6. REPAIR AND BOOSTER RUNDOWNS
There is a great deal of tech on this within Scientology. I can't repeat all of it here, and most of it is well done so why should I alter it. You will find the materials in the later tech volumes. This is where modern Scientology is at its best and where the professional auditors really shine. It came about partially because there were so many mistakes that they got very good at fixing people up after a screw up.
The mistakes, by the way, included quickie grades, endless unnecessary sec checks, endless drug rundowns, endless R3R Dianetics after clear, XDN (expanded Dianetics), and various goofs at the detail level such as "barking" style TRs, running unreading items (because the auditor and the tech knew better than the PC and the meter), and refusing to handle the PC's originations. These particular faults have all been corrected (when a bulletin comes out to fix something, it should be obvious to you that it was being done backwards up until that point). There were many more and there is no sense in listing them all here. But it was the "repair" technology which kept people from deserting in droves and cleaned up the messes made.
Here I only have a few comments plus a brief summary for those of you who are not trained as auditors. Also I did come up with a new rundown that might be needed occasionally.
6.1 LIFE REPAIR
The org usually runs extensive life repair before beginning on grades. The processing is generally very light, to take charge off of things the person is concerned about. The auditing requires a very high skill level.
The auditing itself is mostly aimed at simply talking with the PC and steering him into coming up with things that he decided, did, or postulated in areas that have charge on them.
This can produce a nice result, but it is usually unnecessary and is going at things the long way around. Unless the person is really stuck in something, he will run faster and deeper on grades processing.
My own experience on doing numerous intro and demonstration sessions on new people in the early days was that almost anyone who came in of their own free will (not pushed) and was searching for truth (rather than crying for help) was immediately capable of running grades level processes. If they can do a TRs course successfully (which is powerful processing), they can certainly run a simple grades process.
Most of the people who weren't up to running grades processes were people who had previously been messed up by auditing or by screwed up ethics handling or otherwise banged around by the subject. They probably could have run grades processes when they walked in originally and probably could again if they went off and cooled down for awhile.
One of the indicators that we have is the "tone arm" (TA) of the E-meter, which reads low when the person is overwhelmed. If the TA is truly low, the person is not up to confronting things and really does need some repair processing. I emphasize "truly low" here because one of the old mistakes was to ignore things like sweaty hands (and possibly low body weight) which might give a very slightly low reading, but you could always see the difference in a real low TA and a false reading because of the "haunted" look of the PC and the tight, unresponsive, needle behavior on the meter.
In handling new people, I never saw more than one low TA reading in a hundred. In handling staff members and people who had gotten quickie grades or been otherwise mishandled, they were extremely common.
This lead the org into going crazy about doing life repair, endless setup rundowns, etc. But they were really solving a problem in the subject itself rather than doing things that are inherently necessary.
I would say that the bulk of new people can bypass the life repair step and get into the meat of the subject immediately. There will only be a small percentage (people heavily overwhelmed etc.) who do need a life repair step, unless, of course, you start trying to process skeptics or people who aren't really reaching for the subject. It's not that you need belief for this stuff to work, but you do need somebody who is willing to dive in and muck around with the mind and try to do the commands. So in the cases where that isn't present, or where the person has been heavily overwhelmed, you do need life repair, and that is best left to professionals.
6.2 AUDITING REPAIR
There is tons of material on this and its well beyond the scope of this document.
There are extensive needs for this if a professional auditor is running somebody who knows nothing about the subject because its very easy for things to go wrong even if the tech is correct, and when there have been flaws in the tech, the pro can really jam them down some poor PC's throat and so the repair actions become quite essential.
For people who are studying the subject and trying things and need to dig themselves out occasionally, the simple techniques gives in the earlier section on assists should generally be good enough to get them back on the rails.
An ideal scene would be to have people mostly working through this stuff on their own and in co-audit groups and occasionally getting a clean up session from a professional. That would be the most efficient use of the technology and handles the problem of the long training needed to make a good professional auditor.
6.3 THE PURIF
I'm listing this with the repair techniques because it's done to get a road block out of the way rather than to produce case gain.
You will need something like this if the person has been too heavily swamped with drugs, whether they are of the medical or the street variety.
This was originally developed to handle people who had taken LSD and still had residual traces of it locked up in their system. The idea was to sweat the stuff out of the body.
The idea that poisons get locked up in the tissues is also proposed by homeopathy and there are a number of good books on the subject.
I have prejudices in favor of vitamins, homeopathy, home remedies, and other alternative medicines as alternatives to the usual drug oriented treatment that is pushed by the AMA and the drug companies. Unfortunately, a lot of the research money comes from businesses that make money from drugs and so there is a prejudice in their favor within the medical community. You can find doctors who are not slanted this way, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
I am not an expert in this field, but from what I have read of biochemistry texts, its obvious that they are not yet capable of modeling the chemical reactions of the human body as a whole. This means that they are only looking at the direct and immediate chemical reactions and they don't really know what other chemical actions might take place. Hence, the continual worry about side effects. This makes me leery of any powerful medical drugs except in emergencies.
I'm also not in a position to judge whether the purif is any better than other exercise and vitamin programs. Ron does have one key thing which is to keep doing something as long as it produces change and not to back off because something starts to happen. An old Scientology datum is what turns it on turns it off. In other words, you keep going and push through the reactions. This would improve any such program, so its hard to say if the program itself is better or whether its simply being carried through more effectively.
Unfortunately, with the usual fanaticism, they push everybody to do this thing. Its a body oriented program and has little to do with the mind or the search for truth. Its as bad as the yogis who practice sitting instead of contemplating truth or doing mental exercises. There are people who need this, but for most, its a distraction and a road block. There may be a need for an exercise or vitamin program in your life, but it has little to do with your spiritual growth. I suppose the org could also give driving lessons and teach cinematography, and might even do well at these things, but it would be off their main purpose and is certainly not needed as a prerequisite to grades or OT levels.
6.4 DRUG RUNDOWN
This is simply a specialized version of incident running aimed at handling the pains, sensations, emotions, or attitudes connected with taking drugs, or that existed prior to taking drugs which caused the person to start taking them.
For a person with an extensive drug history, this probably should be done fairly early in the sequence of levels.
But the rundown can be fairly lengthy on a beginner because they tend to do incident running slowly and its easy to associate the bulk of his ills in this lifetime with taking drugs, whether as a cause or a cure or whatever. Grades will raise his awareness and ability much faster and eventually lead to his being able to barrel through incidents fairly quickly. So the drug rundown should be left until later if it is not needed urgently.
The big missing step is mocking up the drug sensations and putting them in the walls etc. as was discussed earlier. This action needs to be done after the drug rundown or else you will have problems with people reverting.
Since they don't do this last step, the org has a always had an occasional problem with someone reverting to drugs. Since this can be extremely embarrassing, especially if the person is supposedly an OT, there are times when the org has gone positively fanatical on doing and re-doing endless drug rundowns.
6.5 SEC CHECKS
I've already commented on these. The current misuse is an atrocity.
But you probably need to do a thorough one at least once. That can be a horsepower booster. It should be done as a case action at an appropriate point, maybe somewhere fairly far along in the grades.
But given the current lack of safety, I would strongly recommend that the auditor burn the worksheets rather than put them in the folder after the session.
6.6 SETUPS
The org gets really carried away with running setup actions before letting a person get on with it. They have so many prerequisites for letting somebody start their OT levels that its a wonder that anybody ever gets on them.
There is an old and very wise saying which goes "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Ron actually put out a similar one which was in force for a brief period. This was an admonition against "Inspection Before the Fact", and it formed the core of the "Fast Flow" policies. But was applied with such blindness and lack of judgment that fast flow was quickly canceled and the subject swung the other way and ended up more pedantic and prerequisite ridden than the university system. Here I would make a plea for good sense and judgment rather than fanatically making every square, round, and triangular peg go through the same hole.
I don't blame an org for wanting to dust somebody off a bit and get the case flying before launching into a series of major actions. But if he's flying already, then don't get in his way. And if he really takes off halfway through the setup program, then drop it and get him moving on the grades or OT levels or whatever because that will move him much faster and get him much happier with the results. If you don't get him moving up the line when you can, you are just asking for random chance (or motivators that have been waiting in the wings) to derail him again.
6.7 EXT/INT
This is the Exteriorization/Interiorization rundown.
When a person first exteriorizes from the body, they are not likely to remain that way very long, and when something causes them to interiorize and go back in, it can have a bit of an impact and be upsetting.
In the 1950s, when they were trying hard to exteriorize people (and often succeeding), it was discovered that after getting somebody out a few times, it got harder instead of getting easier. Finally, this was solved by abandoning all of the exteriorization processes instead of finding out what was going wrong and fixing it.
The real solution was eventually discovered in the ext/int rundown. At first it consisted of simply running out the chain of incidents of interiorizing. Later it was improved by assessing for the specific charge ("Went In", "Pushed In", etc.).
Unfortunately it never occurred to Ron that the high horsepower exteriorization techniques of the 1950s (which used to be used even on new people with good results) could now be reinstated.
6.8 OTHER RUNDOWNS
There are more in the tech volumes. Sometimes one of these will really fit the bill. Other times, they are just a distraction and a way of burning up lots of expensive hours of auditing.
There are also the L's (L12, L11, and L10) which are pushed very heavily by Flag, possibly because they are extremely expensive. They aim at producing the Clear OT state, which actually is a very good thing to achieve. But you can probably make that one simply by doing a good job on running grade 2 processes after clear.
There is also the happiness rundown (the HRD), which is really a sort of beginner's grade 2 based on the way to happiness booklet. Real grade 2 processes are better because they don't evaluate for the person as to what is or isn't an overt. A better idea might be to use a few ideas from the HRD to beef up grade 2 a bit more.
A really neat idea might be to have the person roll their own way to happiness. You could run "What would improve survival of the body" / "What would detract from the survival of the body" as alternating questions. Then do the same on each of the other dynamics.
A serious flaw in the HRD is that it does not address problems or ARCXs connected with the precept that they are trying to audit. They look exclusively for misunderstoods, overts, or valence shifting mechanisms. So they are going to mess up in a certain number of cases. A key question would be "is there a problem you are trying to solve by violating (precept)?". Another one would be "do you have an ARCX connected with (precept)?".
6.9 A NEW RUNDOWN
This is a new one that I came up with (mainly because I needed to run it) which handles a specific roadblock that you might hit.
WORLD CLOSED IN RUNDOWN
Oct 27, 1990.
This could also be called the collapsed space rundown.
Having space collapse in on one is a phenomena similar to Interiorization but an order of magnitude heavier. It runs more basic than interiorization and is a source of ext/int type maladies. One of the reasons for trouble in handling ext/int is that after it has been flattened on a PC, this underlying phenomena can cause the symptoms to turn up again. Then the PC's ext/int handling gets invalidated, or he mis-assignees the phenomena to BTs (which can be a source, but his own case is senior), and he misses the real charge. It's true that BTs can have out-int, and it does need to be handled, but it doesn't usually give the PC out-int phenomena once he's gotten up a bit of causation by doing a thorough OT3 or some Nots.
Early on, one is capable of creating and owning space. Then one's space collapses. Then comes interiorizing into things which will generate space for you.
Early in 1952, in the Hubbard College Summary Lectures, Ron mentions "world closed in" incidents, times when something happened and all the color and life went out of everything. I used to think that this was simply the experience of interiorizing. It is not. You could be already interiorized, and yet operating fairly well and have some feeling of owning things and doing alright and then have some terrible loss or whatever and suddenly life has lost all of its luster. Or you could be well exteriorized and even operating without a body, and something goes very wrong (maybe you accidentally drop a planet full of nice folks into a sun or something) and suddenly your space is collapsed without interiorizing into anything. Note that this can happen to a free being who is well above the level of needing a body, and therefore runs much earlier and higher on the scale than ext/int.
This rundown becomes urgently needed when you start running OT drills such as those in SOP8C etc. These get your space and anchor points way out there. I was doing quite well with these kinds of processes when some unrelated trouble caused some inval and threat of loss. My anchor points snapped in and it was just like the ext/int phenomena. But there was no interiorization per se, and it wouldn't resolve on ext/int buttons (either on myself or on BTs etc.). Furthermore, it was almost impossible to audit anything else while this was in restim. After much fooling around with various techniques to get charge off of what had occurred, I managed to see enough to figure out this theory and design the following rundown. It worked like dynamite.
The incident consists of one's space collapsing. First you are big, your anchor points are way out there, etc. Then bang, it all falls in on you and you're tiny, withdrawn, etc.
This can be run exactly like ext/int or end of endless int by using the following list of buttons instead of the int buttons. For advanced cases, the following methods of running would be appropriate:
1. As an assist (if this happens to you in pt):
Assess the list of buttons. Then run 3 way (or 4 way or 5 way) recalls on the best reading, and then on the next best reading until you suddenly feel great relief. Don't continue past the EP even if other buttons were reading as well. (for 5 way recalls, add the flow "another to himself").
2. Handling entities with collapsed space.
Actually this is wrong with all entities (BTs etc.), but for some it will be the key button that wakes them up and digs them out. You can do this just like handling out-int on a BT. Just assess (or spot) the button, assess (or spot) the right flow, and run recalls (generally simply recalling it and then recalling the earliest will produce a blow).
3. Full Rundown.
Assess for the best reading, run it as follows, then the next best etc. until the entire list of buttons just FNs.
3.1 Run 5 way recalls
3.2. Run 5 way secondaries as follows: For each flow, first check whether you already went release on the (button) occurring due to a loss (it often releases on recalls).
a) Recall a time when (button) happened due to a loss. b) Spot any postulate you might have made at that time. Run question b one or more times after each incident recalled on question a. If you can't spot any postulates, then alternately spot something in the incident and something in the room until you can spot a postulate you made at that time.
3.3. Run 5 way engrams as follows: check for release as in 2 above. a) Recall a moment of pain and unconsciousness when (button). b) spot any postulate you might have made at that time. (if you can't find any, then handle as in secondaries above).
3.4. Check for any entities who have (button) and handle.
Note that a clear shouldn't run Dianetic pictures on the secondary and engram steps. Above clear, those usually are supplied by BTs and machinery etc. Just remember what happened to you and spot your postulates (which generally have considerable importance even to a clear). Its even OK to do a bit of ITSA on the incident (spotting time, place, form, and event), just don't start trying to pull in pictures.
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Assessment Buttons:
1. World Closed In
2. Space Collapsed
3. (your) Energy Collapsed
4. Anchor Points Collapsed
5. Anchor Points Snapped in
6. Everything fell in
7. Space Was Unmocked
8. (your) Energy Was Unmocked
9. (your) Frame of Reference Collapsed
10. Caved-In
11. Pulled Back
12. Withdrew from everything.
13. Made it all unreal
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Note that its always you who collapses your own space. Others may do things to you that get you to do this, but its only you who can snap in your own anchor points no matter how many BTs or nasty folks are working you over.
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7. WRONG IDEAS IN STANDARD TECH
Here I am going to talk about the technology of auditing rather than the high level flaws that I have been pointing out all along.
First of all, the bulk of the auditing technology is correct. It has gone through a long evolution and many of the flagrant misconceptions of earlier years have long since been corrected. But there are still some wrong ideas.
The most basic mistake is to consider that the standardness, correctness, and exactness of the procedure is senior to the PC's gains, maintaining communication with the PC, and granting beingness to the PC.
Our primary target is to produce the best result possible for the PC, this is senior to everything. To achieve this, it is more important to remain in comm with the PC than it is to do the procedure right, because communication is the most important basic we have and nothing can occur in its absence. Furthermore, if the PC's abilities and awareness are to be raised, we must make more of the PC rather than making less of him. Therefore, we must always grant and encourage his own beingness and reinforce his own positive efforts even when these don't fit perfectly into the rote procedure that we are trying to inflict on him. These things are known, and they can be found in the auditor's code. What is not known is the correct relative importance. These things are senior to everything else in the technology including the CS series, the class VIII materials, and all formal procedures of auditing.
When he was writing about art, Ron realized that absolute technical perfection was a dead end. For maximum aesthetics, you get as close as you can to perfection without losing the communication line. If only he had realized that this applies to auditing technology as well.
If you deliver absolutely perfect standard technology, the PC will not make gains. This is robotic and you might as well program up a computer to audit the guy. On the other hand, if the auditor just slops around and makes a mess, there wouldn't be any gains either. The quality of the auditing and quantity of results is dependent on how close you can come to standard while maintaining communication, granting beingness, and keeping other basics in. This may mean occasionally violating standard procedure. The real skill comes in in minimizing the violations rather than in adhering perfectly to standard while the session and the PC go to hell.
If you beat the auditor over the head every time he violates standard procedure with a good result for the PC, then you will kill his ability to be with the PC and use his knowingness and understanding to do what is really needed by the PC even though it isn't in the textbook. The CS must validate these successful violations rather than attacking the auditor.
The standards are there for a reason, and that is the fact that they usually work and trouble results from violating them. On that basis, there will be many instances where violations of standards result in failures and poor results. This is where you correct the incapable auditor and teach him the right way to do things. Don't wreck his judgment by fixing a theoretical mistake that might not be a mistake in the specific case. Instead, fix the real mistakes which are obvious in their failure to help the PC.
The above assumes that the standards are always correct. Even in that case, you must allow for deviations because there are no absolutes. But there can also be actual flaws in the standards, or better ways of doing things. In the past we have seen endless corrections of mistakes in the standards themselves. So if you find that the auditors are getting results with some consistent violation of standard procedure, then maybe you had better revise the standard procedure.
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There have been a number of points which have shifted around over the years. Often there were results either way and there were arguments in favor of either approach.
One of these was whether or not a real FN could occur above 3.0 on the meter. At one time this was an absolute (never call one above 3.0) and some cases were messed up. At other times, anything was accepted without any judgment and some cases were found where processes were left incomplete. Maybe the auditor has to actually look at the PC and be in good enough communication to tell whether or not the PC has gotten release from something. If you're good, you should be able to see this even without a meter. And if the auditor is already well trained and the PC seems happy, maybe the CS should take the auditors judgment as being better than the mechanical phenomena of the E-meter.
Another is the exact definition of what is a read on the meter. In the old days, any change of needle characteristic was taken up. In modern times, they limit themselves to falls and instant FNs, rocket reads, and (in special cases) rock slams. In the first case, we sometimes took up something that was inaccessible (a rise generally indicates a non-confront and if you take one up sometimes it is unrunable). In the second case, we might occasionally miss something that does need to be run. In practice, it might make a difference what you are trying to do. In repair actions, you might take up a read that you would not use in normal processing because it might be your only entry point into some terrible auditing error that was done earlier and you might have no choice but to fight your way through something that is barely runable to get the matter straightened out.
There is also the case of rare and unusual meter reactions. One of these is the sharp instant rise which looks like a fast long fall in reverse. These are very rare. They should be taken up. What you have is a dramatic flinch and non-confront, but the person is right on the edge of looking at it. Its one of these "oh my god that can't be" type reactions. Simply calling it a few times will often turn it into a spectacular fall as the person takes a real look at the item being checked.
One problem is spectacularly large reads. Really huge FNs, theta bops, and rock slams can be confused with each other and can also be confused with giant rocket reads that dive off of the dial. These reads can be 2 or 3 divisions wide on the TA and if they are really fast the needle can slam against the pin with audible force as it shifts on and off the dial. Your immediate action should be to turn the sensitivity down to 1 so that you have some hope of identifying the read. You may also have to swing the TA up or down to catch the end of the read and you may have to recheck the item with the TA already sitting at the position where you are guessing that the read will shove it too. We could really use a meter with a sensitivity setting way below 1 for identifying these giant reads.
The super duper ultra sensitive meters are needed for repair actions where there is so much blocking the PCs view that you need all the help you can get. When a PC is really flying, especially on advanced levels, the reads should be spectacular and you need a less sensitive meter. This silly business of needing a more sensitive meter to run NOTS means that they are running the wrong process. If it is the right action, it will read well. If it doesn't, then either its unnecessary, or out-gradient (something else needs to be run first), or the procedure itself is flawed in some manner. The NOTS material can read well on the meter sometimes. Done at the right time, these can be very beneficial. But run by fanatics who are trying to blame all case on NOTS factors, you get this strange quick of needing more and more sensitive meters to find things that are not reading as expected.
By the way, it would be nice to have a super cheep but ultra sophisticated meter for use by solo auditors so that the ordinary population could run do-it-yourself solo processes etc. A simple and cheep whetstone bridge could be plugged into the serial port of a PC (Personal Computer). A sophisticated program could do signal analysis and put up a graphical display. It could probably do ten times as much as the current meters because of the flexibility and power of doing things in software. I would guess that such a thing could be marketed for under a hundred dollars.
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An extremely misleading datum is "The PC Doesn't Know What Is Wrong With Him". This was coined on the assumption that if he really knew what was wrong with him, it wouldn't be wrong.
This is pretty much the case for somebody walking in off of the street. Anything they could figure out or handle with the data they currently know and their current level of confront has already been handled and if it is still wrong, then they don't have the correct answer to it.
But this changes as soon as you give them more data or raise their level of confront.
Try listening to the PC for a change. When he's halfway on something, he often does know what's what and has a partial view of the truth. If he saw it all, it would be gone, but when he has a partial view, he is often right but not quite free of it. If you left him alone, he would actually get through it eventually on his own but it might take some time. If, however, you keep insisting that he doesn't know when he really does, your going to mess him up and create a big ARCX as well.
An extreme example was the mess up on people who had gone clear on Dianetics before the Dianetic clear bulletin came out. They would usually know that they were being run on wrong actions and they often felt that they were clear but wouldn't dare claim to be. In this case, they knew better than the auditors and CSes and nobody would acknowledge their rightness.
A good button for ARCX correction lists (the L1) and repair lists (the green form) would be "Were you right and nobody would accept it?". This is a key point because we are trying to rekindle the fundamental rightness that lies under all the aberrations and when the PC has it but you shoot it down, you are pushing him right back into the bank and killing his real hopes of freedom. This can cause the kind of ARCX where the PC wants to burn down the org because it is acting suppressively towards his case.
Of course you don't want to lose control of the session or go chasing after every idle thought or get derailed by the PCs attempts to avoid looking at something. But you should be able to tell the difference between a PC who is non-confronting and one who is perceiving truth. And you should be able to finish a cycle of action while noting down things the PC suggests for later handling, and keep the PC reassured, and really address those things as soon as the current process is done.
And don't make a fight out of not taking the PCs orders. You can bend a little and still not lose control of the session. Sometimes the PC is right. Validate it. Getting the PC to the point where his ITSA of his own case is actually correct is the most important gain he will ever make because it is the one which will let him find his own way out.
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Another sore point is the datum that "All Auditors Talk Too Much". A policy from the late 1960s states this explicitly.
The interesting thing about this one is that it is true and yet the policy was written in such a manner as to be totally destructive of auditing.
The policy presents this as something to be corrected. The end result was that auditors stopped talking and auditing ceased to occur. This was to some degree remedied in later years (by a revision to TR4 handling of originations), but still remains a trouble spot.
The correct datum is that any auditor who is really auditing the PC will talk too much. Maintaining two way communication is senior. If the auditor talks too little, there will be no auditing taking place. If the auditor tries to talk precisely the right amount, he will occasionally undershoot and betray some of his PCs by losing the comm line. Therefore, he will talk too much if he really intends to get results instead of trying to make some CS happy or meet some arbitrary standard. Again, however, it is a matter of coming as close as possible. The highly skilled auditor will only talk a hairsbreadth too much rather than blabbering away at the PC and occasionally saying the wrong thing and getting into a mess.
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One fatal flaw has been the use of endless setups, preparation, and repair before letting the PC get moving on new grades and OT levels.
This has mostly come about as a solution to the mistakes of having defined clear incorrectly, blaming all case on NOTS, considering things to be absolutes rather than a gradient of increasing confront and awareness, and the many grades and processes which are missing from the current lineup. This makes CSes scared to let somebody start something because it might not handle what is wrong and the PC might fall on his head.
The grades and levels work quickly to increase ability and awareness. Unnecessary repair and setup actions (and the infamous unnecessary sec checks) grind along slowly and waste everyones time and money.
The only criteria that should be considered before embarking on one of these major steps is whether or not the PC is flying (e.g. running well, high toned, FNs and cognites easily, etc.).
In some cases an out-list or out-int will be a roadblock and you have to solve it. In other cases, it doesn't matter. Look at the PC and see if he has the free attention necessary to run something new or whether his attention is fixated. That's all you care about.
There are many things wrong with the PC. You need to raise his confront in lots of areas. No single area is the right reason behind all his aberrations, and that means that you can't get evangalistic and try to cure everything with one approach. Move the PC forward as quickly as possible, getting a big win on each of many different major areas. When you get too thorough in one area, it begins to bypass the charge of the other areas that you are not handling and eventually it will blow up in your face.
Don't promise perfect stability or absolute solutions. Promise instead that you will move him along as fast as possible to increase his horsepower and abilities.
As far as NOTS goes, it is a lesser case factor and mainly causes trouble when it is assigned as the reason behind the PCs problems, overts, and upsets. Its simply the WRONG WHY. Indicating the correct "why" behind something never really harms the PC, even if it is a bit out-gradient and hard to confront. But taking something that does have charge on it (and there is generally some charge on NOTS) but is not the correct why for something and jamming it down the PCs throat is a sure way to mess up the PC.
The point at which to begin NOTS is when the PC starts noticing entities and gets interested in handling them. It shouldn't be kept a secret from him. It should be identified as something which will show up eventually and we have the tech to handle it when it does. Meanwhile, it can safely be ignored. Just don't let the PC start blaming his case on them, because that will kill him.
The correct gradient into doing NOTS is to do OT drills first. That is what gets his perception and horsepower up to the point where he can just dust himself off and get these entities out of his way. You get the PC up to the point where he is trying to project energy and percieve at a distance and things like that and he's noticing that there is stuff in his way that's muddying things up and reducing his horsepower. That is the real effect of entities. They do not abberate the person significantly (the PC was already abberated before incident 2, else why was he walking around in a body and letting himself get bashed around by a nasty ruler), but they do get in the person's way, especially in regards to OT abilities.
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In comparison with the vague fumblings that usually occur in metaphysics, Scientology is a precise technical subject. But we err in equating it to a mechanical technology such as engineering. This misleads you into thinking that its all mechanics, and its not.
In building bridges, you simply do the tech mechanically and a bridge results.
But Scientology tech is more like the tech of painting or playing the piano. These things have a very high theta component and if you only apply the techniques mechanically, you do not get the desired product. The tech is only a prerequisite to real understanding and ability, it is not the final result.
Scientology is, first and formost, a philosophy rather than an engineering decipline. You need to study and apply it as a philosophy. And because it is an applied philosophy, you also need to master the mechanical aspects of the tech, but don't get lost in them or think that they are the end product.
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The basic problem is one of attitude. The effort seems to be to defend the technology and make it right when what you really need to do as an auditor is to build up the rightness of the PC and what you need to do as a CS is to build up the rightness of your auditors.
If you validate beingness, knowingness, and responsibility, then you will get more beingness, knowingness, and responsibility. On the other hand, if you validate rote procedure, then you will get more rote procedure (and will in turn need even more rote procedures because the old ones wouldn't be enough in the face of a deterioration of beingness, knowingness, and responsibility).
Despite all of this, there are some really good auditors, supervisors, and CSes working for the CofS. The shame of it is that they are the exception rather than the rule and they are subject to invalidation for the exact things which set them above the crowd.