This chapter is from The Road to Clear, Level Two

Priest?	Detective?	Police man?	Interrogator?

At the end of Level 0, there was a chapter about Auditor's Beingness.
This present chapter is about the Confessional Auditor's Beingness as it requires its own drill to assume it.

To the new auditor Confessional auditing may seem scary and confusing to do. Am I a priest? A detective? A police man or an interrogator? You could probably add many more professions to this list. 

To get to the truth, to 'get to the bottom of things' through tough questioning and other means is indeed an age old activity plagued with many abusive practices.

In a sense you are a little bit of all four of the professions above. But confessional auditing is first and foremost its own - it is auditing. It may awake all kinds of ideas and possible valences in the new auditor. To be able to do it right you need to sort this out.

The main thing that flies into your face are 'earlier practices'. Earlier practices, such as psycho-analysis and the Catholic Church's confession were also discussed in 'Auditor's Beingness'.

Here is a list and brief description of some 'earlier practices' - not necessary practices to help the individual, but all done in the 'quest for truth'.

The Religious Confession. In the Catholic Church you confess your sins to a priest in the confession box. This is done to help the sinner come clean and get forgiveness from Jesus. "Confess your sins, and Jesus Christ will forgive you." This seems to have good workability.

Some Christian practices arrange meetings where one member is on stage, confessing to the group. This is less workable as it often becomes an act. The sinner may withhold some things and embellish others, which are both working against As-ising of incidents; but the general practice does help the members to confront sin.

Alcoholic Anonymous uses a similar technique to help alcoholics. Since it stays on the subject of substance abuse, it probably has some workability and minimal risks. Also the members get a handle on confronting alcoholism and substance abuse. 

Psycho-analysis. There are many schools of psycho-analysis, but the classic form was to make the patient go on and on. Q and A, as in free association, reduces its workability. Since 20% of any group will improve just by having their difficulties addressed, it had some workability, probably above the 20%. The problem was overrunning the patients, mainly discussing motivators and not getting the withholds. Q and A (free association) was used as the method to open a case. Thus missed withholds were left all over the place - with following upsets and even suicide as a result.  This nullified any professional claims the practitioners could make as a group.

Psychiatry. Since psychiatry is a branch of medicine they see any behavior outside the 'normal' as a medical problem of the brain. Mental problems are described as a chemical imbalance of the brain. Their 'successes' consist of pacifying or subduing a patient with drugs at this time. When the patient is sitting quiet in a corner in a drugged state he is 'cured'. They are not interested in the patients case or story. They deny his spiritual nature. Any results or ill effects from confessionals are 'unscientific'. 

They also, as a group, developed and administered 'truth-serum', which is a drug, that makes subjects unable to withhold, but using sedation plays right into the Bank and  no As-ising or improvements are taking place. 

Psychology. At this time it is a mix of many schools, including the two above. Results depend upon the practitioner, not the subject. You find some caring individuals practicing with good sense and judgment with some success and some to the harm of their patients. They completely lack a workable professional code and TR's.

Justice and Military Use. Here we have a number of practices, which are done to get information. They later punish or dispose of the individual. These practices have no therapeutic intent or pretense. They are done to protect society, or as in the military, one's own forces.

Police in some totalitarian countries use torture, drugs, sleep deprivation, food and drink deprivation to get suspects to 'cooperate'. They use electric chock, beatings and other means to inflict pain. The idea is of course, that at some point the suspect will break down and 'tell all' or 'come clean' rather than be subject to more pain. They also use threats of harming loved ones if the prisoner does not 'cooperate'. Other methods of  blackmail are also applied. Similar methods are being used by armies in times of war. No wonder both pc's and auditors can find the confessional situation restimulative at times, if things get rough.

Historical Examples
The Spanish Inquisition and other witch hunters also used cruel methods. They used torture like putting boiling eggs under the victims arm pits; they would place the victim's body in a device that would stretch it to a point where it almost came apart. They would use red hot irons to inflict pain. It was impossible to prove innocence. They would take any statement as a proof of guilt. A stubborn denial was an even surer sign of being 'possessed by the Devil'. 

So you get the idea. The Reactive Bank is full of images of telling the truth equals pain and unconsciousness, danger and even violent death. Demanding the truth on the other side, has it own Chains of inflicting pain, unconsciousness and death.

So what are we actually doing with confessionals?
How do we stay clear of all the above?

It could be summarized in two words: Confront and As-is

When we talk Confessional and Confront, we talk about the 'confronting of Evil.'

Evil is to Man the toughest thing to confront. Yet - since it is in his Bank - it should be confronted to be As-is'ed. If not, you give it power and it will continue to be at work and eventually take over.

Evil has an appeal to us.  From childhood and on.  We have these images  of evil characters, that    we usually don't act upon.   To act it out in play is  of course fine. It is a  degree of confront.

How evil can take over was explained this way by R. Hubbard  in a lecture:

It might interest you how an evil person (suppressive person)  becomes one. That's the guy who has enough overts to deserve more pay-back than you can imagine. The guy, who keeps doing things to do others in. He's the villain. Now the reason he got to be a bad boy was by switching valences. 

He had a bad boy over there parked in his mind; and he then, in some peculiar way, got into that bad boy's valence. Now he knows what he is - he's a bad boy. Man is basically good but he mocks-up evil valences and then gets inside them and gets stuck in them. He says the other fellow is bad. He keeps saying the other fellow is bad. He works on this character all the time as something not to be. And eventually he has got this very live character all made up in his mind. Then some day he becomes this other fellow. You see, a valence shift or personality shift happens - he becomes the whole, complete package of personality. And there he is. So now he is an evil fellow. He knows how he is supposed to act. He is supposed to act like the other fellow. That's the switch-over. That's how evil comes into being. (Covered in SH Briefing 73, 1966).

So the key to handling evil is to be able to confront it in the first place. The difference between Auditor's Beingness and Confessional Auditor's Beingness is only in degree. The confessional auditor has to have an excellent ability to confront evil. 

That is what went wrong with the guy in the piece above. The person who couldn't confront evil, but only mock it up as something not to be, eventually gave up and became it. He was Not-is'ing, hating and detesting it. He was holding onto this evil personality package in his mind as something not to be; and suddenly it had become so powerful so he became it. It simply took over.

This is how the Reactive Mind 'works'. It warns you against danger on a stimulus-response level and you don't want to look at those terrible things. Suddenly it has become so powerful so you have no choice but living it.

There are of course degrees of this. A complete switch does not happen suddenly, just because of one incident. Long before it happens, the person simply withholds himself. But when you pull overts and withholds you are preventing something like this from happening down the road. You are getting the pc's ability to confront evil up. The 'demons' (evil valences) in his mind will loose power. He will regain power over them and the basic goodness of Man will prevail in his conduct and thinking.

Confessional Auditor's Beingness

In Auditor's Beingness  of Level 0 we got the following definitions:

It also stated:
"Before you can assume the beingness of an auditor you must have gotten the certainty on the materials of processing. You must know your tools of the trade, the basic data and actions. The most basic skills of an auditor are the TR's and Meter skills."

All this applies. You simply have to get your confront up on overts and withholds and on evil. It has to be up to a point where no human or inhuman act will surprise you, upset you, tick you off or shut your communication down.

The best way to do this in the context of this course, is to use the included Confessional Form (Joburg) and drill it as an auditing drill on a doll. You have your twin come with hard crime answers and you drill to handle it with perfect TR's. If you encounter problems in that, you may have to go back to TR's, especially TR-0 Bullbait, and be drilled on that to improve your confront of overts and withholds.

Having done that your own confront of evil will have come up and you can now perform Confessional auditing as auditing without getting it mixed up with harmful practices of the past.

When you can pull overts and withholds while maintaining high ARC and perfect communication with the pc, you have got it. It does take courage to be a good confessional auditor.

Some Stable Data

What you can confront, you can handle.

What you Not-is tends to persist. It eventually becomes so powerful so you become it (valence shift).

Confessional Auditing is auditing. It is done for the pc. You make him confront the hardest thing to confront: Evil.

The auditor is bound by the Auditor's Code; the Meter is not. This means you pursue and persist on pulling withholds and getting it all until the Meter, the pc and the auditor are all in agreement about, that the question is now clean. According to R. Hubbard, "a good Confessional auditor is marked by his thoroughness, his willingness to pry, his swinish suspicion. He's a believer in the Meter and little else when he is on the trail of a pc's withhold. This does not, however, mean that the auditor should be misemotional or accusative. It means that he sees what he sees. He knows that when his Meter tells him something is there, something is there - and he knows when he's gotten it all."

Confessionals are done under Auditor's Code. Especially these points apply:

(15) Do not to mix the processes of ST with other practices except when the preclear is physically ill and only medical means will serve.
You do not mix Confessional Procedure with any of the practices covered above. It is its own and it is ultimately done for the pc.

(22) Never use the secrets of a preclear divulged in session for punishment or personal gain.
There is a client/practitioner privilege. The auditor is sworn to secrecy and confidentiality in a similar manner as lawyers, doctors and priests. If this is violated, pc's willingness to speak to the auditor would not exist or be lowered seriously.

All this should be reflected in your beingness. By making the pc understand, how the Auditor's Code apply here and by having your own confront of evil handled, having drilled the procedures with lot of special situations, you can now complete the Confessional Auditor's Beingness step and put it all together and assume the beingness of a Pro.

Wrong way - before the Meter. Auditor's Trust violated.	Right way -  with a Meter and for the PC. Effectiveness based on Auditor's Trust: Auditor plus PC greater than the Bank.

© Clearbird Publishing 2003, 2004