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.