Any auditing command has the potentiality of flows in it. If the PC is running a command with the flow always from A to B, the PC could go into an occlusion. You could then have him run it the other way a few times, and it will un-occlude. All stuck flows give stuck needles. You see this in withholds, too. A withhold is a non-permitted flow, so anything going in against it sticks; nothing can backflow. You'll see the TA rise and the needle stick. The more you make him conscious of it, the more tightly he squashes himself with the withhold. You finally trigger it. This reverses the flow and you get blowdowns. In a withhold, the PC regrets the backflow. E.g. he should not have back-flowed the bullet when he killed the king of France. He shouldn't have backflowed in the first place, so he is withholding it. He can receive everything you tell him about the king of France, but nothing can come out about the king of France. Watch the needle go up and stick. The more questions you flow in, the more he packs it in. When he stops withholding, the T.A. goes down from reversing the flow.
There are lots of directions of flows, but five, or ten, ways seems pretty adequate. If you only run PC to another and another to PC, you can start getting the other person's flows jamming, and you will again get a stuck meter. This doesn't pose a problem if you are running it for a short time only. You can overrun a flow on a prehav run, or all flows can run out. [?] You can run a flow too long in one direction and get a high TA. Then it can blow up with a blowdown. You can overrun it, in which case, the more you run it, the more stuck it is going to get.
The mind is capable of a considerable resurgence. By getting in ruds, you give the mind the freedom to look at PT. With that freedom comes the ability to as-is. This makes it possible to use a five-way bracket instead of a 32-way bracket. Auditing is not an absolute practice, fortunately. If everything bad that ever happened to the PC had to be audited out, you'd be at it forever. If you pull certain pins, enough will blow so that the mind can resurge, if the ruds are in. A problems intensive is run so that the mind can resurge enough to let you run goals easily.
Auditors can have trouble with the idea of flows if they don't realize that the mind is full of particles. Thoughts get connected with the particles and the particles get connected with solids and masses. So the PC tries to think and runs into solids. You try to audit him and run into particles. There's nothing wrong with the PC's thinkingness per se; the trouble is that it gets joined up with energy, space, time, and particles. So he can't think of time without getting space, or of a thought without getting particles or masses. He can't differentiate amongst these things or amongst the dynamics. The preclear identifies the sixth dynamic particularly with with all the dynamics, and the seventh dynamic gets identified with the reactive mind. Thinkingness only goes haywire when a person can no longer differentiate where he should or associate where he should. He identifies even on a semantic level, e.g. "He road a boat." You can get some amazing results with semantics, like the airline pilot who came in looking for the phrase that gave him a compulsion to have accidents while flying. His mother has said, "He's no earthly good," which reactively made him fly, even though he hated it. [Leukemia was once found to be caused by the mother's phrase, "It would turn your blood to water!"] But auditing by phrases requires a very good auditor, and it doesn't work on everybody. If it worked well and easily, we'd still be doing it.
It is a mistake to let the PC run only one-way flows. The PC has been motivating for years and years, not just in session. What is holding it pinned is lack of any reverse flow. It looks moral to the PC, but it's not. It's that he started an outflow along a certain tone level, making a line along which an interchange could occur. Having done so, he can be inflowed on at that level. This is all based on the horrible fact that a thetan can never be inflowed on until he has outflowed. How could he have been located by someone else otherwise?
This leads to the "safe" solution of never being anywhere or saying anything. Of course, then you'll never do anything or see anything, and nothing will ever happen ever. The police evidently operate on this, since it's being there and communicating that are punished. Someone in apathy has solved life this way, and he's easy to inflow on, so he gets kicked. If he's not careful, though, he may get a reputation for being a good listener. Yet people get taught this, "Be a good listener; don't be obtrusive; be a little late," but it backfires.
When making up auditing commands, be sure it is understood and that it reads on the meter, and that it is explicit, and that you get it answered every time. And don't set up a stuck flow situation. Even a flow of giving punishment to someone will violate games condition because it is giving something to an enemy, so it makes one feel degraded and start figuring on it. War is degrading because soldiers are always giving things to their enemies. This sets up a bad games condition.An auditor shouldn't run a contrary-to-games-condition process which is all give or one that violates flows with all receive. There are wordings that allow for any flow, e.g., "What was happening?" or "What was unknown? If the PC can't run "unknown", you can use "forgotten", the lower harmonic of "unknown". Use any of the not-know words if necessary; don't leave the problem unrun. If you start getting into a stuck flow on a process, you can just end the process without too much fuss and add another flow to it, e.g. by saying, "Now we are going to add another side to this...." If your intention is to get auditing done rather than to follow a ritual, it'll go down just fine. Anything that goes wrong to a PC in session is registered by him on the basis of a scarcity of auditing and is best remedied by giving him auditing. If you run withholds a lot (e.g. unkind thoughts), you can wind up with a stuck flow unless you run the overt as the outflow.
[In the problems intensive, the O-section is a list of self-determined changes the PC has made in this lifetime. The list is assessed out by elimination, and the item is then handled in the P-section. The auditor gets the problem that preceded this change; he runs it on, "What is unknown about that problem with (the terminal in the problem)?" or some such process. Later version omits running it. Then the confusion prior tc the change (later -- prior to the problem) is located, and the dramatis personae of the confusion are sec checked, getting off all the O's and W's in the area of the confusion, until the problem no longer reacts. Then another self-determined change is assessed out, etc. A later version of the Problems Intensive is given in HCOB 9Nov61 "The Problems Intensive -- Use of the Prior Confusion"]
The number of problems a person has determines how fast or slow he will audit, and his speed of accomplishment in life in general. So he'll speed up in life when you get his problems out of the way.