1. THE UNDERLYING BASIS OF AUDITING

The existence of aberration stems from our need to create and experience everything. But, for a god like being, this is much like viewing an occasional horror movie to keep the more desirable conditions from becoming too monotonous. There is nothing here that requires a persistence or perpetuation of aberration. You should be able to shrug these things off effortlessly.

The persistence of aberration, on the other hand, is a grave mistake and is due to a basic conflict between the wrong information we were fed (see "jewel of knowledge" in #2 "Cosmic History"), and the true nature of our existence. The factors in conflict are as follows:

At the beginning of our existence, we were mislead into believing that thinking, perceiving, experiencing, or creating certain things could be permanently harmful to us. From this, we began to flinch or withdraw from various things. And those things were then used (by each of us against the others) to further discourage looking, and being, and thinking, and doing until we have all sunk into a morass of mental blindness and incapacity.

But, if we are indeed balancing nothingness with an infinity of creation (as I proposed in "Cosmic History"), then we will never get rid of anything unless we are capable of creating it again in the future, because we would be unwilling to lose anything on a permanent basis. This would mean that you will never uncreate anything unless you look at it so completely that you could mock it up again.

And thus things persists because we mistakenly believe that we should not look at them and must not create them. On this basis, if something can be brought fully into view, it should at least desensitize. And if the person can be made to mock up a perfect duplicate, and therefore see that he is capable of recreating it at will, then he should be able to completely vanish the object or condition if he so chooses.

And if we further realize that the willingness to create something is monitored by the willingness to be responsible for the existence of the thing and the effects it creates, we see that responsibility is a key underlying button. And since controlling something is the act of being responsible for the effects that it is currently creating, we furthermore see that control of something is a gradient towards full responsibility. And to control something, you certainly need to know about it. This gives us the Knowingness / Control / Responsibility triangle (KRC) that is used in Scientology.

Coming at this from another angle, it should be obvious that fully viewing something and being able to duplicate it is monitored by one's ability to communicate with it. And this is also monitored by the perception of the reality of it. And furthermore, a complete duplication would require the ability to, shall we say, synchronize or move in sympathy with it, which could be described as having an affinity or liking for it.

This last button of needing to have affinity might be the big problem because we have been shown that you're not supposed to like things that are bad, and you're not supposed to like two things that are in conflict with each other, and (most deadly), if you like something and then change your mind, it's considered a betrayal. To get rid of a bad condition, you might have to (just very briefly) choose to like it and that often comes in conflict with all three of the above.

The factors of Affinity, Reality, and Communication are what is known as the ARC triangle in Scientology.

And so we see that to bring about the vanishment of a condition, we restore the ability to create that condition and we can work towards this by gradient scales of increased looking, communicating, knowing, controlling, taking responsibility, etc. This is the exact opposite of how things are handled in the society at large where undesirable conditions are buried and suppressed and kept out of view. This, per my opening remarks, would ensure that we will continue to compulsively create them out of our control.

Those of you who are trained as auditors will see that I have taken a different path than LRH did in specifying the theoretical basis of auditing, but we do come to the same conclusions.

HOW MUCH OF THE MIND IS ACCESSIBLE

Every intelligent researcher in the field has recognized that there are portions of the mind that the individual is unaware of. Even the most meat body oriented theories have to allow for a vast realm of unobserved activity and the statement that you are only using 5% of your brain or mind is quite commonly accepted.

One of the early Dianetic principles was the idea that if anybody had some inherent mental ability (such as total recall, lightning fast computations, etc.), then the ability must be an inherent property of each and every mind and must in most cases be buried and blocked in this unaware section of the mind. The brilliance of this observation was partially tarnished by the inadequate one lifetime view and the mistaken idea of blaming everything on recent engrams. None the less, it expanded the concept of what must be hidden in that unseen area below the level of consciousness.

The breakthroughs of 1952 opened up an immensely larger sphere in which the individual should be capable of operating but where he was even less aware and disabled. The manifestation of any OT ability, ever, by anyone, would on this basis indicate that everyone is capable of these things but has them buried far out of reach. And these things do happen, just look at Rhine's research or the endless history of observed poltergeist manifestations. As an interesting side note, any such manifestation also invalidates the absoluteness of physics and places it in the position of being a special case in much the same way as modern physics (both Einstein and quantum) placed Newtonian physics into a limited (but exceedingly common and useful) special case.

We could label this hidden portion of the mind many ways. We could call it the subconscious, but that has many undesirable connotations for our purposes here, as does the term "unconscious". Even the label "Reactive Mind" has many implications which might be correct for some portions of this hidden area but which are not necessarily true for all of it.

The only sweeping statement we can make with certainty is that this portion of the mind is subaware or below the individual's level of awareness. Since there is no indication that the whole thing is homogenous, we should realize that we are always dealing with relative truth rather than absolutes. An accurate anatomy of, for example, engrams, only maps one portion of this hidden area and leaves much else to be discovered. One of Ron's main weaknesses was his tendency to grab a single factor, whether it was overts or implants or entities or whatever, and decide that he finally had the solution to it all.

Our primary task in auditing is to move things from this hidden realm into consciousness.

A useful (but not entirely accurate) analogy is to draw a box and place a horizontal line across the middle of it, and label the upper section as aware and the lower section as hidden. We might even shade in the lower area to represent the blackness that comes from lack of awareness. Our job would be to keep moving that line down until everything in the box was within the person's awareness.

But the boundary between the aware and hidden portions of the individual's mind is not a simple line. It would be best thought of as a gray area in which he is almost aware. This band may be thin or thick and the wider it is, the more things he has that are accessible to simple processing. If the line is too thin, there might only be a handful of things that he can look at to raise his awareness and great skill and understanding are required to get any kind of results in working with him. If the gray area is exceedingly wide, almost any technique ever dreamed up by anybody will produce positive results because there is so much that is accessible.

As the individual moves things from this gray area into full awareness, the gray area does not shrink, instead it moves downward to encompass more things that were previously unreachable. The individual has a certain tolerance for unknown, frightening, or confusing things and he will allow more of the deeply buried stuff come up to the surface as you clean up the things that are currently accessible. It makes it look like an unending job because there's always something more, but this is a wrong view brought about because the hidden area is orders of magnitude larger than the conscious area. Never worry about how much more he is finding because this may actually be a positive indication that he is able to tolerate a wider gray area. Instead, pay attention to whether he is resolving things and becoming more able and more aware.

The things that are in your full awareness are not the source of your difficulties. And the things hidden down in the mud are just too deeply buried for you to figure them out until you have worked deep enough to bring them up into the gray area. Therefore, the only things that you can make progress on are the ones in this gray band. Those things, shall we say, that are half obscured but somewhat in view. For this reason, there will be aberrations that you're not going to get anywhere near handling. It doesn't matter how slight or silly something seems, the cause of it could be ten fathoms deep. So never get evangelistic about some disability, it can be heartbreaking. Instead, you always work on what is accessible and keep going deeper.

But it is very useful to widen this gray area. It makes more things accessible. It gives you more angles of approach (and we don't know the right way to address everything). It allows more room for error. And it lets you get deeper and undercut things and therefore leads to faster progress in general.

Simple things like being well fed and rested will expand the gray band because you are more willing to look deeper. Things like courage and confidence, knowledge and determination all play a role in this. And the more you succeed, the more you are willing to grapple with so that eventually you're digging this thing out with a steam shovel instead of handling tiny specs of dirt.