Lecture: Auditing Positions (August, 1956)

There was a punk by the name of Pavlov who had a bunch of dogs and after a great many years of study he found out they barked. And this-it’s all very well, I shouldn’t be this impolite, but there’s been so much smoke made about this fellow Pavlov that when I, at length, uncovered a secret manuscript of his, I expected really to find something, you know? And it was about as informative as a comic strip.

He gave people the idea, however, of driving people’s attention inward. And if he’d said that and specialized on it and had any concept of it, why, it would have been quite effective. But the physical universe is a brainwasher from Pavlov’s standpoint, only he simply speeds up the action of the physical universe. The physical universe yanks your attention out and drives it in and confuses it. And whether that’s being done in school or by your mother or somebody or other, it’s a sort of a long-longtime brainwash. If you speed that up, you have everything that Pavlov knew about brainwashing. He just tried to take the general actions of the physical universe and speed them up against the individual. People evidently didn’t exist as far as he was concerned. And he did, however, find out about introversion and therefore the subject will be found lying around in old sciences and so on as a rather complex thing. It’s not complex at all. I’ll tell you how to introvert somebody: walk up to him and kick him in the shins and he’ll introvert. Now, if you watch him carefully, the next moment he will extrovert.
You see how that is? Extroversion-introversion.

Now, if we were to see an airplane crash out there in the street at this moment, our attention with some horror would leap out there to that airplane, you see? That’s an extroversion. And then a little while afterwards somebody would say, ”You know I’ve ridden in airplanes. That could have happened to me.” That’s the introversion component, don’t you see?

So we get these alternations of extroversion and introversion and it so happens in this universe, because one is standing in the middle of a lot of things that are flying around, that one  tends more to introvert than to extrovert. The balance is on introversion, see, for the most part.

So, it is necessary when you’re auditing a preclear to pay attention to this cycle of extroversion-introversion.