Cowhands, Child Games, and Opening Procedure


Cowhands, Child Games, and Opening Procedure

WHEREVER you look in the world around you, you find evidence validating Hubbard's standard "basic" SOP 8-C, Opening Procedure a, b and c. Probably no "discovery" of importance has had so much evidence in existence of its validity, and been so completely missed by the massed myopia of mankind.

We have a traditional longing for the freedoms of the "open range". We have an innate recognition of the generally desirable features of the life of the working cowhand, yet how many doctors who prescribe that "change of scenery -- the dude ranch vacation" -- have calculated the exact elements that produce the tone rise?

Looking back on a childhood and early manhood as a "cowboy" and all-around ranch hand, what do I find, personally? SOP 8-C a, b, and c, exactly! It's touch and go from beginning to end, all three phases. In a, the boss says, "Saddle up than roan horse -- take the Hawley saddle -- and ride down to the north pasture. Cut those cows with calves out of the herd and move them over to the island through that lower gate. Ride out all that brush in the area and the swamps to see if anything's down or hurt...

"Take some wire and a set of blocks and the fencing pliers and check that north fence along the hill. If any wire's down or broken) patch it up. On your way back ride up to the Miller place in Garden Creek and bring those saddle horses out with you and put them in the high corral. Leave the mares and colts up there."

Well, there's five hours of SOP 8-C Opening Procedure on the a and b phases. The c comes in because it is expected that all incidentals will be looked at, decided upon, and taken care of along the way.

And when that cowboy comes in at noon for lunch after his six a.m. breakfast, he is not "pooped out", "headachy", fatigued, despondent, or worried about death, taxes, and damnation. His eyes are bright, his appetite is ravenous, and his general disposition is gay, and pixilated. He feels dam' good.

There is no end to the variety and scope of a large and diversified ranch

operation. Winter and summer the making and breaking of contact with MEST goes on under conditions that encourage "looking" and acting, and not thinking or stewing.

Contrariwise, on drudge farms where a routine becomes a deadly daily grind, and looking becomes "against the law", you find the antithesis of the above situation.

Dude ranch vacationers get lots of the same "therapy": "Get up, now"; "Come eat breakfast, now"; "Go put your saddle on that sorrel horse now"; "Now let go and take the. reins"; "Now get aboard"; "Now go here"; "Now get off"; etc.

People skiing and in similar sports are mostly working with the c phase, but the essense of looking and making and breaking contact is there.

In children's games, you find lots of this stuff; Run-sheep-run is a go-and-come-at-my-direction technique. Hide and Seek is a c phase. "Mother, may I?" is an almost perfect duplication of the a and b phases of 8-C Opening Procedure. So is "Follow the Leader", for the followers, while leading in turn is a c element.

A friend relates to me that an early-day psychoanalyst in France experimented with having some of his patients simply

spend half a day under his personal direction (with detailed instructions) digging a hole in the ground, and then, after lunch and a rest, filling it up in the afternoon. He followed this routine of duplication for as many days as needed to effect the "cure". This produced what the doctor called "very interesting results".

In his excellent and rollicking story of the building of Jackson Dam at Moran, Wyoming, "Desperate Scenery", Elliott Paul relates the experiences of a young friend who was a philosopher and creative thinker. This lad was in charge of a way station on the freight haul over the Teton mountain range and had as a helper a fellow with Saint Vitus dance -- considered "incurable". When snowed in for the winter, the philosopher offered to continue paying the wages of the "flunky" if he would do exactly as told. Thus, as an auditor, he had to pay the "pre-clear" to get enough co-operation to cure the Saint Vitus dance, but this he did by