HUBBARD COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE
Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, SussexHCO POLICY LETTER OF 2 MAY 1985
Remimeo
(Also issued as an HCOB, same date and title)
RESPONSIBILITY, DEFINITION OF
RESPONSIBILITY: THE NON-RECOGNITION AND DENIAL OF THE RIGHT OF INTERVENTION BETWEEN ONESELF AND ANY BEING, IDEA, MATTER, ENERGY, SPACE, TIME OR FORM, AND THE ASSUMPTION OF FULL RIGHT OF DETERMINATION OVER IT.
L. RON HUBBARD
Founder1
HUBBARD COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE
Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, SussexHCO POLICY LETTER OF 2 NOVEMBER 19701
Issue IIIRemimeo
RESPONSIBILITY
Note: This policy is extracted verbatim from HCOB 4 Feb. 60 I, THEORY OF RESPONSIBILITY PROCESSING. Certain paragraphs have been omitted where they applied specifically to auditing.
In order to make up one’s mind to be responsible for things it is necessary to get over the idea that one is being forced into responsibility.
The power of choice is still senior to responsibility. What one does against his will operates as an overt act against oneself. But where one’s will to do has deteriorated to unwillingness to do anything, lack of will is itself an aberration.
There is nothing wrong, basically, with doingness. But where one is doing something he is unwilling to do, aberration results. One does, in such a case, while unwilling to do. The result is doingness without responsibility.
In the decline of any state into slavery as in Greece, or into economic strangulation of the individual as in our modern Western society, doingness is more and more enforced and willingness to do is less and less in evidence. At length people are doing without being responsible. From this results bad workmanship, crime, indigence and its necessities for welfarism. At length there are so many people who are unwilling to do that the few left have to take the full burden of the society upon their backs. Where high unwillingness to do exists, democracy is then impossible, for it but votes for the biggest handout.
Where high unwillingness to do exists then we have a constant restimulation of all the things one is really unwilling to do such as overt acts. Forcing people who do not want to work to yet work restimulates the mechanism of overt acts with, thereby, higher and higher crime ratio, more and more strikes and less and less understanding of what it is all about.
The individual who has done something bad that he was not willing to do then identifies anything he does with any unwillingness to do—when of course he has done this many times. Therefore all doingness becomes bad. Dancing becomes bad. Playing games becomes bad. Even eating and procreation become bad. And all because unwillingness to do something bad has evolved and identified into unwillingness to do.
The person who has done something bad restrains himself by withholding doingness in that direction. When at length he conceives he has done many many bad things, he becomes a total withhold. As you process him you encounter the recurring phenomenon of his realization that he has not been as bad as he thought he was. And that’s the wonderful part of it. People are never as bad as they think they are—and certainly other people are never as bad as one thinks they have been.
The basic wonder is that people police themselves. Out of a concept of good they conceive themselves to be bad, and after that seek every way they can to protect others from self. A person does this by reducing his own ability. He does it by reducing his own activity. He does this by reducing his own knowingness.
Where you see a thetan who sleeps too much and does too little, where you see a person who conceives bad doingness on every hand, you see a person who is safeguarding others from the badness of himself or herself.
Now there is another extreme. A person who must do because of economic or other whips, and yet because of his own concept of his own badness dares not do, is liable to become criminal. Such a person’s only answer to doingness is to do without taking any responsibility and this, when you examine the dynamics, falls easily into a pattern of dramatized overt acts. Here you have a body that is not being controlled, where most knowledge is obscured and where responsibility for others or even self is lacking. It is an easy step from criminality to insanity, if indeed there is any step at all. Such people cannot be policed since being policed admits of some obedience. Lacking control there is no ability to obey, and so they wind up simply hating police and that is that.
Only when economic grips are so tight or political pressure is so great as it is in Russia do we get high criminality and neurotic or psychotic indexes. Whenever doing is accompanied by no will to do, irresponsibility for one’s own acts can result.
Basically, then, when one is processing a pc, one is seeking to rehabilitate a willingness to do. In order to accomplish this one must rehabilitate the ability to withhold on the pc’s own determinism (not by punishment) further bad actions.
Only then will the pc be willing to recover from anything wrong with the pc since anything wrong with the pc is self-imposed in order to prevent wrongdoing at some past time.
Responsibility can be rehabilitated on any case.
L. Ron Hubbard
Founder
HUBBARD COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE
Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, Sussex
HCO BULLETIN OF 10 JULY 19641Remimeo
Sthil Students
MissionsOVERTS—ORDER OF EFFECTIVENESS IN PROCESSING
(STAR RATED except for Forbidden Words List)
It will be found in processing the various case levels that running overts is very effective in raising the cause level of a pc.
The scale, on actual tests of running various levels of pc response, is seen to go something like this:
I ITSA — Letting a pc discuss his or her guilt feelings about self with little or no auditor direction.
I ITSA — Letting a pc discuss his or her guilt feelings about others, with little or no auditor direction.
II REPETITIVE O/W — Using merely “In this lifetime what have you done?” “What haven’t you done?”Alternate.
III ASSESSMENT BY LIST — Using existing or specially prepared lists of possible overts, cleaning the meter each time it reads on a question and using the question only so long as it reads.
IV JUSTIFICATIONS — Asking the pc what he or she has done and then using that one instance (if applicable) finding out why “that” was not an overt.
Advice enters into this under the heading of instruction: “You’re upset about that person because you’ve done something to that person.”
Dynamics also permissively enter into this above Level I but the pc wanders around amongst them. In Level III one can also direct attention to the various dynamics by first assessing them and then using or preparing a list for the dynamic found.
RESPONSIBILITY
There is no reason to expect any great pc responsibility for his or her own overts below Level IV and the auditor seeking to make the pc feel or take responsibility for overts is just pushing the pc down. The pc will resent being made feel guilty. Indeed the auditor may only achieve that, not case gain. And the pc will ARC break.
At Level IV one begins on this subject of responsibility but again it is indirectly the target. There is no need now to run Responsibility in doing O/Ws.
The realization that one has really done something is a return of responsibility and this gain is best obtained only by indirect approach as in the above processes.
_________
ARC BREAKS
The commonest cause of failure in running overt acts is “cleaning cleans” whether or not one is using a meter. The pc who really has more to tell doesn’t ARC Break when the Auditor continues to ask for one but may snarl and eventually give it up.
On the other hand leaving an overt touched on the case and calling it clean will cause a future ARC Break with the auditor.
“Have you told all?” prevents cleaning a clean. On the unmetered pc one can see the pc brighten up. On the meter you get a nice fall if it’s true that all is told.
“Have I not found out about something?” prevents leaving an overt undisclosed.
On the unmetered pc the reaction is a sly flinch. On a metered pc it gives a read.
A pc’s protest against a question will also be visible in an unmetered pc in a reeling sort of exasperation which eventually becomes a howl of pure bafflement at why the auditor won’t accept the answer that that’s all. On a meter protest of a question falls on being asked for: “Is this question being protested?”
There is no real excuse for ARC Breaking a pc by
1. Demanding more than is there or
2. Leaving an overt undisclosed that will later make the pc upset with the auditor.
FORBIDDEN WORDS
Do not use the following words in auditing commands. While they can be used in discussion or nomenclature, for various good reasons they should be avoided now in an auditing command:
Responsibility (ies)
Justification (s)
Withhold (s)
Failed (ures)
Difficulty (ies)
Desire (s)
Here
There
Compulsion (s) (ively)
Obsession (s) (ively)No unusual restraint should be given these words. Just don’t frame a command that includes them. Use something else.
WHY OVERTS WORK
Overts give the highest gain in raising cause level because they are the biggest reason why a person restrains himself and withholds self from action.
Man is basically good. But the reactive mind tends to force him into evil actions.
These evil actions are instinctively regretted and the individual tries to refrain from doing anything at all. The “best” remedy, the individual thinks, is to withhold. “If I commit evil actions, then my best guarantee for not committing is to do nothing whatever.” Thus we have the “lazy”, inactive person.
Others who try to make an individual guilty for committing evil actions only increase this tendency to laziness.
Punishment is supposed to bring about inaction. And it does. In some unexpected ways.
However, there is also an inversion (a turn about) where the individual sinks below recognition of any action. The individual in such a state cannot conceive of any action and therefore cannot withhold action. And thus we have the criminal who can’t act really but can only re-act and is without any self direction. This is why punishment does not cure criminality but in actual fact creates it; the individual is driven below withholding or any recognition of any action. A thief’s hands stole the jewel, the thief was merely an innocent spectator to the action of his own hands. Criminals are very sick people physically.
So there is a level below withholding that an auditor should be alert to in some pcs, for these “have no withholds” and “have done nothing”. All of which, seen through their eyes is true. They are merely saying “I cannot restrain myself” and “I have not willed myself to do what I have done.”
The road out for such a case is the same as that for any other case. It is just longer. The processes for levels above hold also for such cases. But don’t be anxious to see a sudden return of responsibility, for the first owned “done” that this person knows he or she has done may be “ate breakfast”. Don’t disdain such answers in Level II particularly. Rather, in such people, seek such answers.
There is another type of case in all this, just one more to end the list. This is the case who never runs O/W but “seeks the explanation of what I did that made it all happen to me”.
This person easily goes into past lives for answers. Their reaction to a question about what they’ve done is to try to find out what they did that earned all those motivators. That, of course, isn’t running the process and the auditor should be alert for it and stop it when it is happening.
This type of case goes into its extreme on guilt. It dreams up overts to explain why. After most big murders the police routinely have a dozen or two people come around and confess. You see, if they had done the murder, this would explain why they feel guilty. As a terror stomach is pretty awful grim to live with, one is apt to seek any explanation for it if it will only explain it.
On such cases the same approach as given works, but one should be very careful not to let the pc get off overts the pc didn’t commit.
Such a pc (recognizable by the ease they dive into the extreme past) when being audited off a meter gets more and more frantic and wilder and wilder in overts reported. They should get calmer under processing, of course, but the false overts make them frantic and hectic in a session. On a meter one simply checks for “Have you told me anything beyond what really has occurred?” Or “Have you told me any untruths?”
The observation and meter guides given in this section are used during a session when they apply but not systematically such as after every pc answer. These observations and meter guides are used always at the end of every session on the pcs to whom they apply.
L. RON HUBBARD
Founder
Hubbard, L. R. (1964, 10 July). Overts—Order Of Effectiveness in Processing. Technical Bulletins of Dianetics and Scientology (1991 ed., Vol. VII, pp. 438-41). Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, Inc.
HUBBARD COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE
Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, SussexHCO BULLETIN OF 23 DECEMBER AD91; 2
BPI
RESPONSIBILITY
If the definition of operating thetan is knowing and willing cause over all dynamics then we can see at once that responsibility must go hand in hand with making an operating thetan.
One cannot as-is acts for which one is taking no responsibility, but for which one is really responsible.
The reason one gets amnesia on his past lives or even denies their existence lies with responsibility. He or she is unwilling to take responsibility for having been this or that other identity. This keys in in present time and closes one down every time one stops taking responsibility for one’s fellows. Fighting ‘other identities’ in present time one ceases to be responsible for other identities. Therefore those he has had in the past become ‘other people’ and one dramatizes his own past identities because he cannot take responsibility for them.
When one falls away from responsibility on the various dynamics he can then become less and less able to influence those dynamics and therefore becomes a victim of them. One must have done to other dynamics those things which other dynamics now seem to have the power to do to him. Therefore one can be injured. One can lose control. One can become in fact a zero of influence and a vacuum for trouble.
The way one becomes separate from others is by his own overt acts against them. These overt acts become withholds and the person then individuates very strongly. You have seen this happening in auditing. The more overt acts the Auditor pulls on the pc the less willing the auditor is to audit that pc. Further, the more overt acts the pc pulls on the auditor the less willing he is to stay in session. It only looks as though cause and effect is at work. Actually all life consists of opposed causes where it is aberrated.
The way a person blows out of session or blows out of an organization or blows out of Scientology is a simple one. He withholds information and hides his overts. After a while he blows himself off. Show me a pc blowing session and I will show you a pc who has not levelled with his auditor and who is guilty of undeclared overts against the dynamics and the auditor. Show me a staff member who is blowing the organization and I will show you a staff member who is guilty of undeclared overts against the organization.
It is fatal to audit anyone unless full two-way comm is established between the auditor and the pc. A person who goes on being audited without asserting his responsibility for what he has done is a person who will make no auditing gains or whose auditing gains will slump. As most of the human race has undeclared overts this fact alone assumes gigantic proportions in forwarding Scientology and for that reason alone we will have to give it a lion’s share of attention from here on out.
Of course you will see that many people at first will not come near us for fear of what we will find out. But as this is better understood you will find that the people who come to us will come with a willingness to bare their guilt to us and get it sorted out.
As this is so much the case we must then therefore have amongst us none with undeclared overts against the dynamics which would prevent their getting gains in processing or who would render a person’s confidences liable to use for less pure purposes.
Along with this technical discovery then goes the administrative must that our noses must be clean and our hearts cleared. Our strength will be the strength of a billion if we have nothing to hide.
This may or may not be popular. I don’t care about that. It is effective. I do care about that.
And remember that whenever a person discloses to view discreditable overts and withholds we must run what part of that act or incident could you be responsible for.
You’re going to see more case gains than you’ve ever seen before—providing you have the stamina to get over this first hump.
So here we change from irresponsible to responsible, from guilt to strength and all in the twinkling of an eye.
L. Ron Hubbard
Founder