Volume 9, Issue 5, page 6

of the basic concept -- they couldn't stand to
listen Calling themselves "auditors" (those
who listen), they became the damndest bunch of
miserable preachers (those who blab endlessly
and warn of dire and devilish perils in their
doctrines and preachments) ever to grace a
nation of natural-born, self-opinionated, and
self-anointed evangelists.

And of course in this manner profits the
novelist who can ruthlessly dredge from his
own subconsciousness all the cloaca of emotional distortions. Thus he has it better than
either the tragic preclear (seeking a friendly
listener, but beset on all sides by disputing
preachers) or the frail , quailing secretkeeping writer of endless diaries locked away
in millions of hidden "safe places" .

Let the faint-hearted pansies of both sexes
rail against a book of catharsis ( "Tropic of
Cancer"), written by Henry Miller in 1933 and
call him a pornographer without having read
his poignant essay on Greece titled "Colossus
of Maroussi", or the deeply perceptive study
of Balzac's personal triumph as a writer and
failure as an individual, in "The Wisdom of the
Heart". Let them rail, rant, rave, and condemn
Miller, who learned to not deceive himself and
keeps no secret diaries, who escaped from the
mental imprisonments of background, training,
and environment and changed both past and future as he redefined and upgraded his daily
and environmental present by autobiography;
Miller cares not -- and oddly enough says the
same as Hubbard said, that this took more than
20 years of hard work and that the last fragment was as treacherous and deadly and hard to
grasp as the first overwhelming tide of hidden
adversity that was loosed in the first effort
to communicate and to have the communication
received and accepted.

I repeat, that therein lies the crux, in the
reception without the clearly implied criticism of "friendly" correction, "well intentioned" advice, "serious" counsel, and other
variations of the emotional-electroshock "therapy " that seems to be automatically inspired
in the otherwise apparently trustworthy friend
who has been sought as a listener and converted
instantly into a demonic preacher who "innocently" blocks the transmission by verbal correction of the error he has interpretatively
perceived in the communicant's "distorted
point of view"; who therefore cries aloud to
stop such heresy and thereby acts to halt the
flow of emotional charge that is riding on the
effort to communicate; thus making impossible
the already extremely difficult need to expose
the hidden secrets that scourge a guilty conscience endlessly. It makes no difference that
the auditor-preacher is ever so well intentioned and ever so sure that the communicant
must (for his own salvation) be steered from
such deviationist courses, and foolish thoughts.
Thereafter, as in the case of the fragile corps
who constituted most of the Dianetic coterie,
the failure of these preachments to effect
changes that had been suggested as the possible result of good listening practices, was
promptly blamed on the guy who said, "Try this
for yourself and see how you can convert the
theory to your own data."
This is somewhat a part and parcel of your
July-August Auditorial in which you speak of
the need to acquire personal ownership in replacement of blind worship of ideas or the exponents of ideas, and it's interesting that you
should classify "editorials" (which are so
clearly defined by newspapers and magazines as
"preaching") under the punning title of " Auditorials "; truly an apt joke after you had seen
that most of the so-called auditing was, in
application, damn' little listening and a whole
hell of a lot of preaching -- and even where
someone had listened for a couple of hours in
what was actually disapproving silence, the
whole communication was frequently -- in fact,
generally -- summarily rejected with criticism
or correction or detailed analysis of what this
was supposed to mean as interpreted by the
auditor-now-turned preacher who must perforce
reject the data by interpretation of, correction of, or criticism of, as he saw it.

But, on the stipulated theme of Autobiography