Refund and Reparation

This is a cold-blooded and factual account of your last sixty trillion years.

The test of any knowledge is its usefulness. Does it make one happier or more able? By it and with it, can he better achieve his goals?

This is useful knowledge. With it the blind again see, the lame walk, the ill recover, the insane become sane and the sane become saner. By its use the thousand abilities man has sought to recover become his once more.

Like all useful knowledge it was hardly won. I began search into the back track of mankind some years ago. There was no actual knowledge of it in existence. There were numberless superstitions, countless guesses, as many theories in favour of one thing as in favour of another. People believed, some of them, that Man had lived before. They had no proof. Others believed that Man was born innocent and died and went to a place called Hell. Most believed that when you had lived once, that was all, fellow.

Such a number of conflicting theories must have truth in them. It became my business to discover, against considerable odds, that truth.

In the first place, there was something wrong with man. An animal such as a cat, even a reptile, a lizard, had habit patterns which carried him through his early days. Not man. Why not? As usual, a lot of vagueness answered this. The very schools of 'thought' that said Man was just another animal bogged utterly on why it was that babies, the young of this very intelligent animal, are much more stupid than kittens. That was only one thing wrong with man that wasn't explained.

The further one investigated, the more one came to understand that here, in this creature Homo sapiens, were entirely too many unknowns. People who suddenly out of no observable training, begin to speak foreign tongues, men who 'seem to remember having been here before, strange yearnings in people for various parts of the country or the world or the stars of which they have no actual knowledge, such things are routine puzzles.

And there was a much more important thing at work than mere curiosity. Now and then, in my auditing, I would discover a case which would be extremely reluctant to recover and then would recover only partially so long as I used data from the current lifetime of the preclear; but as soon as I used the whole span of the time track about sixty trillion years I could obtain immediate response.

One must be very impartial, even brutal, in investigation. The last series of cases I audited, twenty in number, chosen at random from various life strata and suffering from mental and physical ills which were extremely varied, were audited to demonstrate finally to myself one thing only: Can an auditor obtain a swift recovery by auditing the current lifetime only? I used the most modern of techniques—1952—and did a standard auditing address to the current lifetime of each one. I obtained mediocre results, partial recoveries, slight betterment in attitude. Then I audited each case addressing only past track, prior to this lifetime: the results were swift and spectacular. Thus I validated, for myself, the reality that in auditing the whole track, one can obtain excellent results, that in auditing the current lifetime, one can obtain slow and mediocre results. From this series came this conclusion: THE AUDITOR WHO INSISTS ON AUDITING THE CURRENT LIFETIME ONLY, WHEN HE HAS THE WHOLE TRACK TECHNIQUE AVAILABLE, IS WASTING TIME AND EFFORT AND IS, IN FACT, SWINDLING HIS PRECLEAR. [...]