In summary: 1. An individual keeps doing things to solve his environment. This doingness amounts to a continuous series of overts. 2. So the individual considers that his communicating with the environment is an overt. 3. Therefore, he has to stop communicating with the environment. 4. So he develops wild solutions, so that he won't have to communicate with the environment (like not looking).] This is not at the communication level. It is just riding on the comm line. The individual has put up a screen against tigers, so he can't see the tigers. He just knows that he has to fight in that direction. This may take different forms, e.g. never looking in that direction. Someone who doesn't look at something has something there that he is doing something to or about. He does low-level overts, because he is afraid that he will do high-level overts. The bank is manufactured in such a way that: 1. The individual is forced to commit overts. 2. He gets in trouble after committing those overts. People are kept insane because the bank enforces commitment of overts and insures insanity if the individual does commit overts. Even if the individual didn't have a bank, he would get into trouble by committing overts, because committing overts violates the communication formula. This is above the bank. There are two mechanisms above the bank: 1. The communication formula. [Cf. axiom 51] 2. O/W. That puts the auditor in the driver seat early on, because he has two things that are superior to all the aberration that the PC can muster. O/W is one of the frail spots of auditors. You would expect the perpetuators of any trap to talk a lot about invasion of privacy and how people should keep their withholds, so they seize E-meters. The most craziness is at the door to sanity. Auditors' reticence in pulling withholds is based on a fear of breaking down the communication channel. They preserve communication so well that they never do anything with it. An auditor can pussyfoot on getting overts from a PC, because he wants to preserve the comm line, but he hasn't done anything with it. The fact is that if the PC is pinned into something, he must have originated something that got him connected to the thing. Then, once he is pinned to it, he gets into an obsessive "do" to straighten it all out. This gives him more worries. When a person is pinned, he thinks that he can unpin himself by more doing. Actually, he can unpin himself by stopping obsessive doing. Anyone can get caught in this mechanism, since it is the basic mechanism of entrapment. What the individual originally did may not have been intentional, but he starts having to do more and more to handle it. Sometimes the doingness in resisting a thing is to blow, having failed to handle it. So if the person can't leave physically, he may, for instance, get groggy, or show people that he shouldn't be allowed to stay around. There are innumerable ways in which a thetan can leave without leaving physically, all the way down the neurotic/psychotic spiral. For instance, if one cannot leave a marriage physically, one may leave non-physically. Complication stems from the number of ways in which a thetan can leave without leaving physically. For instance, a thetan can make others sorry they didn't let him leave. He can appear nasty, where he was happy before. Psychotherapy could be called a study of ways of leaving without leaving physically. So the sequence is: 1. An individual commits overts. Asserted Thereness | 2. He commits more overts to get out of previous | overts. | V 3. He invents solutions to not leaving. Asserted Not-Thereness All this occurs on comm channels. Being on a comm line, it is resolved by communication. O/W (regretted reach or action), and the communication formula are senior to the bank. The bank boobytraps this. The word "withhold" is in the bank, so you shouldn't use it. It is too restimulative and gives false TA (i.e. TA unrelated to discharge) by virtue of just moving banks around. In running withholds, therefore, substitute for "withhold" "what (the PC) didn't say". Use ""What haven't you said?" "One of the principal factors that you bat your head against ... in a case, is the inability of a case to admit any action or take any responsibility for action." If a case can take no responsibility for any action ever committed, that case has had it. That's any act, not just an overt act. "A lost soul that's being shredded between the worlds with a soundless wail is the person who can take no responsibility for any action he has ever done." That is where a case ceases to be in range of any assistance. The case must be able to take some responsibility for some action, in order to be salvageable. This makes those things that you can't talk to pretty irresponsible, doesn't it? Well, they are. "I can imagine a conversation, if you could achieve one, with a spider." The utter irresponsibility of any action ever undertaken by the spider would be amazing. Inability to communicate is an index of irresponsibility. "As the ability to communicate drops out, responsibility for action, as a factor, falls," and vice versa. They rise and fall together. A stutterer has some deteriorated area of communication and therefore a deteriorated area of responsibility. A madman is as mad as you can't get into communication with him. The biggest problem with the madman is how you can get in comm with him: what gradient of comm to use, and how you put it to him that you want to find out what part of his environment he can be responsible for. You could get in comm with him, one way or another. He would eventually differentiate you from the rest of the environment. Then you would have to find out where a guy is stuck and what he is stuck in, then find "what responsibility can he take ... for his own actions in that zone or area," expand that perimeter, and you would return his sanity. All you are interested in at lower levels is "responsibility for own actions or responsibility for lack of actions." The real difficulty is the getting into comm and really finding what he would take responsibility for. An undercut would be to get a "done", by reason of placement: "Where have you been that you know you have been?" Even though "communication" is in the bank, the formulas of communication are superior to the reactive bank. Responsibility is also superior to the bank. It is the woof and warp of being a thetan. The questions are: "Can you decide to do something and do it? Can you be somewhere at will? Can you be in or out of something on your own determinism?" The overt-motivator sequence is not an ultimate truth, but it goes out, as a consideration, higher than any other consideration. It is still a truth after other things have become lies, before it becomes a lie. It gives you all levels of processing and cases from Level IV on down. If you've got those two factors [communication and responsibility], you've got all lower levels of processing. There is no real reason for you to be in the dark about why you are not making progress with a case. Whatever other factors are present, these factors are more present. There is one thing that gets in your road. Someone can have a GPM keyed in to such a degree that it is driving him "round the bend. At lower levels, you had better leave it alone. LRH has tried reading a PC a list of words that might be causing the condition. If one read, LRH told the PC that that word was an integral part of the reactive bank that was influencing him, and the PC ceased to be obsessively worried. This is a bit dangerous, though. If a person is glibly telling you what he has done in an area, it may be that he is not really taking responsibility for that. The rebuttal, in this case, is to get the PC to explain, at length, how he has not really done this thing. Eventually, it begins to dawn on him how he did have something to do with it. This is an indirect approach to a lower-level case. You can't run it too long, because it is an out-of-ARC process. At a little higher level, you could run, "What reasons did you have for doing that?", as long as you don't let him get into inventing them.