COMPARISON TO EARLIER PRACTICES

Auditing is quite different, both in terms of approach and result, from other efforts which purport to help man improve his lot in life.

In psychoanalysis, for instance, the analyst does not accept what the person says but interprets it, evaluates his condition for him, reads sexual significance into his statements and tells him why he is worried, all of which merely confuse a person further and have no helpful effect. In auditing, what the preclear says is never evaluated and his data is never refuted. To do so would totally violate the Auditor’s Code. Nor in auditing is the preclear encouraged to ramble on without guidance, ransacking the millions of incidents in his reactive mind and restimulating many, in the hope he might stumble across the right one.

In the more brutal practice of psychiatry, force (physical, chemical or surgical) is used to overwhelm an individual’s ideas and behavior and render the patient quiet. There is no thought of gain or help here but only of making patients more manageable. Auditing bears no resemblance to any part of this field.

Similarly, auditing bears no resemblance to psychology, which is primarily the study of observing responses to stimuli and provides no means of producing actual improvement. Other practices such as hypnotism consider that a person has to be put into a state of lessened awareness (i.e., a trance) before anything can be done. Auditing is quite the opposite and seeks to wake people up, not put them to sleep.

Past efforts to help man sought to do so by enforcing moral codes or standards of behavior and conduct but, having no knowledge of the reactive mind or means to relieve its irrational dictates, they achieved no lasting improvements.

Auditing is quite different from these past practices, many of which were impositive and some, like psychiatry, which are actually harmful. In auditing one follows a precisely mapped route which leads to specific improvements and it is only the individual being audited who says whether these have been achieved or not. The preclear determines when he has regained an ability or rid himself of a spiritual barrier to living, not anyone else. The auditor continues to minister to the preclear until the preclear knows of his own volition that he has succeeded. It is not the auditor or anyone else in Scientology who says the preclear has made a gain. The preclear himself knows. Given that the goal of auditing is rehabilitation of one’s own potentials, the gains can really be determined in no other way.

Auditing is made up of common denominators which apply to all life. There are no variables in auditing; the same procedures apply to all cases. Only auditing restores to the individual his native potentials, enabling him to be the person he knows he really is. Only auditing frees a person from the traps of the reactive mind.