.DIANETICS
THE MODERN SCIENCE
OF MENTAL HEALTH
A HANDBOOK OF DIANETIC PROCEDURE
B y
L. RON HUBBARD.Dedicated to Will Durant..TABLE OF CONTENTS
SYNOPSIS 1
INTRODUCTION 7
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK 10
Book One THE GOAL OF MAN 12
CHAPTER I The Scope of Dianetics 13
CHAPTER II The Clear 16
CHAPTER III The Goal of Man 22
CHAPTER IV The Four Dynamics 30
CHAPTER V Summary 33
Book Two THE SOURCE OF ALL MENTAL AND PSYCHO-SOMATIC ILLS 36
CHAPTER I 37
CHAPTER II The Reactive Mind 41
CHAPTER III The Cell and the Organism 53
CHAPTER IVThe “Demons” 61
CHAPTER V Psycho-somatic Illness 65
CHAPTER VI Emotion and the Dynamics 76
CHAPTER VII Prenatal Experience and Birth 84
CHAPTER VIII Contagion of Aberration 91
CHAPTER IX Keying-in the Engram 95
CHAPTER X Preventive Dianetics 102
Book Three THERAPY 108
CHAPTER I The Mind’s Protection 108
CHAPTER II Release or Clear 112
CHAPTER III The Auditor’s Role 114
CHAPTER IV Diagnosis 118
CHAPTER V Returning, the File Clerk, and the Time Track 127
CHAPTER VI The Laws of Returning 134
CHAPTER VII Emotion and the Life Force 146
CHAPTER VIII Some Types of Engrams 166
CHAPTER IX PART ONE Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy 174
CHAPTER IX PART TWO Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy 199
CHAPTER X Dianetics -- Past and Future 247
APPENDIX I The Philosophic Method 254
APPENDIX II The Scientific Method 255
APPENDIX III (A) Mind Schematic 259
APPENDIX III (B) Analyzer Schematic 261
APPENDIX IV Advice to the Pre-clear 263
Glossary 270.1
SYNOPSIS
The creation of dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and
superior to his inventions of the wheel and arch.
Dianetics (Gr., dianoua -- thought) is the science of mind. Far simpler than physics or
chemistry, it compares with them in the exactness of its axioms and is on a considerably higher
echelon of usefulness. The hidden source of all psycho-somatic ills and human aberration has
been discovered and skills have been developed for their invariable cure.
Dianetics is actually a family of sciences embracing the various humanities and
translating them into usefully precise definitions. The present volume deals with Individual
Dianetics and is a handbook containing the necessary skills both for the handling of
interpersonal relations and the treatment of the mind. With the techniques presented in this
handbook the psychiatrist, psycho-analyst and intelligent layman can successfully and
invariably treat all psycho-somatic ills and inorganic aberrations. More importantly, the skills
offered in this handbook will produce the dianetic clear, an optimum individual with
intelligence considerably greater than the current normal, or the dianetic release, an individual
who has been freed from his major anxieties or illnesses. The release can be done in less than
twenty hours of work and is a state superior to any produced by several years of psycho-analysis,
since the release will not release.
Dianetics is an exact science and its application is on the order of, but simpler than,
engineering. Its axioms should not be confused with theories since they demonstrably exist as
natural laws hitherto undiscovered. Man has known many portions of dianetics in the past
thousands of years, but the data was not evaluated for importance, was not organized into a
body of precise knowledge. In addition to things known, if not evaluated, dianetics includes a
large number of new discoveries of its own about thought and the mind.
The axioms may be found on Page 42 of this volume. Understood and applied, they
embrace the field of human endeavor and thought and yield precision results.
The first contribution of dianetics is the discovery that the problems of thought and
mental function can be resolved within the bounds of the finite universe, which is to say that all
data needful to the solution of mental action and Man’s endeavor can be measured, sensed and
experienced as scientific truths independent of mysticism or metaphysics. The various axioms
are not assumptions or theories -- the case of past ideas about the mind -- but are laws which
can be subjected to the most vigorous laboratory and clinical tests.
The first law of dianetics is a statement of the dynamic principle of existence.
THE DYNAMIC PRINCIPLE OF EXISTENCE IS: SURVIVE!
No behavior or activity has been found to exist without this principle. It is not new that
life is surviving. It is new that life has as its entire dynamic urge only survival.
Survival is divided into four dynamics. Survival can be understood to lie in any one of
the dynamics and by faulty logic can be explained in terms of any one dynamic. A man can be
said to survive for self alone and by this all behavior can be formulated. He can be said to
survive for sex alone and by sex alone all behavior can be formulated. He can be said to
survive for the group only or for Mankind only and in either of these the entire endeavor and
behavior of the individual can be equated and explained. These are four equations of survival,
each one apparently true. However, the entire problem of the purpose of Man cannot be
resolved unless one admits all four dynamics in each individual. So equated, the behavior of
1.2
the individual can be estimated with precision. These dynamics then embrace the activity of
one or many men.
DYNAMIC ONE: The urge of the individual to reach the highest potential of survival in terms
of self and his immediate symbiotes.
DYNAMIC TWO: The urge of the individual to reach the highest potential of survival in terms
of sex, the act and the creation of children and their rearing.
DYNAMIC THREE: The urge of the individual to reach the highest potential of survival in
terms of the group, whether civil, political, or racial, and the symbiotes of that group.
DYNAMIC FOUR: The urge of the individual to reach the highest potential of survival in terms
of Mankind and the symbiotes of Mankind.
Thus motivated, the individual or a society seeks survival and no human activity of any
kind has other basis: experiment, investigation and long testing demonstrated that the
unaberrated individual, the clear, was motivated in his actions and decisions by all the above
dynamics and not one alone.
The clear, the goal of dianetic therapy, can be created from psychotic, neurotic,
deranged, criminal or normal people if they have organically sound nervous systems. He
demonstrates the basic nature of Mankind and that basic nature has been found uniformly and
invariably to be good. That is now an established scientific fact, not an opinion.
The clear has attained a stable state on a very high plane. He is persistent and vigorous
and pursues life with enthusiasm and satisfaction. He is motivated by the four dynamics as
above. He has attained the full power and use of hitherto hidden abilities.
The inhibition of one or more dynamics in an individual causes an aberrated condition,
tends toward mental derangement and psycho-somatic illness and causes the individual to make
irrational conclusions and act, still in an effort to survive, in destructive ways.
Dianetic technique deletes, without drugs, hypnotism, surgery, shock or other artificial
means, the blocks from these various dynamics. The removal of these blocks permits the free
flow of the various dynamics and, of course, results in a heightened persistency in life and a
much higher intelligence.
The precision of dianetics makes it possible to impede or release these dynamics at will
with invariable results.
The hidden source of all inorganic mental disturbance and psycho-somatic illness was
one of the discoveries of dianetics. This source had been unknown and unsuspected, though
vigorously sought, for thousands of years. That the discovered source is the source requires
less laboratory proof than would have been necessary to have proven the correctness of
William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. The proof does not depend upon a
laboratory test with complicated apparatus but can be made in any group of men by any
intelligent individual.
The source of aberration has been found to be a hitherto unsuspected sub-mind which,
complete with its own recordings, underlies what man understands to be his “conscious” mind.
The concept of the unconscious mind is replaced in dianetics by the discovery that the
“unconscious” mind is the only mind which is always conscious. In dianetics this sub-mind is
called the reactive mind. A holdover from an earlier step in Man’s evolution, the reactive mind
possesses vigor and command power on a cellular level. It does not “remember”; it records and
uses the recordings only to produce action. It does not “think”; it selects recordings and
impinges them upon the “conscious” mind and the body without the knowledge or consent of
the individual. The only information the individual has of such action is his occasional
2.3
perception that he is not acting rationally about one thing or another and cannot understand
why. There is no Censor.
The reactive mind operates exclusively on physical pain and painful emotion. It is not
capable of differentiative thought but acts on the stimulus-response basis. This is the principle
on which the animal mind functions. It does not receive its recordings as memory or
experience but only as forces to be reactivated. It receives its recordings as cellular engrams
when the “conscious” mind is “unconscious.”
In a drugged state, when anaesthetized as in an operation, when rendered
“unconscious” by injury or illness, the individual yet has his reactive mind in full operation.
He may not be “aware” of what has taken place, but, as dianetics has discovered and can
prove, everything which happened to him in the interval of “unconsciousness” was fully and
completely recorded. This information is unappraised by his conscious mind, neither evaluated
nor reasoned. It can, at any future date, become reactivated by similar circumstances observed
by the awake and conscious individual. When any such recording, an engram, becomes
reactivated, it has command power. It shuts down the conscious mind to greater or lesser
degree, takes over the motor controls of the body and causes behavior and action to which the
conscious mind, the individual himself, would never consent. He is, nevertheless, handled like
a marionette by his engrams.
The antagonistic forces of the exterior environment thus become entered into the
individual himself without the knowledge or consent of the individual. And there they create an
interior world of force which exerts itself not only against the exterior world but against the
individual himself. Aberration is caused by what has been done to not done by the individual.
Man has unwittingly long aided the reactive mind by supposing that a person, when
“unconscious” from drugs, illness, injury or anaesthetic, had no recording ability. This permits
an enormous amount of data to enter into the reactive bank since none have been careful to
maintain silence around an “unconscious” person. The invention of language and the entrance
of language into the engram bank of the reactive mind seriously complicates the mechanistic
reactions. The engrams containing language impinge themselves upon the conscious mind as
commands. Engrams then contain command value much higher than any in the exterior world.
Thought is directed and motivated by the irrational engrams. Thought processes are disturbed
not only by these engramic commands but also by the fact that the reactive mind reduces, by
regenerating unconsciousness, the actual ability to think. Few people possess, because of this,
more than 10% of their potential awareness.
The entire physical pain and painful emotion of a lifetime, whether the individual
“knows” about it or not, is contained, recorded, in the engram bank. Nothing is forgotten. And
all physical pain and painful emotion, no matter how the individual may think he has handled it,
is capable of re-inflicting itself upon him from this hidden level, unless that pain is removed by
dianetic therapy.
The engram and only the engram causes aberration and psycho-somatic illness.
Dianetic therapy may be briefly stated. Dianetics deletes all the pain from a lifetime.
When this pain is erased in the engram bank and refiled as memory and experience in the
memory banks, all aberrations and psycho-somatic illnesses vanish, the dynamics are entirely
rehabilitated and the physical and mental being regenerate.
Dianetics leaves an individual full memory but without pain. Exhaustive tests have
demonstrated that hidden pain is not a necessity but is invariably and always a liability to the
health, skill, happiness and survival potential of the individual. It has no survival value.
The method which is used to refile pain is another discovery. Man has unknowingly
possessed another process of remembering of which he has not been cognizant. Here and there
a few have known about it and used it without realizing what they did or that they did
3.4
something which Man as a whole did not know could be done. This process is returning.
Wide awake and without drugs an individual can return to any period of his entire life
providing his passage is not blocked by engrams. Dianetics developed techniques for
circumventing these blocks and reducing them from the status of Powerful Unknown to useful
memory.
The technique of therapy is done in what is called a dianetic reverie. The individual
undergoing this process sits or lies in a quiet room accompanied by a friend or professional
therapist who acts as auditor. The auditor directs the attention of the patient to the patient’s self
and then begins to place the patient in various periods of the patient’s life merely by telling him
to go there rather than remember.
All therapy is done, not by remembering or associating, but by travel on the time track.
Every human being has a time track. It begins with life and it ends with death. It is a sequence
of events complete from portal to portal as recorded.
The conscious mind, in dianetics, is called by the somewhat more precise term of
analytical mind. The analytical mind consists of the “I” (the center of awareness), all
computational ability of the individual, and the standard memory banks which are filled with all
past perceptions of the individual, awake or normally asleep (all material which is not
engramic). No data are missing from these standard banks, all are there, barring physical
organic defects, in full motion, color, sound, tactile, smell and all other senses. The “I” may
not be able to reach his standard banks because of reactive data which bar portions of the
standard banks from the view of “I.”
Cleared, “I” is able to reach all moments of his lifetime without exertion or discomfort
and perceive all he has ever sensed, recalling them in full motion, color, sound, tone and other
senses. The completeness and profusion of data in the standard banks is a discovery of
dianetics, and the significance of such recalls is yet another discovery.
The auditor directs the travel of “I” along the patient’s time track. The patient knows
everything which is taking place, is in full control of himself, and is able to bring himself to the
present whenever he likes. No hypnotism or other means are used. Man may not have known
he could do this but it is simple.
The auditor, with precision methods, recovers data from the earliest “unconscious”
moments of the patient’s life, such “unconsciousness” being understood to be caused by shock
or pain, not mere unawareness. The patient thus contacts the cellular level engrams. Returned
to them and progressed through them by the auditor, the patient re-experiences these moments a
few times, when they are then erased and refiled automatically as standard memory. So far as
the auditor and the patient can discover, the entire incident has now vanished and does not
exist. If they searched carefully in the standard banks they would find it again but refiled as
“Once aberrative, do not permit as such into computer.” Late areas of “unconsciousness” are
impenetrable until early ones are erased.
The amount of discomfort experienced by the patient is minor. He is repelled mainly by
engramic commands which variously dictate emotion and reaction.
In a release, the case is not progressed to the point of complete recall. In a clear, fill
memory exists throughout the lifetime, with the additional bonus that he has photographic recall
in color, motion, sound, etc., as well as optimum computational ability.
The psycho-somatic illnesses of the release are reduced, ordinarily, to a level where
they do not thereafter trouble him. In a clear, psycho-somatic illness has become non-existent
and will not return since its actual source is nullified permanently.
The dianetic release is comparable to a current normal or above. The dianetic clear is to
a current normal individual as the current normal is to the severely insane.
4.5
Dianetics elucidates various problems with its many discoveries, its axioms, its
organization and its technique. In the progress of its development many astonishing data were
thrust upon it, for when one deals with natural laws and measurable actualities which produce
specific and invariable results, one must accept what Nature holds, not what is pleasing or
desired.
When one deals with facts rather than theories and gazes for the first time upon the
mechanisms of human action several things confound him, much as the flutterings of the heart
did
Harvey or the actions of yeasts did Pasteur. The blood did not circulate because Harvey
said it could nor yet because he said it did. It circulated and had been circulating for eons;
Harvey was clever and observant enough to find it; and this was much the case with Pasteur
and other explorers of the hitherto unknown or unconfirmed. In dianetics the fact that the
analytical mind was inherently perfect and remained structurally capable of restoration to full
operation was not the least of the data found.
That man was good, as established by exacting research, was no great surprise, but that
an unaberrated individual was vigorously repelled by evil and yet gained enormous strength
was astonishing since aberration had been so long incorrectly supposed to be the root of
strength and ambition according to authorities since the time of Plato.
That a man contained a mechanism which recorded with diabolical accuracy when the
man was observably and by all presumable tests “unconscious” was newsworthy and
surprising. To the layman the relationship of prenatal life to mental function has not entirely
been disregarded since for centuries beyond count people were concerned with “prenatal
influence.” To the psychiatrist, the psychologist and psycho-analyst, prenatal memory had long
been an accepted fact since “memories of the womb” were agreed to influence the adult mind.
But the prenatal aspect of the mind came as an entire surprise to dianetics, an unwanted and at
the time unwelcome observation.
Despite existing beliefs -- which are not scientific facts -- that the foetus had memory,
the psychiatrist and other workers believed as well that memory could not exist in a human
being until myelin sheathing was formed around the nerves. This was as confusing to dianetics
as it was to psychiatry. After much work over some years the exact influence prenatal life had
on the later mind was established by dianetics with accuracy. There will be those who,
uninformed, will say that dianetics “accepts and believes in” prenatal memory.
Completely aside from the fact that an exact science does not “believe” but establishes
and proves facts, dianetics emphatically does nor believe in “prenatal memory.” Dianetics had
to invade cytology and biology and form many conclusions by research; it had to locate and
establish both the reactive mind and the hidden engram banks never before known before it
came upon “prenatal” problems. It had been discovered that the engram recording was probably
done on the cellular level, that the engram bank was contained in the cells. It was then
discovered that the cells, reproducing from one generation to the next, within the organism,
apparently carried with them their own memory banks. The cells are the first echelon of
structure, the basic building blocks. They built the analytical mind. They operate, as the whip,
the reactive mind. Where one has human cells, one has potential engrams. Human cells begin
with the zygote, proceed in development with the embryo, become the foetus and finally the
infant.
Each stage of this growth is capable of reaction. Each stage in the growth of the colony
of cells finds them fully cells, capable of recording engrams. In dianetics “prenatal memory” is
not considered since the standard banks which will someday serve the completed analyzer in
the infant, child and man are not themselves complete. There is neither “memory” or
“experience” before the nerves are sheathed as far as dianetic therapy is concerned. But dianetic
therapy is concerned with engrams, not memories, with recordings, not experience, and
5.6
wherever there are human cells, engrams are demonstrably possible and, when physical pain
was present, engrams can be demonstrated to have been created.
The engram is a recording like the ripples in the groove of a phonograph record: it is a
complete recording of everything which occurred during the period of pain. Dianetics can
locate, with its techniques, any engram which the cells have hidden, and in therapy the patient
will often discover himself to be upon the prenatal cellular time track. There he will locate
engrams and he goes there only because engrams exist there.
Birth is an engram and is recovered by dianetics as a recording, not as a memory. By
return and the cellular extension of the time track, zygote pain storage can be and is recovered.
It is not memory. It impinged upon the analytical mind and it obstructed the standard banks
where memory is stored. This is a very great difference from prenatal memory. Dianetics
recovers prenatal engrams and finds them responsible for much aberration and discovers that
any longing for the womb is not present in any patient but that engrams sometimes dictate a
return to it, as in some regressive psychoses which then attempt to remake the body into a
foetus.
This matter of prenatal life is discussed here at length in this synopsis to give the reader
a perspective on the subject. We are dealing here with an exact science, precision axioms and
new skills of application. By them we gain a command over aberration and psycho-somatic ills
and with them we take an evolutionary step in the development of Man which places him yet
another stage above his distant cousins of the animal kingdom.
6.7
INTRODUCTION
The progress of Mankind from the period of savagery to the present is marked with
milestones. Conventional history books would have you believe that these milestones are battle
monuments or the tombs of great men. Yet there are more important markers of Man’s
progress -- and these are New Ideas. Whenever a New Idea has been created, Man’s chances
for survival have been improved and the arduousness of his journey away from animalhood is
lessened.
There have been numerous New Ideas in the past. To name a few of the more obvious,
consider the invention of the wheel, the control of fire, the development of mathematics or even
the newest one -- the discovery of the means of atomic fission. Every one of these ideas has
altered the progress of Mankind -- sometimes temporarily for the worse, but ultimately for
Man’s betterment.
In my opinion DIANETICS is worthy of being called a New Idea, and is destined to
take its place alongside of these other milestones of progress. It might even be considered to be
more important than any of these, for it is a science which for the first time gives us an
understanding of the tool with which these other inventions were created -- the human mind.
In the creation of any New Idea, there is one step which is highly important. It is so
obvious as to be frequently overlooked. This step, the sine qua non of any idea, consists in
examining the basic assumptions of the subject and determining whether or not they need to be
revised. The creator of a New Idea asks, “What would happen if I assume that this belief which
everyone has had for centuries isn’t necessarily so?”
The primitive man who invented the wheel did just that. His fellows assumed that,
when one wanted to transport an object, it had to be carried or dragged along the ground. The
inventor changed the assumption -- and the wheel was born.
Again, so long as man assumed that fire was dangerous and should be avoided, he
made no attempt to control it. When some brave soul re-examined this assumption and decided
that fire, although it entailed some hazards, might offer certain advantages to the dwellers in his
cave, he took the first step toward the creation of the science of chemistry and nuclear physics.
So it is with DIANETICS. In it there has been a reexamination and a re-evaluation of
numerous basic assumptions regarding the functioning of the human mind.
The originator has had both the temerity and the wisdom to refuse to accept all of the
old assumptions.
For example, we have all assumed that when a person is unconscious, he is
unconscious -- that’s all there is to it. The originator of dianetics was critical of that assumption
and, as a result, was able to demonstrate that the mind is never totally unconscious. The
assumption that nobody can remember anything which happened to him before the age of three
or four also came in for consideration -- and the result of these and other reassessments was
DIANETICS.
Yes, basic assumptions are important. They are especially important when they get such
a strangle-hold on our ways of thinking that we can’t get away from them. For hundreds of
years it was assumed that the sun and the planets revolved around the earth; it was not until the
assumption was tested and found to be faulty that modern astronomy was able to develop. For
hundreds of years a certain group of philosophers and religionists have assumed that Man is
fundamentally evil; now comes DIANETICS to test this assumption. It will be highly
interesting to see if there will be any change in our interpersonal relationships as a result of a
new, different basic assumption.
7.8
The basic assumption is also a long-lived brute, hard to kill. Perhaps one reason for his
hardiness is that he feeds upon Authority. There is a vast difference between Authority and an
authority. An authority might be described as a man who propounds a basic assumption which
is valid for his time and applicable to the state of knowledge at the time it was propounded and
has had his ideas accepted. No doubt this man would not be at all averse to altering his
assumptions if a change in knowledge warranted it. His protagonists and disciples don’t seem
to act this way, however; before very long they begin to treat his idea as if it were some sort of
divine revelation -- and the man now becomes an Authority.
The words of an Authority carry much more weight than do those of a mere authority.
They are sacrosanct, holy, not to be questioned; the words themselves are Authority. And, in
time, another change occurs; Authority becomes confused with knowledge and is accepted
blindly, unthinkingly. A man can even become an authority himself by knowing a great deal
about the things Authority said.
Perhaps the epitome of this sort of foolishness is exemplified in the attitude of
numerous doctors toward the work of Harvey, the man who first described the circulation of
the blood. Harvey’s views, even though they were well founded in observation and
experimentation, ran counter to those held by his predecessor, Galen, who was the great
medical Authority of that day. So great was the controversy that some men took the stand,
“Male errare cum Galen qualm veritam Harveii amplecti.” (“I would rather err with Galen than
accept Harvey’s truth.”)
Now, respect for authority is all very well. There are certain brands of authority which
we may tacitly agree to accept, such as customs and morals; there are other brands of authority
which we may vote to accept, such as our laws. But we should be wary of self-constituted
authority, especially the type I have called Authority. We should feel free to examine the basic
assumptions of any body of knowledge we wish, without fear of committing lese majeste. If
any system of thought is going to wither in the light of investigation, it does not deserve the
title of Authority.
The originator of DIANETICS has, without the slightest effort towards being
iconoclastic, succeeded in dislodging a good many of our false gods of Authority from their
pedestals. perhaps the job wasn’t too difficult -- so many of the idols who bear that name have
feet of the poorest sort of clay. Those authorities whose work was sound and valid are still in
their proper places in the temple of Knowledge, and will no doubt continue to remain.
In early 1948 I first heard about DIANETICS from a colleague. I studied it, getting
reports from others who were familiar with aspects of the therapy. Shortly thereafter I
corresponded with the originator of dianetics, which resulted in my traveling East to study with
him, and finally, in my experiencing personal dianetic therapy under his supervision.
For the past year I have been practicing DIANETICS on my patients, on my friends,
and on my family. For the first time in my life, I’m satisfied that there is a method by which
many questions, hitherto unanswerable, can be answered with definiteness and proven correct.
Correct, insofar as the improved health of the patient is concerned. Correct, insofar as his
well-being has been implemented by a feeling of security. Correct, insofar as his approach to
living has become more advanced, interesting, and productive of growth. To me this
correctness is meaningful and worthy of acceptance.
Let me state that this is my opinion. I do not urge you to accept that opinion; I would
much prefer that you make your own tests of DIANETICS, carefully, impartially, and arrive at
your own opinion. This statement is directed towards doctors in general, psychiatrists,
psychologists, psycho-analysts, etc., as well as the layman.
DIANETICS is a science. It has certain laws, and by following these laws we can
predict the results which will be obtained under given circumstances. These laws have no
exceptions -- or at least, no exceptions have been found. In this respect the laws of
8.9
DIANETICS are like the law of gravity: if you suspend a mass heavier than air above the
ground and then remove the support, it will fall. It won’t fall seventy per cent of the time or
eighty per cent of the time; it will always fall. And if it doesn’t fall, we are justified in re-examining
the law.
The discovery that engrams (the ability of the cell to record a lasting trace of an event)
are recorded on a cellular level when the higher sphere of the mind is “unconscious,”
insensitive, and not recording (as, for instance, in severe injury, delirium, or surgical
anaesthesia) and that the recorded engrams then received are highly reactive, portends a new
trend for psychological and psychiatric thought and practice. The engram recorded during a
period of “unconsciousness” is susceptible to reactivation during future periods of mental
anguish. This fact has been found to be a single, direct source of aberrated behavior. Its
discovery and isolation with the mechanics of its operation within the psyche, bring new and
brilliant light to hitherto obscure phenomena of the mind and its behavior. The engram, hidden
beneath unexplored layers of “unconsciousness,” possesses a power of command not unlike
that of a hidden and unsuspected monitor upon the conscious mind; it produces effects which
are comparable to those of a post-hypnotic suggestion, though in a far more insidious and
involved manner and with greater and more tragic effect.
The technique of DIANETIC therapy is basically simple and can be understood and
applied to each other by any two reasonably intelligent people after a brief study of this volume,
which is the operating manual for therapy. (Dianetic psychiatric treatment of severe
derangements is also delineated.) No previous background in psycho-analysis or psychology is
necessary. The therapeutic technique offered in DIANETICS is independent of hypnotism or
narco-synthesis.
1. DIANETICS will help you to eliminate any psychosomatic illness from which you may
suffer.
2. DIANETICS will help you achieve at least one-third more than present capacity for
work and happiness.
3. DIANETICS offers to the medical profession, to psychiatrists, to psycho-analysts, to
all who are interested in the advancement of their fellow men, a new theory and
technique which makes accessible for therapy diseases and symptoms which hitherto
were unusually complex and obscure.
4. DIANETICS is the most advanced and most clearly presented method of psycho-therapy
and self-improvement ever discovered.
At this point, I step out -- the job ahead is yours.
J. A. Winter, M. D.
9.10
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
Dianetics is an adventure. It is an exploration into Terra Incognita, the human mind, that
vast and hitherto unknown realm half an inch back of our foreheads.
The discoveries and developments which made the formulation of dianetics possible
occupied many years of exact research and careful testing. This was exploration, it was also
consolidation. The trail is blazed, the routes are sufficiently mapped for you to voyage in safety
into your own mind and recover there your full inherent potential, which is not, we now know,
low but very, very high. As you progress in therapy the adventure is yours to know why you
did what you did when you did it, to know what caused those Dark and Unknown Fears which
came in nightmares as a child, to know where your moments of pain and pleasure lay. There is
much which an individual does not know about himself, about his parents, about his
“motives.” Some of the things you will find may astonish you, for the most important data of
your life may be not memory but engrams in the hidden depths of your mind, not articulate but
only destructive.
You will find many reasons why you “cannot get well” and you will know at length,
when you find the dictating lines in the engrams, how amusing those reasons are, especially to
you.
Dianetics is no solemn adventure. For all that it has to do with suffering and loss, its
end is always laughter, so foolish, so misinterpreted were the things which caused the woe.
Your first voyage into your own Terra Incognita will be through the pages of this book.
You will find as you read that many things “you always knew were so” are articulated here.
You will be gratified to know that you held not opinions but scientific facts in many of your
concepts of existence. You will find, too, many data that have long been known by all, and you
will possibly consider them far from news and be prone to underevaluate them: be assured that
underevaluation of these facts kept them from being valuable, no matter how long they were
known, for a fact is never important without a proper evaluation of it and its precise
relationship to other facts. You are following here a vast network of facts which, reaching out,
can be seen to embrace the whole field of Man in all his works. Fortunately you do not have to
concern yourself with following far any one of these lines until you are done. And then these
horizons will stretch wide enough to satisfy anyone.
Dianetics is a large subject, but that is only because Man is himself a large subject. The
science of his thought cannot but embrace all his actions. By careful compartmenting and
relating of data, the field has been kept narrow enough to be easily followed. Mostly this
handbook will tell you, without any specific mention, about yourself and your family and
friends, for you will meet them here and know them.
This volume has made no effort to use resounding or thunderous phrases, frowning
polysyllables or professorial detachment. When one is delivering answers which are simple, he
need not make the communication any more difficult than is necessary to convey the ideas.
“Basic language” has been used, much of the nomenclature is colloquial; the pedantic has not
only not been employed, it has also been ignored. This volume communicates to several strata
of life and professions; the favorite nomenclatures of none have been observed since such a
usage would impede the understanding of others. And so bear with us, psychiatrist, when
your structure is not used, for we have no need for structure here, and bear with us, doctor,
when we call a cold a cold and not a catarrhal disorder of the respiratory tract. For this is,
essentially, engineering and these engineers are liable to say anything. And “scholar,” you
would not enjoy being burdened with the summation signs and the Lorentz-Fitzgerald-Einstein
equations, so we shall not burden the less puristic reader with scientifically impossible
Hegelian grammar which insists that absolutes exist in fact.
10.11
The plan of the book might be represented as a cone which starts with simplicity and
descends into wider application. This book follows, more or less, the actual steps of the
development of dianetics. First there was the dynamic principle of existence, then its meaning,
then the source of aberration, and finally the application of all as therapy and the techniques of
therapy. You won’t find any of this very difficult. It was the originator who had the difficulty.
You should have seen the first equations and postulates of dianetics! As research progressed
and as the field developed, dianetics began to simplify. That is a fair guarantee that one is on a
straight trail of science. Only things which are poorly known become more complex the longer
one works upon them.
It is suggested that you read straight on through. By the time you get into the appendix,
you should have an excellent command of the subject. The book is arranged that way. Every
fact related to dianetic therapy is stated in several ways and is introduced again and again. In
this way, the important facts have been pointed up to your attention. When you have finished
the book you can come back to the beginning and look through it and study what you think you
need to know.
Almost all the basic philosophy and certainly all the derivations of the master subject of
dianetics were excluded here, partly because this volume had to stay under half a million words
and partly because they belong in a separate text where they can receive full justice.
Nevertheless, you have the scope of the science with this volume in addition to therapy itself.
You are beginning an adventure. Treat it as an adventure. And may you never be the
same again.
11.12
Book One
THE GOAL OF MAN
12.13
CHAPTER 1
The Scope of Dianetics
A science of mind is a goal which has engrossed thousands of generations of Man.
Armies, dynasties and whole civilizations have perished for the lack of it. Rome went to dust
for the want of it. China swims in blood for the need of it; and down in the arsenal is an atom
bomb, its hopeful nose full-armed in ignorance of it.
No quest has been more relentlessly pursued or has been more violent. No primitive
tribe, no matter how ignorant, has failed to recognize the problem as a problem, nor has it
failed to bring forth at least an attempted formulation. Today one finds the aborigine of
Australia substituting for a science of mind a “magic healing crystal.” The Shaman of British
Guiana makes shift for actual mental laws with his monotonous song and consecrated cigar.
The throbbing drum of the Goldi medicine man serves in the stead of an adequate technique to
alleviate the lack of serenity in patients.
The enlightened and golden age of Greece yet had but superstition in its principal
sanatoria for mental ills, the Aesculapian temple. The most the Roman could do for peace of
mind for the sick was to appeal to the penates, the household divinities, or sacrifice to Febris,
goddess of fevers. And an English king, centuries after, could have been found in the hands of
exorcists who sought to cure his deliriums by driving the demons from him.
From the most ancient times to the present, in the crudest primitive tribe or the most
magnificently ornamented civilization, Man has found himself in a state of awed helplessness
when confronted by the phenomena of strange illnesses or aberrations. His desperation, in his
efforts to treat the individual, has been but slightly altered during his entire history, and until
this twentieth century passed mid-term, the percentages of his alleviations, in terms of
individual mental derangements, compared evenly with the successes of the shamans
confronted with the same problems. According to a modern writer, the single advance of
psycho-therapy was clean quarters for the madman. In terms of brutality in treatment of the
insane, the methods of the shaman or Bedlam have been far exceeded by the “civilized”
techniques of destroying nerve tissues with the violence of shock and surgery, treatments
which were not warranted by the results obtained and which would not have been tolerated in
the meanest primitive society, since they reduce the victim to mere zombie-ism, destroying
most of his personality and ambition and leaving him nothing more than a manageable animal.
Far from an indictment of the practices of the “neurosurgeon” and the ice-pick which he thrusts
and twists into insane minds, they are brought forth only to demonstrate the depths of
desperation man can reach when confronted with the seemingly unsolvable problem of
deranged minds.
In the larger sphere of societies and nations, the lack of such a science of mind was
never more evident; for the physical sciences, advancing thoughtlessly far in advance of man’s
ability to understand man, have armed him with terrible and thorough weapons which await
only another outburst of the social insanity of war.
These problems are not mild ones; they lie across every man’s path; they wait in
company with his future. As long as Man has recognized that his chief superiority over the
animal kingdom was a thinking mind, so long as he understood that his mind alone was his
weapon, he has searched and pondered and postulated in efforts to find a solution.
Like a jig-saw puzzle spilled by a careless hand, the equations which would lead to a
science of the mind and, above that, to a master science of the universe, were stirred round and
round. Sometimes two fragments would be united; sometimes, as in the case of the golden age
of Greece, a whole section would be built. Philosopher, shaman, medicine man,
mathematician: each looked at the pieces. Some saw they must all belong to different puzzles.
Some thought they all belonged to the same puzzle. Some said there were really six puzzles in
13.14
it, some said two. And the wars went on and the societies sickened or were dispersed, and
learned tomes were written about ever-increasing hordes of madmen.
With the methods of Bacon, with the mathematics of Newton, the physical sciences
went on, consolidating and advancing their frontiers. And, like a derelict battalion, careless of
how many allied ranks it exposed to destruction by the enemy, studies of the mind lagged
behind.
But after all, there are just so many pieces in any puzzle. Before and after Francis
Bacon, Herbert Spencer and a very few more, many of the small sections had been put
together, many honest facts had been observed.
To adventure into the thousands of variables of which that puzzle was composed, one
had only to know right from wrong, true from false, and use all Man and Nature as his test
tube.
Of what must a science of mind be composed?
1. An answer to the goal of thought.
2. A single source of all insanities, psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, repressions and
social derangements.
3. Invariant scientific evidence as to the basic nature and functional background of the
human mind.
4. Techniques, the art of application, by which the discovered single source could be
invariably cured, ruling out, of course, the insanities of malformed, deleted or
pathologically injured brains or nervous systems and, particularly, iatrogenic psychoses
(those caused by doctors and involving the destruction of the living brain itself).
5. Methods of prevention of mental derangement.
6. The cause and cure of all psycho-somatic ills, which number, some say, 70% of Man’s
listed ailments.
Such a science would exceed the severest terms previously laid down for it in any age,
but any computation on the subject should discover that a science of mind ought to be able to be
and do just these things.
A science of the mind, if it were truly worthy of that name, would have to rank, in
experimental precision, with physics and chemistry. There could be no “special cases” to its
laws. There could be no recourse to Authority. The atom bomb bursts whether Einstein gives it
permission or not. Laws native to Nature regulate the bursting of that bomb. Technicians,
applying techniques derived from discovered natural laws, can make one or a million atom
bombs, all alike.
After the body of axioms and technique was organized and working as a science of
mind, in rank with the physical sciences, it would be found to have points of agreement with
almost every school of thought about thought which had ever existed. This is again a virtue and
not a fault.
Simple though it is, dianetics does and is these things:
1. It is an organized science of thought built on definite axioms: statements of natural laws
on the order of those of the physical sciences.
14.15
2. It contains a therapeutic technique with which can be treated all inorganic mental ills and
all organic psychosomatic ills, with assurance of complete cure in unselected cases.
3. It produces a condition of ability and rationality for Man well in advance of the current
norm, enhancing rather than destroying his vigor and personality.
4. Dianetics gives a complete insight into the full potentialities of the mind, discovering
them to be well in excess of past suppression.
5. The basic nature of man is discovered in dianetics rather than hazarded or postulated,
since that basic nature can be brought into action in any individual completely. And that
basic nature is discovered to be good.
6. The single source of mental derangement is discovered and demonstrated, on a clinical
or laboratory basis, by dianetics.
7. The extent, storage capacity and recallability of the human memory is finally established
by dianetics.
8. The full recording abilities of the mind are discovered by dianetics with the conclusion
that they are quite dissimilar to former suppositions.
9. Dianetics brings forth the non-germ theory of disease, complementing bio-chemistry
and Pasteur’s work on the germ theory to embrace the field.
10. With dianetics ends the “necessity” of destroying the brain by shock or surgery to effect
“tractability” in mental patients and “adjust” them.
11. A workable explanation of the physiological effects of drugs and endocrine substances
exists in dianetics and many problems posed by endocrinology are answered.
12. Various educational, sociological, political, military, and other human studies are
enhanced by dianetics.
13. The field of cytology is aided by dianetics, as well as other fields of research.
This, then, is a skeletal sketch of what would be the scope of a science of mind and of what is
the scope of dianetics.
15.16
CHAPTER II
The Clear
Dianetically, the optimum individual is called the clear. One will hear much of that
word, both as a noun and a verb, in this volume, so it is well to spend time here at the outset
setting forth exactly what can be called a clear, the goal of dianetic therapy.
A clear can be tested for any and all psychoses, neuroses, compulsions and repressions
(all aberrations) and can be examined for any autogenic (self-generated) diseases referred to as
psycho-somatic ills. These tests confirm the clear to be entirely without such ills or aberrations.
Additional tests of his intelligence indicate it to be high above the current norm. Observation of
his activity demonstrates that he pursues existence with vigor and satisfaction.
Further, these results can be obtained on a comparative basis. A neurotic individual,
possessed also of psychosomatic ills, can be tested for those aberrations and illnesses,
demonstrating that they exist. He can then be given dianetic therapy to the end of clearing these
neuroses and ills. Finally, he can be examined, with the above results. This, in passing, is an
experiment which has been performed many times with invariable results. It is a matter of
laboratory test that all individuals who have organically complete nervous systems respond in
this fashion to dianetic clearing.
Further, the clear possesses attributes, fundamental and inherent but not always
available in an uncleared state, which have not been suspected of Man and are not included in
past discussions of his abilities and behavior.
First there is the matter of perceptions. Even so-called normal people do not always see
in full color, hear in full tone, or sense at the optimum with their organs of smell, taste, tactile
and organic sensation.
These are the main lines of communication to the finite world which most people
recognize as reality. It is an interesting commentary that while past observers felt that the facing
of reality was an absolute necessity if the aberrated individual wished to be sane, no definition
of how this was to be done was set forth. To face reality in the present one would certainly
have to be able to sense it along those channels of communication most commonly used by man
in his affairs.
Any one of Man’s perceptions can be aberrated by psychic derangements which refuse
to permit the received sensations to be realized by the analytical portion of the individual’s
mind. In other words, while there may be nothing wrong with the mechanisms of color
reception, circuits can exist in the mind which delete color before the consciousness is
permitted to see the object. Color blindness can be discovered to be relative or in degrees in
such a way that colors appear to be less brilliant, dull or, at the maximum, entirely absent.
Anyone is acquainted with persons to whom “loud” colors are detestable and with persons who
find them insufficiently “loud” to notice. This varying degree of color blindness has not been
recognized as a psychic factor but has been nebulously assumed to be some sort of a condition
of mind when it was noticed at all.
There are those persons to whom noises are quite disturbing, to whom, for instance,
the insistent whine of a violin is very like having a brace and bit applied to the eardrum; and
there are those to whom fifty violins, played loudly, would be soothing; and there are those
who, in the presence of a violin, express disinterest and boredom; and, again, there are persons
to whom the sound of a violin, no matter if it be playing the most intricate melody, is a
monotone. These differences of sonic (hearing) perception have, like color and other visual
errors, been attributed to inherent nature or organic deficiency or assigned no place at all.
16.17
In a like manner, from person to person, smells, tactile sensations, organic perceptions,
pain and gravity, vary widely and wildly. A cursory check around amongst his friends will
demonstrate to a man that there exist enormous differences of perception of identical stimuli.
One smells a turkey in the oven as wonderful, one smells it with indifference, another may not
smell it at all. And somebody else may maintain that roasting turkey smells exactly like hair oil
-- to be extreme.
Until we obtain clears it remains obscure why such differences should exist. For in the
largest measure, such wild quality and quantity of perception is due to aberration. Because of
pleasurable experiences in the past and inherent sensitivity, there will be some difference
amongst clears, and a clear response should not be assumed automatically to be a standardized,
adjusted middle ground, that pallid and obnoxious goal of past doctrines. The clear gets a
maximum response compatible with his own desire for the response. Burning cordite still
smells dangerous to him, but it does not make him ill. Roasting turkey smells good to him if he
is hungry and likes turkey, at which time it smells very, very good. Violins play melodies, not
monotones, bring no pain and are enjoyed to a fine full limit if the clear likes violins as a matter
of taste -- if he doesn’t, he likes kettledrums, saxophones or, indeed, suiting his mood, no
music at all.
In other words, there are two variables at work. One, the wildest, is the variable caused
by aberrations. The other, and quite rational and understandable, is caused by the personality.
Thus the perceptions of an aberree* (non-cleared individual) * Aberree is a neologism
meaning an aberrated person vary greatly from those of the cleared (unaberrated) individual.
Now there are the differences of the actual organs of perception and the errors
occasioned by these. Some of these errors, a minimum, are organic: punctured eardrums are
not competent sound-recording mechanisms. The majority of perceptic (sense message) errors
in the organic sphere are caused by psycho-somatic errors.
Glasses are seen on noses everywhere around, even on children. The majority of these
spectacles are perched on the face in an effort to correct a condition which the body itself is
fighting to uncorrect again. Eyesight, when the stage of glasses is entered (not because of
glasses), is deteriorating on the psycho-somatic principle. And this observation is about as
irresponsible as a statement that when apples fall out of trees they usually obey gravity. One of
the incidental things which happen to a clear is that his eyesight, if it had been bad as an
aberree, generally improves markedly, and with some slight attention will recover optimum
perception in time. (Far from an optician’s argument against dianetics, this assures rather good
business, for clears have been known, at treatment’s end, to have to buy, in rapid succession,
five pairs of glasses to compensate adjusting eyesight; and many aberrees, cleared late in life,
settle down ocularly at a maximum a little under optimum.)
The eyesight was reduced in the aberree on an organic basis by his aberrations so that
the perceptic organ itself was reduced from optimum operating function. With the removal of
aberrations, repeated tests have proven that the body makes a valiant effort to reconstruct back
to optimum.
Hearing, in addition to other perceptics, varies organically over a wide range. Calcium
deposits, for instance, can make the ears “ring” incessantly. The removal of aberrations permits
the body to readjust toward its reachable optimum, the calcium deposit disappears, and the ears
stop ringing. But far and beyond this very specific case, there are great differences in hearing
on the organic basis. Organically as well as aberrationally, hearing can become remarkably
extended or closely inhibited so that one person may hear footsteps a block away as a normal
activity and another would not hear a bass drum thundering on the porch.
That the various perceptions differ widely from individual to individual on an
aberrational and psycho-somatic basis is the least of the discoveries outlined here. Ability to
recall is far more fantastic in its variation from person to person.
17.18
An entirely new recall process which was inherent in the mind but which had not been
noticed came to light in the process of observing clears and aberrees. This recall process is
possible in only a small proportion of aberrees in its fullest sense. It is standard, however, in a
clear. Naturally, no intimation is made here that the scholars of past ages have been
unobservant. We are dealing here with an entirely new and hitherto non-existent object of
inspection, the clear. What a clear can do easily, quite a few people have, from time to time,
been partially able to do in the past.
An inherent, not a taught, ability of the remembering mechanisms of the mind can be
termed, as a technical word of dianetics, returning. It is used in its dictionary sense, with the
addition of the fact that the mind has it as a normal remembering function, as follows: the
person can “send” a portion of his mind to a past period on either a mental or combined mental
and physical basis and can re-experience incidents which have taken place in his past in the
same fashion and with the same sensations as before. Once upon a time an art known as
hypnotism used what was called “regression” on hypnotized subjects, the hypnotist sending the
subject back, in one of two ways, to incidents in his past. This was done with trance
techniques, drugs and considerable technology.
The hypnotic subject could be sent back to a moment “entirely” so that he gave every
appearance of being the age to which he was returned with only the apparent faculties and
recollections he had at that moment: this was called “revivification” (re-living). “Regression”
was a technique by which part of the individual’s self remained in the present and part went
back to the past. These abilities of the mind were supposed native only in hypnotism and were
used only in hypnotic technique. The art is very old, tracing back some thousands of years and
existing today in Asia as it has existed, apparently, from the dawn of time.
Returning is substituted for “regression” here because it is not a comparable thing and
because “regression,” as a word, has some bad meanings which would interrupt its use.
Reliving is substituted for “revivification” in dianetics because, in dianetics, the principles of
hypnotism can be found explained and hypnotism is not used in dianetic therapy, as will be
explained later.
The mind, then, has another ability to remember. Part of the mind can “return” even
when a person is wide awake and re-experience past incidents in full. If you want to test this,
try it on several people until one is discovered who does it easily. Wide awake he can “return”
to moments in his past. Until asked to do so he probably will not know he has such an ability.
If he had it, he probably thought everybody could do it (the type of supposition which has kept
so much of this data from coming to light before). He can go back to a time when he was
swimming and swim with full recall of hearing, sight, taste, smell, organic sensation, tactile,
etc.
A “learned” gentleman once spent some hours demonstrating to a gathering that the
recall of a smell as a sensation, for instance, was quite impossible since “neurology had proven
that the olfactory nerves were not connected to the thalamus.” Two people in the gathering
discovered this ability to return and despite this evidence, the learned gentleman continued the
dispute that olfactory recall was impossible. A check amongst the gathering on this faculty,
independent of returning, brought forth the fact that one-half of those present remembered
smell by smelling it again.
Returning is the full performance of imagery recall. The entire memory is able to make
the organ areas re-sense the stimuli in a past incident. Partial recall is common, not common
enough to be normal, but certainly common enough to have merited considerable study. For it
again is a wide variable.
Perception of the present would be one method of facing reality. But if one cannot face
the reality of the past then, in some part, he is not facing some portion of reality. And if it is
ageed that facing reality is desirable, then one would have to face yesterday’s reality as well if
he were to be considered entirely “sane” by contemporary definition. To “face yesterday”
18.19
requires a certain condition of recall to be available. One would have to be able to remember.
But how many ways are there of remembering?
First there is the return. That is new. It gives the advantage of examining the moving
pictures and other sense perceptions recorded at the time of the event with all senses present.
He can also return to his past conclusions and imaginings. It is of considerable aid in learning,
in research, in ordinary living to be able to be again at the place where the data desired was first
inspected.
Then there are the more usual recalls. Optimum recall is by the return method of single
or multiple senses, the individual himself remaining in present time. In other words, some
people, when they think of a rose, see one, smell one, feel one. They see in full color, vividly
-- with the “mind’s eye” to use an old colloquialism. They smell it vividly. And they can feel it
even to the thorns. They are thinking about roses by actually recalling a rose.
These people, thinking about a ship, would see a specific ship, feel the motion of her if
they thought of being aboard her, smell the pine-tar or even less savory odors and hear
whatever sounds there were about her. They would see the ship in full color motion and hear it
in full tone audio.
These faculties vary widely in the aberree. Some, when told to think of a rose, can
merely visualize one. Some can smell one but not see it. Some see it without color or in very
pale color. When told to think of a ship some aberrees only see a flat, colorless, still picture
such as a painting of a ship or the photograph of one. Some perceive a vessel in motion without
color but with sound. Some hear the sound of a ship but fail to see any picture whatever.
Some merely think of a ship as a concept that ships exist and that they know about them and
fail to see, feel, hear, smell or otherwise sense anything on a recall basis.
Some past observers have called this “imagery” but the term is so inapplicable to sound
and touch, organic sensation and pain that recall is used uniformly as the technical dianetic
term. The value of recall in this business of living has occupied such scant attention that the
entire concept has never been formulated previously. It is therefore detailed at some length
here, as above.
It is quite simple to test recalls. If one will ask his fellows what their abilities are, he
will gain a remarkable idea of how widely varied this ability is from individual to individual.
Some have this recall, some have that, some have none, but operate on concepts of recall only.
And remember, if you make a test on those around you, that any perception is filed in the
memory and therefore has a recall which is to include pain, temperature, rhythm, taste and
weight with the above mentioned sight, sound, tactile, and smell.
The dianetic names for these recalls are visio (sight), sonic (sound), tactile (touch),
olfactory (smell), rhythmic, kinesthetic (weight and motion), somatic (pain), thermal
(temperature) and organic (internal sensations and, by new definition, emotion).
Then there is another set of mental activities which can be summated under the headings
of imagination and creative imagination. Here again is abundant material for testing.
Imagination is the recombination of things one has sensed, thought or intellectually
computed into existence, which do not necessarily have existence. This is the mind’s method of
envisioning desirable goals or forecasting futures. Imagination is extremely valuable as a part
of essential solutions in any mental problem and in everyday existence. That it is recombination
in no sense deprives it of its vast and wonderful complexity.
A clear uses imagination in its entirety. There is an imagination impression for sight,
smell, taste, sound -- in short, for each one of the possible perceptions. These are
manufacturered impressions on the basis of models in the memory banks combined by
conceptual ideas and construction. New physical structures, tomorrow in terms of today, next
19.20
year in terms of last year, pleasure to be gained, deeds to be done, accidents to avoid, all these
are imaginational functions.
The clear has full color-visio, tone-sonic, tactile, olfactory, rhythmic, kinesthetic,
thermal and organic imagination in kind. Asked to envision himself riding in a gilded coach and
four, he “sees” the equipage, moving, in full color, he “hears” all the noises which should be
present, he “smells” the smells he thinks should be there, and he “feels” the upholstery, the
motion, and the presence in the coach of himself.
In addition to standard imagination there is creative imagination. This is a very wide
undimensional ability, quite variable from individual to individual, possessed in enormous
quantity by some. It is included here, not as a portion of the operation of the mind treated as a
usual part of dianetics, but to isolate it as an existing entity. In a clear who possessed creative
imagination, even if inhibited, as an aberree, it is present and demonstrable. It is inherent. It
can be aberrated only by prohibition of its general practice, which is to say, by aberrating the
persistence in its application or encysting the whole mind. But creative imagination, that
possession by which works of art are done, states builded and Man enriched, can be
envisioned as a special function, independent in operation and in no way dependent for its
existence upon an aberrated condition in the individual, since the examination of its activity in
and use by a clear possessing adequately demonstrates its inherent character. It is rarely absent
in any individual.
Finally, there is the last but most important activity of the mind. Man is to be regarded
as a sentient being. His sentience depends upon his ability to resolve problems by perceiving or
creating and understanding situations. This rationality is the primary, high echelon function of
that part of the mind which makes him a Man, not just another animal. Remembering,
perceiving, imagining, he has the signal ability of resolving conclusions and of using
conclusions resolved to resolve further conclusions. This is rational Man.
Rationality, as divorced from aberration, can be studied in a cleared person only. The
aberrations of the aberree give him the appearance of irrationality. Though such irrationality
may be given the gentler names of “eccentricity” or “human error” or even “personal
idiosyncrasy,” it is, nevertheless, irrationality. The personality does not depend upon how
irrationally a man may act. It is not a personality trait, for instance, to drive while drunk and
kill a child on a crosswalk -- or even to risk killing a child by driving while drunk. Irrationality
is simply that -- the inability to get right answers from data.
Now it is a curious thing that although “everybody knows” (and what a horrible amount
of misinformation that statement lets circulate) it is “human to err,” the sentient portion of the
mind which computes the answers to problems and which makes man Man is utterly incapable
of error.
This was a startling discovery when it was made, but it need not have been. It could
have been deduced some time before. For it is quite simple and easy to understand. The actual
computing ability of Man is never in error even in a very severely aberrated person. Observing
the activity of such an aberrated person, one might thoughtlessly suppose that that person’s
computations were wrong. But that would be an observer error. Any person, aberrated or
clear, computes perfectly on the data stored and perceived.
Take any common calculating machine (and the mind is an exceptionally magnificent
instrument far, far superior to any machine it will invent for ages to come) and put a problem
on it for solution. Multiply seven times one. It will answer, properly, seven. Now multiply six
times one but continue to hold down the seven. Six times one is six but the answer you will get
is forty-two. Continue to hold down seven and put other problems on the machine. They are
wrong, not as problems, but as answers. Now fix seven so that it stays down no matter what
keys are touched and try to give the machine away. Nobody will want it because, obviously,
the machine is crazy. It says ten times ten is seven hundred. But is the calculating portion of the
machine really wrong or is it merely being fed the wrong data?
20.21
In the same way the human mind, being called upon to resolve problems of a magnitude
and with enough variables to confound any mere calculating machine a thousand times an hour,
is prey to incorrect data. Incorrect data gets into the machine. The machine gives wrong
answers. Incorrect data enters the human memory banks, the person reacts in an “abnormal
manner.” Essentially, then, the problem of resolving aberration is the problem of finding a
“held-down seven.” But of that much, much more, later. Right now we have accomplished our
immediate ends.
These are the various abilities and activities of the human mind in its constant task of
resolving and putting into solution a multitude of problems. It perceives, it recalls or returns, it
imagines, it conceives and then resolves. Served by its extensions -- the perceptics and the
memory banks and the imaginations -- the mind brings forth answers which are invariably
accurate, modified only by observation, education and viewpoint.
And the basic purposes of that mind and the basic nature of man, as discoverable in the
clear, are constructive and good, uniformly constructive and uniformly good, the solutions
modified only by observation, education and viewpoint.
Man is good.
Take away his basic aberrations and with them go the evil of which the Scholastic and
the moralist were so fond. The only detachable portion of him is the “evil” portion. And when
it is detached, his personality and vigor intensify. And he is glad to see the “evil” portion go
because it was physical pain.
Later there are experiments and proofs for these things and they can be measured with
the precision so dear to the heart of the physical scientist.
The clear, then, is not an “adjusted” person, driven to activity by his repressions now
thoroughly encysted. He is an unrepressed person, operating on self-determinism. And his
abilities to perceive, recall, return, imagine, create and compute are outlined as we have seen.
The clear is the goal in dianetic therapy, a goal which some patience and a little study
and work can bring about. Any person can be cleared unless he has been so unfortunate as to
have had a large portion of his brain removed or to have been born with a grossly malformed
nervous structure.
We have seen the goal of dianetics here. Let us now inspect the goal of Man.
21.22
CHAPTER III
The Goal of Man
The goal of Man, the lowest common denominator of all his activities, the dynamic
principle of his existence, has long been sought. Should such an answer be discovered, it is
inevitable that from it many answers would flow. It would explain all phenomena of behavior;
it would lead toward a solution of Man’s major problems; and, most of all, it should be
workable.
Consider all knowledge to fall above or below a line of demarcation. Everything above
this line is not necessary to the solution of Man’s aberrations and general shortcomings and is
inexactly known. Such a field of thought could be considered to embrace such things as
metaphysics and mysticism. Below this line of demarcation could be considered to lie the finite
universe. All things in the finite universe, whether known or as yet unknown, can be sensed,
experienced or measured. The known data in the finite universe can be classified as scientific
truth when it has been sensed, experienced and measured. All factors necessary to the
resolution of a science of the mind were found within the finite universe and were discovered,
sensed, measured and experienced, and became scientific truth. The finite universe contains
TIME, SPACE, ENERGY and LIFE. No other factors were found necessary in the equation.
TIME, SPACE, ENERGY and LIFE have a single denominator in common. As an
analogy it could be considered that TIME, SPACE, ENERGY and LIFE began at some point of
origin and were commanded to continue to some nearly infinite destination. They were told
nothing but WHAT to do. They obey a single order and that order is “SURVIVE!”
THE DYNAMIC PRINCIPLE OF EXISTENCE IS SURVIVAL The goal of life can
be considered to be infinite survival. Man, as a life form, can be demonstrated to obey in all
his actions and purposes the one command: “SURVIVE!”
It is not a new thought that Man is surviving. It is a new thought that Man is motivated
only by survival.
That his single goal is survival does not mean that he is the optimum survival
mechanism which life has attained or will develop. The goal of the dinosaur was also survival
and the dinosaur isn’t extant any more.
Obedience to this command, “SURVIVE!” does not mean that every attempt to obey is
uniformly successful. Changing environment, mutation, and many other things militate against
any one organism attaining infallible survival techniques or form.
Life forms change and die as new life forms develop just as surely as one life organism,
lacking immortality in itself, creates other life organisms, then dies as itself. An excellent
method, should one wish to cause life to survive over a very long period, would be to establish
means by which it could assume many forms, and death itself would be necessary in order to
facilitate the survival of the life force itself, since only death and decay could clear away older
forms when new changes in the environment necessitated new forms. Life, as a force, existing
over a nearly infinite period, would need a cyclic aspect in its unit organisms and forms.
What would be the optimum survival characteristics of various life forms? They would
have to have various fundamental characteristics, differing from one species to the next just as
one environment differs from the next.
This is important, since it has been but poorly considered in the past that a set of
survival characteristics in one species would not be survival characteristics in another.
22.23
The methods of survival can be summed under the headings of food, protection
(defensive and offensive) and procreation. There are no existing life forms which lack solutions
to these problems. Every life form errs one way or another, by holding a characteristic too long
or developing characteristics which may lead to its extinction. But the developments which
bring about successfulness of form are far more striking than their errors. The naturalist and
biologist are continually resolving the characteristics of this or that life form by discovering that
need rather than whim govern such developments. The hinges of the clam shell, the awesome
face on the wing of the butterfly, have survival value.
Once survival was isolated as the only dynamic of a life form which would explain all
its activities, it was necessary to study further the action of survival. In order to establish
nomenclature in dianetics which would not be too complex for the purpose, words normally
considered as adjectives or verbs have occasionally been pressed into service as nouns. This
has been done on the valid principle that existing terminology, meaning so many different
things, could not be used by dianetics without making it necessary to explain away an old
meaning to bring forth a new. To remove the step of explaining the old meaning and saying
then that one doesn’t mean that, thus entangling our communications inextricably, and to
obviate the ancient custom of compounding ponderous and thundering syllables from the Greek
and Roman tongues, this principle and some others have been adopted for nomenclature.
Dynamic is here used as a noun and will so continue to be used throughout this volume.
Somatic, perceptic and some others will be noted, defined when used. It was discovered that
when one considered pain and pleasure, he had at hand all the necessary ingredients with which
to formulate the action life takes in its effort to survive.
As will be seen in the accompanying graph, a spectrum of life has been conceived to
span from the zero of death or extinction toward the infinity of potential immortality. This
spectrum was considered to contain an infinity of lines, extending ladderlike toward the
potential of immortality. Each line as the ladder mounted was spaced a little wider than the last,
in a geometric progression.
The thrust of survival is away from death and toward immortality. The ultimate pain
could be conceived as existing just before death and the ultimate pleasure could be conceived as
immortality.
Immortality could be said to have an attractive type of force and death a repelling force
in the consideration of the unit organism or the species. But as survival rises higher and higher
toward immortality wider and wider spaces are encountered until the gaps are finitely
impossible to bridge. The urge is away from death, which has a repelling force, and toward
immortality, which has an attracting force; the attracting force is pleasure, the repelling force is
pain.
For the individual, the length of the arrow could be considered to be at a high potential
within the fourth zone. Here the survival potential would be excellent and the individual would
enjoy existence.
From left to right could be graphed the years.
The urge toward pleasure is dynamic. Pleasure is the reward; and the seeking of the
reward -- survival goals -- would be a pleasurable act. And to ensure that survival is
accomplished under the mandate, SURVIVE!, it seems to have been provided that reduction
from a high potential would bring pain.
Pain is provided to repel the individual from death, pleasure is provided to call him
toward optimum life. The search for and the attainment of pleasure is not less valid in survival
than the avoidance of pain. In fact, on some observed evidence, pleasure seems to have a much
greater value in the cosmic scheme than pain.
23.24
Now it would be well to define what is meant by pleasure, aside from its connection
with immortality. The dictionary states that pleasure is “gratification; agreeable emotions,
mental or physical; transient enjoyment; opposed to pain.” Pleasure can be found in so many
things and activities that a catalogue of all the things and activities Man has, does and may
consider pleasurable alone could round out the definition.
And what do we mean by pain? The dictionary states: “physical or mental suffering;
penalty.”
These two definitions, in passing, are demonstrative of an intuitive type of thought
which runs through the language. Once one has a thing which leads to the resolution of hitherto
unsolved problems, even the dictionaries are found to have “always known it.”
If we wished to make this graph for a life-form cycle, it would be identical except that
the value of the years would be increased to measure eons. For there is no difference, it seems,
except magnitude, in the scope of the individual and the scope of the species. This inference
could be drawn even without such remarkable evidence as the fact that a human being, growing
from zygote to adult, evolutes through all the forms which the whole species is supposed to
have evolved through.
Now there is more in this graph than has been remarked as yet. The physical and mental
state of the individual varies from hour to hour, day to day, year to year. Therefore the level of
survival would form either a daily curve or the curve of a life on a measure of hourly or yearly
position in the zones. And there would be two curves made possible by this, the physical curve
and the mental curve. When we get toward the back of the book the relationships between these
two curves will be found vital and it will also be seen that, ordinarily, a sag in the mental curve
will precede a sag in the physical curve.
The zones, then, can apply to two things: the physical being and the mental being.
Therefore these four zones can be called zones of the states of being. If a person is happy
mentally, the survival level can be placed in Zone 4. If the person is extremely ill physically,
he might be plotted, on estimation of his illness, in Zone 1 or close to death.
Very unprecise but nevertheless descriptive names have been assigned to these zones.
Zone 3 is one of general happiness and well-being. Zone 2 is a level of bearable existence.
Zone 1 is one of anger. Zone 0 is the zone of apathy. These zones can be used as a tone scale
by which a state of mind can be graded. Just above death, which is 0, would be the lowest
mental apathy or lowest level of physical life, 0.1. A Tone 1, where the body is fighting
physical pain or illness or where the being is fighting in anger, could be graded from 1.0,
which would be resentment or hostility, through Tone 1.5, which would be a screaming rage,
to a 1.9 which would be merely a quarrelsome inclination. From Tone 2.0 to Tone 3.0 there
would be an increasing interest in existence, and so forth.
It so happens that the state of physical being or mental being does not long remain
static. Therefore, there are various fluctuations. In the course of a single day an aberree may
run from 0.5 to 3.5, up and down, as a mental being. An accident or illness could cause a
similar fluctuation in a day.
These are, then, figures which can be assigned to four things: the mental state on an
acute basis and the mental state on a general, average basis, and the physical being on an acute
basis and the physical being on a general basis. In dianetics we do not much employ the
physical tone scale. The mental tone scale, however, is of vast and vital importance!
These values of happiness, bearable existence, anger and apathy are not arbitrary
values. They are deduced from observation of the behavior of emotional states. A clear is
usually found varying around Tone 4, plus or minus in an average day. He is a general Tone 4,
which is one of the inherent conditions of being clear. A norm in current society, at a wild
guess, is probably around a general Tone 2.8.
24.25
In this descriptive graph, which is two-dimensional, the vital data for the solution of the
problem of the life dynamic are workably combined. The horizontal lines are in terms of
geometric progression beginning with the zero line immediately above death. There are ten lines
for each zone and each zone denotes a mental or physical state of being, as noted. Geometric
progression, so used, leaves ever increasing spaces between the lines. The width of this space
is the survival potential existing at the moment the top point of the survival dynamic arrow is
within that space. The further away from death the top point of the survival dynamic arrow is,
the better chance the individual has of survival. Geometric progression reaches up toward the
impossible of infinity and cannot, of course, reach infinity. The organism is surviving through
time from left to right. Survival optimum -- immortality -- lies in terms of time to the right.
Potential only is measured vertically.
The survival dynamic actually resides within the organism as inherited from the species.
The organism is part of the species as a railroad tie might be said to be part of a railroad as seen
by an observer on a train, the observer being always in Now -- although this analogy is not
perhaps the best.
Within itself the organism possesses a repulsive force toward pain sources. The source
of the pain is not a driving force any more than the thorn bush which tears the hand was a
driving force; the organism repulses the potential pain of a thorn.
At the same time the organism has at work a force which attracts it to the sources of
pleasure. Pleasure does not magnetize the organism into drawing near. It is the organism which
possesses the attraction force.
It is inherent.
The repulsion of pain sources adds to the attraction for pleasure sources to operate as a
combined thrust away from death and toward immortality. The thrust away from death is no
more powerful than the thrust toward immortality. In other words, in terms of the survival
dynamic, pleasure has as much validity as pain.
It should not be read here that survival is always a matter of keeping an eye on the
future. Contemplation of pleasure, pure enjoyment, contemplation of past pleasures, all
combine into harmonies which, while they operate automatically as a rise toward the survival
potential, by their action within the organism physically, do not demand the future as an active
portion of the mental computation in such contemplation.
A pleasure which reacts to injure the body physically, as in the case of debauchery,
discovers at work a ratio between the physical effect (which is depressed toward pain) and the
mental effect of experienced pleasure. There is a consequent lowering of the survival dynamic.
Averaging out, the future possibility of strain because of the act, added to the state of being at
the moment the debauchery was experienced, again depresses the survival dynamic. Because of
this, various kinds of debauchery have been in indifferent odor with Man throughout his
history. This is the equation of “immoral pleasures.” And any action which has brought about
survival suppression or which can bring it about, when pursued as a pleasure, has been
denounced at some time or another in Man’s history. Immorality is originally hung as a label
upon some act or class of actions because they depress the level of the survival dynamic.
Future enforcement of moral stigma may depend largely upon prejudice and aberration and
there is, consequently, a continuous quarrel over what is moral and what is immoral.
Because certain things practiced as pleasures are actually pains -- and how easy it will
be to trace out why when you’ve finished this volume -- and because of the moral equation as
above, pleasure itself, in any aberrated society can become decried. A certain kind of thinking,
of which more later, permits poor differentiation between one object and another. Confusing a
dishonest politician with all politicians would be an example of this. In ancient times the Roman
was fond of his pleasures and some of the things he called pleasure were a trifle strenuous on
other species such as Christians. When the Christian overthrew the pagan state, the ancient
25.26
order of Rome was in a villain’s role. Anything, therefore, which was Roman was villainous.
This went to such remarkable lengths that the Roman love of bathing made bathing so immoral
that Europe went unwashed for some fifteen hundred years. The Roman had become a pain
source so general that everything Roman was evil and it stayed evil long after Roman paganism
perished. Immorality, in such a fashion, tends to become an involved subject. In this case it
became so involved that pleasure itself was stigmatized.
When half the survival potential is struck from the list of lawful things, there is a
considerable reduction in survival indeed. Considering this graph on a racial scale, the
reduction of survival potential by one-half would forecast that direful things lay in wait for the
race.
Actually, because Man is after all Man, no set of laws, however enforced, can
completely wipe away the attraction of pleasure. But in this case enough was removed and
banned to occasion precisely what happened: the Dark Ages and the recession of society.
Society brightened only in those periods such as the Renaissance, in which pleasure became
less unlawful.
When a race or an individual drops into the second zone, as marked on the chart, and
the general tone ranges from the first zone barely into the third, a condition of insanity ensues.
Insanity is irrationality. It is also a state in which non-survival has been so closely approached
continually that the race or the organism engages in all manner of wild solutions.
In further interpretation of this descriptic graph there is the matter of the survival
suppressor. This, it will be seen, is a thrust downward out of potential immortality at the race
or organism represented as the survival dynamic. The survival suppressor is the combined and
variable threats to the survival of the race or organism. These threats come from other species,
from time, from other energies. These are also engaged in the contest of survival to potential
immortality in terms of their own species or identities. Thus there is a conflict involved. Every
other form of life or energy could be plotted in a descriptic as the survival dynamic. If we were
to use a duck’s survival dynamic in a descriptic graph, we would see the duck seeking a high
survival level and Man would be a part of the duck’s suppressor.
The balance and nature of things do not permit the infinity of the goal of immortality to
be reached. In fluctuating balance and in almost unlimited complexity, life and energies ebb and
flood, out of the nebulous, into forms and, through decay, into the nebulous once more.*
Many equations could be drawn concerning this, but it is outside the sphere of our present
interest.
In terms of the zones of the descriptic it is of relative concern what the extent of the
force of the suppressor is against the survival dynamic. The dynamic is inherent in individuals,
groups and races, evolved to resist the suppressor through the eons. In the case of Man, he
carries with him another level of offensive and defensive techniques, his cultures. His primary
technology of survival is mental activity governing physical action in the sentient echelon. But
every life form has its own technology, formed to resolve the problems of food, protection and
procreation. The degree of workability of the technology any life form develops (armor or
brains, fleetness of foot or deceptive form) is a direct index of the survival potential, the relative
immortality, of that form. There have been vast upsets in the past; Man, when he developed
into the world’s most dangerous animal (he can and does kill or enslave any life form, doesn’t
he?) overloaded the suppressor on many other life forms and they dwindled in number or
vanished.
A great climatic change, such as the one which packed so many mammoths in Siberian
ice, may overload the suppressor on a life form. A long drought in the American southwest in
not too ancient times wiped out the better part of an Indian civilization.
26.27
A cataclysm such as an explosion of the core of the Earth, if that were possible, or the
atom bomb or the sudden cessation of burning on the Sun would wipe out all life forms on
Earth.
And a life form can even overload the suppressor on itself. A dinosaur destroys all his
food and so destroys the dinosaur. A bubonic plague bacillus attacks its hosts with such
thorough appetite that the whole generation of pasteurella pestis vanishes. Such things are not
intended by the suicide to be suicide; the life form has run up against an equation which has an
unknown variable, and the unknown variable unfortunately contained enough value to overload
the suppressor. This is the “didn’t know the gun was loaded” equation.
And if the bubonic plague bacillus overloads its own suppressor in an area and then
ceases to trouble its food and shelter, the animals, then the animals consider themselves
benefited.
Reckless and clever and well-nigh indestructible, Man has led a course which is a far
cry from “tooth and claw” in every sphere. And so have the redwood tree and the shark. Just as
a life form, Man, like every life form, is “symbiotic.” Life is a group effort. Lichens and
plankton and algae may do very well on sunlight and minerals alone, but they are the building
blocks. Above such existence, as the forms grow more complex, a tremendous
interdependence exists.
It is very well for a forester to believe that certain trees willfully kill all other varieties of
trees around them and then conclude a specious “attitude” of trees. Let him look again. What
made the soil? What provides the means of keeping the oxygen balance? What makes it
possible for rain to fall in other areas? These willful and murderous trees. And squirrels plant
trees. And Man plants trees. And trees shelter trees of another kind. And animals fertilize trees.
And trees shelter animals. And trees hold the soil so less well rooted plants can grow. Look
anywhere and everywhere and we see life as an assist for life. The multitude of the
complexities of life as affinities for life is not dramatic. But they are the steady, practical,
important reason life can continue to exist at all.
A redwood tree may be first out for redwood trees and although it does an excellent job
of seeming to exist as redwood alone, a closer glance will show it has dependencies and is
depended upon.
Therefore the dynamic of any life form can be seen to be assisted by many other
dynamics and combines with them against the suppressive factors. None survive alone.
Necessity has been declared to be a very wonderful thing. But necessity is a word
which has been taken rather loosely for granted. Opportunism seems to have been read largely
into necessity. What is necessity? Besides being the “mother of invention,” is it a dramatic,
sudden thing which excuses wars and murders, which touches a man only when he is about to
starve? Or is necessity a much gentler and less dramatic quantity? “Everything,” according to
Leucippus, “is driven by necessity.” This is a keynote of much theorizing down through the
ages. Driven, that is the key to the error. Driven, things are driven. Necessity drives. Pain
drives. Necessity and pain, pain and necessity.
Recalling the dramatic and overlooking the important, Man has conceived himself, from
time to time, to be an object of chase by necessity and pain. These were two anthropomorphic
(manlike) things which, in full costume, stuck spears at him. It can be said to be a wrong
concept merely because it does not work to produce more answers.
Whatever there is of necessity is within him. Nothing is driving him except his original
impetus to survive. And he carries that within himself or his group. Within him is the force
with which he fends off pain. Within him is the force with which he attracts pleasure.
27.28
It chances to be a scientific fact that Man is a self-determined organism to the outermost
limit that any form of life can be, for he still depends upon other forms of life and his general
environment. But he is self-determined. This is a matter which will be covered later. But right
here it is necessary to indicate that he is not inherently a determined organism in the sense that
he is driven on this wonderful stimulus-response basis which looks so neat in certain text
books, and works so completely unworkably in the world of Man. The happy little illustrations
about rats do not serve when we are talking about Man. The more complex the organism, the
less reliably these stimulus-response equation works. And when one reaches that highest
complexity, Man, he has reached a fine degree of variability in terms of stimulus-response.
The more sentient, the more rational an organism, the more that organism is self-determined.
Self-determinism, like all things, is relative. Compared to a rat, however, Man is very self-determined
indeed. This is only a scientific fact because it can easily be proven.
The more sentient the man, the less he is a “push-button” instrument. Aberrated and
reduced he can, of course, in a limited degree, be made to perform like a marionette, but then it
is understood that the more aberrated a person is, the closer he approaches the intelligence
quotient of an animal.
Given this self-determinism, it is interesting to observe what a man does with it. While
he can never escape the “didn’t know it was loaded” equation in terms of cataclysm or the
unexpected gain of some other life form, he operates in a high zone level of survival potential.
But here he is, self-determined, rational, his primary weapon, his mind, in excellent working
order. What are his necessity instincts?
Necessity, according to that very sentient if rapidly subject-changing article, the
dictionary, is “the state of being necessary; that which is unavoidable; compulsion.” It also
adds that necessity is “extreme poverty,” but we don’t want that. We are talking about survival.
The compulsion mentioned can be re-evaluated in terms of the survival dynamic. That is
interior in the organism and the race. And what is “necessary” to survival?
We have seen and can prove clinically that there are two factors at work. The necessity
of avoiding pain is a factor because, degree by degree, little things, not much in themselves,
can amount to large pains which, compounded in that rapid geometric progression, bring on
death. Pain is the sadness of being bawled out for poor work, because that may lead to being
fired, which may lead to starvation, which may lead to death. Run any equation into which pain
has entered and it can be seen that it reduces down to possible non-survival. And if this were all
there were to surviving and if necessity were a vicious little gnome with a pitch-fork, it seems
rather obvious that there would be scant reason to go on living. But there is the other part of
the equation, pleasure. That is a more stable part than pain, Stoics to the contrary, as clinical
tests in dianetics prove.
There is therefore a necessity for pleasure, for working, as happiness can be defined,
toward known goals over not unknowable obstacles. And the necessity for pleasure is such that
a great deal of pain can be borne to attain it. Pleasure is the positive commodity. It is enjoyment
of work, contemplation of deeds well done; it is a good book or a good friend; it is taking all
the skin off one’s knees climbing the Matterhorn; it is hearing the kid first say daddy; it is a
brawl on the Bund at Shanghai or the whistle of amour from a doorway; it’s adventure and
hope and enthusiasm and “someday I’ll learn to paint”; it’s eating a good meal or kissing a
pretty girl or playing a stiff game of bluff on the stock exchange. It’s what Man does that he
enjoys doing; it’s what Man does that he enjoys contemplating; it’s what Man does that he
enjoys remembering; and it may be just the talk of things he knows he’ll never do.
Man will endure a lot of pain to obtain a little pleasure. Out in the laboratory of the
world, it takes very little time to confirm that.
And how does necessity fit this picture? There is a necessity for pleasure, a necessity as
live and quivering and vital as the human heart itself. He who said that a man who had two
28.29
loaves of bread should sell one to buy white hyacinth, spoke sooth. The creative, the
constructive, the beautiful, the harmonious, the adventurous, yes, and even escape from the
maw of oblivion, these things are pleasure and these things are necessity. There was a man
once who had walked a thousand miles just to see an orange tree and another who was a mass
of scars and poor-set bones who was eager just to get a chance to “fan another bronc.”
It is very well to dwell in some Olympian height and write a book of penalties and very
well to read to find what writers said that other writers said, but it is not very practical.
The pain-drive theory does not work. If some of these basics of dianetics were only
poetry about the idyllic state of Man, they might be justified in that, but it happens that out in
the laboratory of the world, they work.
Man, in affinity with Man, survives, and that survival is pleasure.
29.30
CHAPTER IV
The Four Dynamics
In the original equations of dianetics, when the research was young, it was believed that
survival could be envisioned in personal terms alone and still answer all conditions. A theory is
only as good as it works. And it works as well as it explains observed data and predicts flew
material which will be found, in fact, to exist.
Survival in personal terms was computed until the whole activity of Man could be
theoretically explained in terms of self alone. The logic looked fairly valid. But then it was
applied to the world. Something was wrong: it did not solve problems. In fact, the theory of
survival in personal terms alone was so unworkable that it left a majority of behavior
phenomena unexplained. But it could be computed and it still looked good.
Then it was that a nearly intuitive idea occurred. Man’s understanding developed in
ratio to his recognition of his brotherhood with the Universe. That was high flown but it
yielded results.
Was Man himself a brotherhood of Man? He had evolved and become strong as a
gregarious being, an animal that hunted in packs. It seemed possible that all his activities could
be computed in terms of the survival of the group. That computation was made. It looked
good. Man survived, it was postulated, solely in terms of the survival of his group. It looked
good but it left a majority of observed phenomena unexplained.
It was attempted, then, to explain Man’s behavior in terms of Mankind alone; which is
to say, it was assumed that Mankind survived for Mankind in a highly altruistic way. This was
straight down the sylvan path of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It could be computed that Man lived
alone for the survival of all Mankind. But when addressed to the laboratory -- the world -- it
did not work.
Finally, it was recalled that some had thought that Man’s entire activity and all his
behavior could be explained by assuming that he lived for sex alone. This was not an original
assumption. But some original computations were made upon it and it is true that, by a few
quick twists of the equation, his survival activity can be made to resolve on only the sexual
basis. But when this was applied to observed data, again it failed to explain every
phenomenon.
An examination was made of what had been attempted. It had been assumed that Man
survived only for himself as an individual; it had been computed that he survived only for the
group, the pack, for society; it had been postulated that he survived only for Mankind; and
finally, it had been theorized that he lived only for sex. None worked alone.
A new computation was made on the survival dynamic. Exactly for what was man
surviving? All four of these factors, self, sex, group and Mankind were entered into a new
equation. And now it was found, a theory was in hand which worked. It explained all observed
phenomena and it predicted new phenomena which were discovered to exist. It was a scientific
equation, therefore!
From the survival dynamic, in this fashion, were evolved the four dynamics. By
survival dynamic was meant the basic command, SURVIVE! which underlay all activity. By
dynamic was meant one of the four purpose divisions of the entire dynamic principle. The four
dynamics were not new forces; they were sub-divisions of the primary force.
DYNAMIC ONE is the urge toward ultimate survival on the part of the individual and for
himself. It includes his immediate symbiotes*, the extension of culture for his own benefit, and
name immortality.
30.31
DYNAMIC TWO is the urge of the individual toward ultimate survival via the sex act, the
creation of and the rearing of children. It includes their symbiotes, the extension of culture for
them, and their future provision.
DYNAMIC THREE is the urge of the individual toward ultimate survival for the group. It
includes the symbiotes of the group and the extension of its culture.
DYNAMIC FOUR includes the urge of the individual toward ultimate survival for all Mankind.
It includes the symbiotes of Mankind and the extension of its culture.
Life, the atom and the universe and energy itself are included under the symbiotic
classification.
It will be seen immediately that these four dynamics are actually a spectrum without
sharp division lines. The survival dynamic can be seen to sweep out from the individual to
embrace the entire species and its symbiotes.
None of these dynamics is necessarily stronger than any of the others. Each is strong.
They are the four roads a man takes to survival. And the four roads are actually one road. And
the one road is actually a spectrum of thousands of roads contained within the four. They are all
in terms of past, present and future in that the present may be a sum of the past and the future
may be the product of the past and present.
All the purposes of Man can be considered to lie within this spectrum and all behavior
becomes explained.
That Man is selfish is a valid statement when one means an aberrated Man. That Man is
anti-social is an equally valid statement if one adds the modifier, aberration. And other such
statements resolve equally. * The dianetic meaning of symbiote is extended beyond the
dictionary definition to mean “any or all life or energy forms which are mutually dependent for
survival.” The atom depends on the Universe, the Universe on the atom.
Now it happens that these four dynamics can be seen to compete, one with another, in
their operation within an individual or a society. There is a rational reason for this. The phrase
“social competition” is a compound of aberrated behavior and sentient difficulties.
Any man, group or race may be in contest with any race, group or man and even in
contest with sex on an entirely rational level.
The Equation of the Optimum Solution would be that a problem has been well resolved
which portends the maximum good for the maximum number of dynamics. That is to say that
any solution, modified by the time available to put the solution into effect, should be creative or
constructive for the greatest possible number of dynamics. The optimum solution for any
problem would be a solution which achieved the maximum benefit in all the dynamics. This
means that a man, determining upon some project, would fare best if he benefited everything
concerned in the four dynamics as his project touched them. He would then have to benefit
himself as well for the solution to be optimum. In other words, the benefiting of the group and
Mankind dynamic but the blocking of the sex dynamic and the self dynamic would be much
poorer than the best solution. The conduct survival pattern is built upon this equation of the
optimum solution. It is the basic equation of all rational behavior and is the equation on which
a clear functions. It is inherent in Man.
In other words, the best solution to any problem is that which will bring the greatest
good to the greatest number of beings, including self, progeny, family associates, political and
racial groups, and at length to all mankind. The greatest good may require, as well, some
destruction, but the solution deteriorates in a ratio to the destructiveness employed. Self-sacrifice
and selfishness are alike reductive of the optimum action equation and alike have been
suspected and should be.
31.32
This is entirely a matter of: does it work? Even on an unaberrated basis there are times
when one or another of these dynamics rave to be dropped from the computation of some
activity or other and indeed, few problems are so entirely intense that they must take into
account
the dynamics. But when a problem achieves such intensity and time is not an important
factor, serious errors can follow the omission of one or another of the dynamics from the
factors considered.
In the case of a Napoleon “saving France” at the expense of the remainder of Mankind
in Europe, the equation of the optimum solution was so far neglected that all the revolutionary
gains of the French people were lost. In the case of Caesar “saving Rome,” the equation was so
poorly done that the survival of Rome was impeded.
But there are special cases when the equation of the optimum solution becomes so
involved with time that certain dynamics must be neglected to permit other dynamics to persist.
The case of a sailor giving his own life to save his ship answers the group dynamic. Such an
action is a valid solution to a problem. But it violates the optimum solution because it did not
answer for Dynamic One: self.
Many examples of various kinds could be cited where one or another of the dynamics
must, of necessity, receive priority, all on an entirely rational basis.
On an aberrated basis the equation is still valid but complicated by irrationalities which
have no part of the situation. Many solutions are bad merely because of false educational data
or no data at all. But these are still solutions. In the case of aberrated solutions, the dynamics
are actually and actively impeded, as will later be outlined in full.
32.33
CHAPTER V
Summary
The dynamic principle of existence is survival.
This survival can be graduated into four zones, each one progressively portending a
better opportunity of reaching the potential of immortality. Zone 0 borders from death and
includes apathy; Zone 1 borders from apathy and includes violent effort; Zone 2 borders from
violence into mediocre but not entirely satisfactory success; Zone 3 borders from the mediocre
to the excellent chance. These zones are each occasioned by the ratio of the suppressor to the
survival dynamic. In apathy, Zone 0, the suppressor appears too great to be overcome. In the
area of violence, Zone I, the suppressor more or less overbalances the survival dynamic,
requiring enormous effort which, when expended without result, drops the organism into the
Zero Zone. In the area of mediocrity, Zone 2, the suppressor and the survival dynamic are
more or less evenly balanced. In the area of Zone 3 the survival dynamic has overcome the
suppressor and, the chances of survival being excellent, is the area of high response to
problems. These four zones might be classed as the zone of no hope, the zone of violent action,
the area of balance and the area of high hope. Clinical experiment is the basis of these zones
since they follow a progress of mental or physical being as it rises from the death area into high
existence.
The four dynamics are subdivisions of the survival dynamic and are, in Mankind, the
thrust toward potential survival in terms of entities. They embrace all the purposes, activities
and behavior of Mankind. They could be said to be a conduct survival pattern. The first of
these, but not necessarily the most important nor yet the one which will receive priority in
various efforts, is the individual dynamic, DYNAMIC ONE, which includes the personal
survival of the individual as a living person and the survival of his personal symbiotes.
DYNAMIC TWO is the thrust toward potential immortality through children and includes all
sexual activity as well as the symbiotes of the children. DYNAMIC THREE is survival in terms
of the group, which term may include such things as a club, a military company, a city, a state,
a nation; this would include the symbiotes of the group. DYNAMIC FOUR is the thrust toward
potential immortality of Mankind as a species and the symbiotes of Mankind. Embraced within
these classifications are any part of existence, any form of matter and, indeed the Universe.
Any problem or situation discoverable within the activities or purposes of Mankind is
embraced within these dynamics.
The equation of the optimum solution is inherent within the organism and, modified by
education or viewpoint and modified further by time, is the operating method of unaberrated
individuals, groups or Mankind. The equation of the optimum solution is always present even
in severely aberrated individuals and is used as modified by their education, viewpoint and
available time. The aberration does not remove activity from the dynamics of survival.
Aberrated conduct is irrational survival conduct and is fully intended to lead to survival. That
the intent is not the act does not eradicate the intent.
THESE ARE THE FUNDAMENTAL AXIOMS OF DIANETICS: The dynamic
principle of existence -- SURVIVE!
Survival, considered as the single and sole Purpose, sub-divides into four dynamics.
DYNAMIC ONE is the urge of the individual toward survival for the individual and his
symbiotes. (By symbiote is meant all entities and energies which aid survival.)
DYNAMIC TWO is the urge of the individual toward survival through procreation; it includes
both the sex act and the raising of progeny, the care of children and their symbiotes.
33.34
DYNAMIC THREE is the urge of the individual toward survival for the group or the group for
the group and includes the symbiotes of that group.
DYNAMIC FOUR is the urge of the individual toward survival for Mankind or the urge toward
survival of Mankind for Mankind as well as the group for Mankind, etc., and includes the
symbiotes of mankind.
The absolute goal of survival is immortality or infinite survival. This is sought by the
individual in terms of himself as an organism, as a spirit or as a name or as his children, as a
group of which he is a member or as Mankind and the progeny and symbiotes of others as well
as his own. The reward of survival activity is pleasure.
The ultimate penalty of destructive activity is death or complete non-survival, and is
pain. Successes raise the survival potential toward infinite survival. Failures lower the
survival potential toward death.
The human mind is engaged upon perceiving and retaining data, composing or
computing conclusions and posing and resolving problems related to organisms along all four
dynamics and the purpose of perception, retention, concluding and resolving problems is to
direct its own organism and symbiotes and other organisms and symbiotes along the four
dynamics toward survival. Intelligence is the ability to perceive, pose and resolve problems.
The dynamic is the tenacity to life and vigor and persistence in survival. Both the
dynamic and intelligence are necessary to persist and accomplish and neither is a constant
quantity from individual to individual, group to group.
The dynamics are inhibited by engrams, which lie across them and disperse life force.
Intelligence is inhibited by engams which feed false or improperly graded data into the
analyzer. Happiness is the overcoming of not unknown obstacles toward a known goal and,
transiently, the contemplation of or indulgence in pleasure.
The analytical mind is that portion of the mind which perceives and retains experience
data to compose and resolve problems and direct the organism along the four dynamics. It
thinks in differences and similarities.
The reactive mind is that portion of the mind which files and retains physical pain and
painful emotion and seeks to direct the organism solely on a stimulus-response basis. It thinks
only in identities.
The somatic mind is that mind which, directed by the analytical or reactive mind, places
solutions into effect on the physical level.
A training pattern is that stimulus-response mechanism resolved by the analytical mind
to care for routine activity or emergency activity. It is held in the somatic mind and can be
changed at will by the analytical mind.
Habit is that stimulus-response reaction dictated by the reactive mind from the content
of engrams and put into effect by the somatic mind. It can be changed only by those things
which change engams.
Aberrations, under which is included all deranged or irrational behavior, are caused by
engams. They are stimulus-response pro- and contra-survival. Psycho-somatic ills are caused
by engrams. The engram is the single source of aberrations and psycho-somatic ills. Moments
of “unconsciousness” when the analytical mind is attenuated in greater or lesser degree are the
only moments when engrams can be received. The engram is a moment of “unconsciousness”
containing physical pain or painful emotion and all perceptions and is not available to the
analytical mind as experience.
34.35
Emotion is three things: engramic response to situations, endocrine metering of the
body to meet situations on an analytical level and the inhibition or the furtherance of life force.
The potential value of an individual or a group may be expressed by the equation:
(PV = ID) where I is Intelligence and D is Dynamic.
The worth of an individual is computed in terms of the alignment, on any dynamic, of
his potential value with optimum survival along that dynamic. A high PV may, by reversed
vector, result in a negative worth as in some severely aberrated persons. A high PV on any
dynamic assures a high worth only in the unaberrated person.
35.36
Book Two
THE SINGLE SOURCE OF ALL
INORGANIC MENTAL AND ORGANIC
PSYCHO-SOMATIC ILLS
36.37
CHAPTER I
The Analytical Mind and the Standard Memory Banks
This chapter begins the search for human error and tells where it is not.
The human mind can be considered to have three major divisions. First, there is the
analytical mind, second, there is the reactive mind, and third, there is the somatic mind.
Consider the analytical mind as a computing machine. This is analogy, because the
analytical mind, while it behaves like a computing machine, is yet more fantastically capable
than any computing machine ever constructed and infinitely more elaborate. It could be called
the “computational mind” or the “egsusheyftef.” But for our purposes, the analytical mind, as a
descriptive name, will do. This mind may live in the pre-frontal lobes -- there is some hint of
that -- but this is a problem of structure, and nobody really knows about structure. So we shall
call this computational part of the mind the “analytical mind” because it analyzes data.
The monitor can be considered part of the analytical mind. The monitor could be called
the center of awareness of the person. It, inexactly speaking, is the person. It has been
approximated by various names for thousands of years, each one reducing down to “I.” The
monitor is in control of the analytical mind. It is not in control because it has been told to be but
only because it is, inherently. It is not a demon who lives in the skull nor a little man who
vocalizes one’s thoughts. It is “I.” No matter how many aberrations a person may have, “I” is
always “I.” No matter how “clear” a person becomes, “I,” is still “I.” “I” may be submerged
now and then in an aberree, but it is always present.
The analytical mind shows various evidences of being an organ, but as we know in this
age so little of structure, the full structural knowledge of the analytical mind must come after we
know what it does. And in dianetics we know precisely that for the first time. It is known and
can be proven with ease that the analytical mind, be it one organ of the body or several,
behaves as you would expect any good computing machine to behave.
What would you want in a computing machine? The action of the analytical mind -- or
analyzer -- is everything anyone could want from the best computer available. It can and does
do all the tricks of a computer. And over and above that, it directs the building of computers.
And it is as thoroughly right as any computer ever was. The analytical mind is not just a good
computer, it is a perfect computer. It never makes a mistake. It cannot err in any way so long as
a human being is reasonably intact (unless something has carried away a piece of his mental
equipment).
The analytical mind is incapable of error, and it is so certain that it is incapable of error
that it works out everything on the basis that it cannot make an error. If a person says, “I
cannot add,” he either means that he has never been taught to add or that he has an aberration
about adding. It does not mean that there is anything wrong with the analytical mind.
While the whole being is, in an aberrated state, grossly capable of error, still the
analytical mind is not. For a computer is just as good as the data on which it operates and no
better. Aberration, then, arises from the nature of the data offered to the analytical mind as a
problem to be computed.
The analytical mind has its standard memory banks. Just where these are located
structurally is again no concern of ours at this time. To operate, the analytical mind has to have
percepts (data), memory (data), and imagination (data).
There are another data storage bank and another part of the human mind which contain
aberrations and are the source of insanities. These will be fully covered later and should not be
confused with either the analytical mind or the standard memory banks.
37.38
Whether or not the data contained in the standard memory banks is evaluated correctly
or not, it is all there. The various senses receive information and this information files straight
into the standard memory banks. It does not go through the analyzer first. It is filed and the
analyzer then has it from the standard banks.
There are several of these standard banks and they may be duplicated in themselves so
that there are several of each kind of bank. Nature seems generous in such things. There is a
bank, or set of banks, for each perception. These can be considered racks of data filed in a
cross-index system which would make an intelligence officer purple with envy. Any single
percept is filed as a concept. The sight of a moving car, for instance, is filed in the visio-bank
in color and motion, at the time seen, cross-indexed to the area in which seen, cross-indexed to
all data about cars, cross-indexed to thoughts about cars, and so forth and so forth with the
additional filing of conclusions (thought stream) of the moment and thought streams of the past
with all their conclusions. The sound of that car is similarly filed from the ears, straight into
the audio-bank, and cross-indexed multitudinously as before. The other sensations of that
moment are also filed, in their own banks.
Now it may be that the whole filing is done in one bank. It would be simpler that way.
But this is not a matter of structure but mental performance. Eventually somebody will discover
just how they are filed. Right now the function of filing is all that interests us.
Every percept -- sight, sound, smell, feeling, taste, organic sensation, pain, rhythm,
kinesthesia (weight and muscular motion) and emotion -- is each properly and neatly filed in the
standard banks in full. It does not matter how many aberrations a physically intact person has
or whether he thinks he can or cannot contain this data or recall it, the file is there and is
complete.
This file begins at a very early period, of which more later. It then runs consecutively,
whether the individual is asleep or awake, except in moments of “unconsciousness,”* for an
entire lifetime. It apparently has an infinite capacity.
The numbers of these concepts (concept means that which is retained after something
has been perceived) would stagger an astronomer’s computer. The existence and profusion of
memories retained were discovered and studied in a large number of cases, and they can be
examined in anyone by certain processes.
Everything in this bank is correct in so far as the single action of perception is
concerned. There may be organic errors in the organs of perception, such as blindness or
deafness (when physical, not aberrational), which would leave blanks in the banks; and there
may be organic impairment such as partial organic deafness which would leave partial blanks.
But these things are not error in the standard memory banks; they are simply absence of data.
Like the computer, the standard memory banks are perfect, recording faithfully and reliably.
Now part of the standard banks is audio-semantic, which is to say, the recordings of
words heard. And part of the banks is visio-semantic, which is to say, the recordings of words
read. These are special parts of the sound and sight files. A blind man who has to read with his
fingers develops a tactile-semantic file. The content of the speech files is exactly as heard
without alteration.
Another interesting part of the standard memory banks is that they apparently file the
original and hand forward exact copies to the analyzer. They will hand out as many exact
copies as are demanded without diminishing the actual file original. And they hand out these
copies each in kind with color-motion sight, tone-audio, etc.
The amount of material which is retained in the average standard memory banks would
fill several libraries. But the method of retention is invariable. And the potentiality of recall is
perfect.
38.39
The primary source of error in “rational” computation comes under the headings of
insufficient data and erroneous data. The individual, daily facing new situations, is not always
in possession of all the material he requires to make a decision. And he may have been told
something on Good Authority which was not true and yet which did not find counter-evidence
in the banks.
Between the standard banks, which are perfect and reliable, and the computer, the
analytical mind, which is perfect and reliable, there is no irrational concourse. The answer is
always as right as it can be made to be in the light of data at hand, and that is all anyone can ask
of a computing device or a recording device.
The analytical mind goes even further in its efforts to be right than one would suppose.
It constantly checks and weighs new experience in the light of old experience, forms new
conclusions in the light of old conclusions, changes old conclusions and generally is very busy
being right.
The analytical mind might be considered to have been given a sacred post of trust by the
cells to safeguard the colony, and it does everything within its power to carry out that Mission.
It has correct data, as correct as possible, and it does correct computations on them, as correct
as they can be made. When one considers the enormous number of factors which one handles,
for instance, in the action of driving a car ten blocks, he can appreciate how very, very busy on
how very many levels that analytical mind can be.
Now before we introduce the villain of this piece, the reactive mind, it is necessary to
understand something about the relation of the analytical mind to the organism itself.
The analytical mind, charged with full responsibility, is far from without authority to
carry out its actions and desires. Through the mechanisms of the life function regulator (which
handles all the mechanical functions of living), the analytical mind can effect any function of the
body it desires to effect.
In excellent working order -- which is to say, when the organism is not aberrated -- the
analytical mind can influence the heartbeat, the endocrines (such things as calcium and sugar in
the blood, adrenalin, etc.), selective blood flow (stopping it in the limbs or starting it at will),
urine, excreta, etc. All glandular, rhythm and fluid functions of the body can be at the
command of the analytical mind. This is not to say that in a cleared person they always are.
That would be very uncomfortable and bothersome. But it does say that the analytical mind can
effect changes at desire when it skills itself to do so. This is a marter of laboratory proof, very
easy to do.
People have long been intuitive about the “full power of the mind.” Well, the full power
of the mind would be the analytical mind working with the standard memory banks, the life
function regulator and one other thing.
The last and most important thing is, of course, the organism. It is in the charge of the
analytical mind. And the analytical mind controls it in other ways than life function. All muscles
and the remainder of the organism can be under the full command of the analytical mind.
In order to keep it and its circuits free of bric-a-brac and minor activities, the analytical
mind is provided with a learned training pattern regulator. Into this, by education, it can place
the stimulus-response patterns necessary for the performance of tasks like talking, walking,
piano playing, etc. These learned patterns are not unchangeable. Because they are selected by
the analytical mind after thought and effort, there is seldom any need to change them; if new
situations arise, a new pattern is trained into the muscles. None of these are “conditionings”;
they are simply training patterns which the organism can use without attention of any
magnitude from the analyzer. An uncountable number of such patterns can be laid into the
organism by this method. And they are not the source of any trouble since they file by time and
situation, and a very little thought will serve to annul old ones in favor of new ones.
39.40
All muscles, voluntary and “involuntary,” can be at the command of the analytical
mind.
Here, then, is the composite of a sentient being. There is no chance for error beyond the
error incident to insufficient data and erroneous but accepted data (and the last will be used by
the analyzer just once if that once proves the data to be wrong), Here is the realm of pleasure,
emotion, creation and construction, and even destruction if the computation on the optimum
solution says something has to be destroyed.
The dynamics underlie the activities of the analytical mind. The urge toward survival
explains all its actions. That we can understand the fundamental simplicity of the functional
mechanism does not, however, mean that a man operating this way alone is cold or calculating
or intent on “tooth and claw.” The nearer Man approaches this optimum, in an individual or in a
whole society, the quicker and warmer is that society, the more honest may be its moods and
actions.
Sanity depends upon rationality. Here is optimum rationality and therefore optimum
sanity. And here also are all the things Man likes to think Man should be like or, for that matter,
what he has represented his better gods to be like. This is the clear.
This is sanity. This is happiness. This is survival.
Where is the error?
40.41
CHAPTER II
The Reactive Mind
It is fairly well accepted in these times that life in all forms evolved from the basic
building blocks, the virus and the cell. Its only relevance to dianetics is that such a proposition
works -- and actually that is all we ask of dianetics. There is no point to writing here a past
tome on biology and evolution. We can add some chapters to those things, but Charles Darwin
did his job well, and the fundamental principles of evolution can be found in his and other
works.
The proposition on which dianetics was originally entered was evolution. It was
postulated that the cells themselves had the urge to survive and that that urge was common to
life. It was further postulated that organisms -- individuals -- were constructed of cells and
were in fact aggregations of colonies of cells.
As went the building block, so went the organism. In the finite realms and for any of
our purposes, Man could be considered to be a colonial aggregation of cells and it could be
assumed that his purpose was identical with the purpose of his building blocks.
The cell is a unit of life which is seeking to survive and only to Survive.
Man is a structure of cells which are asking to survive, and only to survive.
Man’s mind is the command post of operation and is constructed to resolve problems
and pose problems related to survival and only to survival.
The action of survival, if optimum, would lead to survival.
The optimum survival conduct pattern was formulated and then studied for exceptions,
and there were no exceptions found.
The survival conduct pattern was discovered to be far from sterile and barren but was
full of rich and most pleasant activity.
None of these postulates outlawed any concept concerning the human soul or divine or
creative imagination. It was understood perfectly that this was a study in the finite universe
only and that spheres and realms of thought and action might very well exist above this finite
sphere. But it was also discovered that none of these factors were needed to resolve the entire
problem of aberration and irrational conduct.
The human mind was discovered to have been most grossly maligned, for it was found
to be possessed of capabilities far in excess of any heretofore imagined much less tested.
Basic human character was found to have been pilloried because Man had not been able
to distinguish between irrational conduct derived from poor data and irrational conduct derived
from another, far more vicious source.
If there ever was a devil, he designed the reactive mind.
This functional mechanism managed to bury itself from view so thoroughly that only
inductive philosophy, traveling from effect back to cause, served to uncover it. The detective
work which was invested in the location of this arch criminal of the human psyche occupied
many years. Its identity can now be certified by any technician in any clinic or in any group of
men. Two hundred and seventy-three individuals have been examined and treated, representing
all the various types of inorganic mental illness and the many varieties of psycho-somatic ills.
41.42
In each one this reactive mind was found operating, its principles unvaried. This is a long
series of cases and will soon become longer.
The reactive mind is possessed by everyone. No human being examined anywhere was
discovered to be without one or without aberrative content in his engram bank, the reservoir of
data which serves the reactive mind.
What does this mind do? It shuts off hearing recall. It places vocal circuits in the mind.
It makes people tone-deaf. It makes people stutter. It does anything and everything that can be
found in any list of mental ills: psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, repressions...
What can it do? It can give a man arthritis, bursitis, asthma, allergies, sinusitis,
coronary trouble, high blood pressure, and so on down the whole catalogue of psycho-somatic
ills, adding a few more which were never specifically classified as psycho-somatic, such as the
common cold.
And it is the only thing in the human being which can produce these effects. It is the
thing which uniformly brings them about.
This is the mind which made Socrates think he had a “demon” that gave him answers.
This is the mind that made Caligula appoint his horse to a government post. This is the mind
which made Caesar cut the right hands from thousands of Gauls, which made Napoleon reduce
the height of Frenchmen one inch.
This is the mind which keeps war a thing of alarm, which makes politics irrational,
which makes superior officers snarl, which makes children cry in fear of the dark. This is the
mind which makes a man suppress his hopes, which holds his apathies, which gives him
irresolution when he should act, and kills him before he has begun to live.
If there ever was a devil, he invented it.
Discharge the content of this mind’s bank and the arthritis vanishes, myopia gets better,
heart illness decreases, asthma disappears, stomachs function properly, and the whole
catalogue of ills goes away and stays away.
Discharge the reactive engram bank and the schizophrenic faces reality at last, the
manic-depressive sets forth to accomplish things, the neurotic stops clinging to books which
tell him how much he needs his neuroses and begins to live, the woman stops snapping at her
children and the dipsomaniac can drink when he likes and stop.
These are scientific facts. They compare invariably with observed experience.
The reactive mind is the entire source of aberration. It can be proved and has been
repeatedly proven that there is no other, for when that engram bank is discharged, all
undesirable symptoms vanish and a man begins to operate on his optimum pattern.
If one were looking for something like demons in a human mind -- such as those one
observes in some inmates of madhouses -- he could find them easily enough. Only they are not
demons. They are by-pass circuits from the engram bank. What prayer and exhortations have
been used against these by-pass circuits!
If one did not believe in demons, if one supposed that Man were good after all (as a
postulate, of course), how would the evil get into him? What would be the source of these
insane rages? What would be the source of his slips of the tongue? How would he come to
know irrational fear?
Why is it that one does not like his boss although his boss has always been pleasant?
Why is it that suicides smash their bodies to bits?
42.43
Why does Man behave destructively, irrationally, fighting wars, killing, ruining whole
sections of Mankind?
What is the source of all neuroses, psychoses, insanities?
Let us return to a brief examination of the analytical mind. Let us examine its memory
banks. Here we find all the sense concepts on file. Or so it appears at first glance. Let us take
another look, a look at the time factor. There is a time sense about these analytical mind banks.
It is very accurate, as though the organism were equipped with a fine watch. But there is
something wrong here about time -- it has gaps in it! There are moments when nothing seems
to be filed in these standard banks. These are gaps which take place during moments of
“unconsciousness,” that state of being caused by anaesthesia, drugs, injury or shock.
This is the only data missing from a standard bank. If in hypnotic trance you examine a
patient’s memory of an operation these incidents are the only periods in the banks you will not
find. You can find these if you care to look and don’t care what happens to your patient -- of
which more later. But the point is that there is something missing which has always been
considered by one and all in any age never to have been recorded.
One and all in every age have never been able to put a finger on insanity either. Are
these two data in agreement and do they have relationship? They definitely do.
There are two things which appear to be -- but are not -- recorded in the standard banks:
painful emotion and physical pain.
How would you go about the building of a sensitive machine upon which the life and
death affairs of an organism depended, which was to be the chief tool of an individual? Would
you leave its delicate circuits prey to every overload or would you install a fuse system? If a
delicate instrument is in circuit with a power line, it is protected by several sets of fuses. Any
computer would be so safeguarded.
It happens that there is some small evidence to support the electrical theory of the
nervous system. In pain there are very heavy overcharges in the nerves. It may well have been
-- and elsewhere some dianetic computations have been made about this -- that the brain is the
absorber for overcharges of power resulting from injury, the power itself being generated by
the injured cells in the area of injury. That is theory and has no place here save to serve as an
example. We are dealing now only with scientific fact.
The action of the analytical mind during a moment of intense pain is suspended. In fact,
the analytical mind behaves just as though it were an organ to which vital supply was shut off
whenever shock is present.
As an example, a man struck in the side by a car is knocked “unconscious” and on
regaining “consciousness” has no record of the period when he was “knocked out.” This
would be a non-survival circumstance. It means that there would be no volition on the part of
anyone who was injured, and this is the time when the organism most requires volition. So this
is non-survival, if the whole mind cuts out whenever pain appears. Would an organism with
more than a billion years of biological engineering behind it leave a problem like this unsolved?
Indeed, the organism solved the problem. Maybe the problem is very difficult,
biologically, and maybe the solution is not very good, but large provision has been made for
those moments when the organism is “unconscious.”
The answer to the problem of making the organism react in moments of
“unconsciousness” or near “unconsciousness” is also the answer to insanity and psycho-somatic
illnesses and all the strange mental quirks to which people are liable and which gave
rise to that fable “it is human to err.”
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Clinical tests prove these statements to be scientific facts:
1. The mind records on some level continuously during the entire life of the organism.
2. All recordings of the lifetime are available.
3. “Unconsciousness,” in which the mind is oblivious of its surroundings, is possible
only in death and does not exist as total amnesia in life.
4. All mental and physical derangements of a psychic nature come about from moments of
“unconsciousness.”
5. Such moments can be reached and drained of charge with the result of returning the
mind to optimum operating condition.
“Unconsciousness” is the single source of aberration. There is no such action as
“mental conditioning” except on a conscious training level (where it exists only with the
consent of the person).
If you care to make the experiment you can take a man, render him “unconscious,” hurt
him and give him information. By dianetic technique, no matter what information you gave
him, it can be recovered. This experiment should not be carelessly conducted because you
might also render him insane.
A pale shade of this operation can be obtained by hypnosis, either by its usual
techniques or drugs. By installing “positive suggestions” in a subject, he can be made to act
like an insane person. This test is not a new one. It has been well known that compulsions or
repressions can be so introduced into the psyche. The ancient Greek was quite familiar with it
and used it to produce various delusions.
There is what is known as a “post-hypnotic suggestion.” An understanding of this can
assist an understanding of the basic mechanism of insanity. The actions under both
circumstances are not identical, but they are similar enough in their essence.
A man is placed in a hypnotic trance by standard hypnotic technique or some hypnotic
drug. The operator then may say to him, “When you awaken there is something you must do.
Whenever I touch my tie you will remove your coat. When I let go my tie, you will put on your
coat. Now you will forget that I have told you to do this.”
The subject is then awakened. He is not consciously aware of the command. If told he
had been given an order while “asleep,” he would resist the idea or shrug but he would not
know. The operator then touches his tie. The subject may make some remark about its being
too warm and so take his coat off. The operator then releases his tie. The subject may remark
that he is now cold and will put his coat back on. The operator then touches his tie. The subject
may say that his coat has been to the tailor’s and with much conversation finally explain why he
is taking it off, perhaps to see if the back seam had been sewn properly. The operator then
releases his tie and the subject says he is satisfied with the tailor and so replaces his coat. The
operator may touch his tie many times and each time receive action on the part of the subject.
At last the subject may become aware, from the expressions on people’s faces, that
something is wrong. He will not know what is wrong. He will not even know that the touching
of the tie is the signal which makes him take off his coat. He will begin to grow uncomfortable.
He may find fault with the operator’s appearance and begin to criticize his clothing. He still
does not know the tie is a signal. He will still react and remain in ignorance that there is some
strange reason he must take off his coat -- all he knows is that he is uncomfortable with his coat
on whenever the tie is touched, uncomfortable with his coat off every time the tie is released.
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These various actions are very important to an understanding of the reactive mind.
Hypnotism is a laboratory tool. It is not used to any extent in dianetic therapy, but it has served
as a means of examining minds and getting their reactions. Hypnotism is a wild variable. A few
people can be hypnotized, many cannot be. Hypnotic suggestions will sometimes “take” and
sometimes they won’t.
Sometimes they make persons well and sometimes they make them ill -- the same
suggestion reacting differently in different people. An engineer knows how to make use of a
wild variable. There is something which makes it unpredictable. Finding out the basic reason
hypnotism was a variable helped to discover the source of insanity. And understanding the
mechanism of the post-hypnotic suggestion can aid an understanding of aberration.
No matter how foolish a suggestion is given to a subject under hypnosis, he will carry
it out one way or another. He can be told to remove his shoes or call someone at ten the
following day or to eat peas for breakfast and he will. These are direct orders and he will
comply with them. He can be told that his hats do not fit him and he will believe that they do
not. Any suggestion will operate within his mind unbeknownst to his higher levels of
awareness.
Very complex suggestions can be given. One such would be to the effect that he was
unable to utter the word “I.” He would omit it from his conversation, using remarkable
makeshifts without being “aware” that he was having to avoid the word. Or he could be told
that he must never look at his hands and he will not. These are repressions. Given to the
subject when drugged or in a hypnotic sleep, these suggestions operate when he is awake. And
they will continue to operate until released by the hypnotic operator.
He can be told that he has an urge to sneeze every time he hears the word “rug” and that
he will sneeze when it is spoken. He can be told that he must jump two feet in the air every time
he sees a cat and he will jump. And he will do these things after he has been awakened. These
are compulsions.
He can be told that he will think very sexual thoughts about a certain girl but that when
he thinks them he will feel his nose itch. He can be told that he has a continual urge to lie down
and sleep and that every time he lies down he will feel that he cannot sleep. He will experience
these things. These are neuroses.
In further experiments he can be told, when he is in his hypnotic “sleep,” that he is the
president of the country and that the secret service agents are trying to murder him. Or he can
be told that he is being fed poison in every restaurant in which he attempts to eat. These are
psychoses.
He can be informed that he is really another person and that he owns a yacht and
answers to the name of “Sir Reginald.” Or he can be told that he is a thief, that he has a prison
record, and that the police are looking for him. These would be schizophrenic and paranoid-schizophrenic
insanities respectively.
The operator can inform the subject that the subject is the most wonderful person on
earth and that everybody thinks so. Or that the subject is the object of adoration of all women.
This would be a manic-type insanity.
He can be convinced, while hypnotized, that when he wakes he will feel so terrible that
he will hope for nothing but death. This would be the depressive-type insanity.
He can be told that all he can think about is how sick he is and that every malady of
which he reads becomes his. This would make him react like a hypochondriac.
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Thus we could go down the catalogue of mental ills and by concocting positive
suggestions to create the state of mind, we could bring about, in the awakened subject, a
semblance to every insanity.
Understood that these are semblances. They are similar to insanity in that the subject
would act like an insane person. He would not be an insane person. The moment the
suggestion is relieved -- the subject being informed that it was a suggestion -- the aberration
(and all these insanities, etc., are grouped under the heading of aberration) theoretically
vanishes.* * An injunction here. These are tests. They have been made on people who could
be hypnotized and people who could not be but who were drugged. They brought forth
valuable data for dianetics. They can be duplicated only when you know dianetics unless you
want to actually drive somebody insane by accident. For these suggestions do not always
vanish. Hypnotism is a wild variable. It is dangerous and belongs in the parlor in the same way
you would want an atom bomb there.
The duplication of aberrations of all classes and kinds in subjects who have been
hypnotized or drugged has demonstrated that there is some portion of the mind which is not in
contact with the consciousness but which contains data.
It was the search for this portion of the mind which led to the resolution of the problem
of insanity, psycho-somatic ills and other aberrations. It was not approached through
hypnotism, and hypnotism is just another tool, a tool which is of only occasional use in the
practice of dianetics and is, indeed, not needed at all.
Here we have an individual who is acting sanely, who is given a positive suggestion
and who then temporarily acts insanely. His sanity is restored by the release of the suggestion
into his consciousness, at which moment it loses its force upon him. But this is only a
semblance of the mechanism involved. The actual insanity, one not laid now by some
hypnotist, does not need to emerge into the consciousness to be released. There is this
difference and others between hypnotism and the actual source of aberration; but hypnotism is a
demonstration of its working parts.
Review the first example of the positive suggestion. The subject was “unconscious,”
which is to say, he was not in possession of complete awareness or self-determinism. He was
given something he must do and the something was hidden from his consciousness. The
operator gave him a signal. When the signal occurred, the subject performed an act. The subject
gave reasons for the act which were not the real reasons for it. The subject found fault with the
operator and the operator’s clothing but did not see that it was the tie which signaled the action.
The suggestion was released and the subject no longer felt a compulsion to perform the act.
These are the parts of aberration. Once one knows exactly what parts of what are
aberrations, the whole problem is very simple. It seems incredible at first glance that the source
could have remained so thoroughly hidden for so many thousands of years of research. But at,
second glance, it becomes a wonder that the source was ever discovered. For it is hidden
cunningly and well.
“Unconsciousness” of the non-hypnotic variety is a little more rugged. It takes more
than a few passes of the hand to cause “unconsciousness” of the insanity-producing variety.
The shock of accidents, the anaesthetics used for operations, the pain of injuries and the
deliriums of illness are the principal sources of what we call “unconsciousness.”
The mechanism, in our analogue of the mind, is very simple. In comes a destructive
wave of physical pain or a pervading poison such as ether and out go some or all of the fuses
of the analytical mind. When it goes out, so go what we know as the standard memory banks.
The periods of “unconsciousness” are blanks in the standard memory banks. These
missing periods make up what dianetics calls the reactive mind bank.
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The times when the analytical mind is in full operation plus the times when the reactive
mind is in operation are a continuous line of consecutive recording for the entire period of life.
During the periods when the analytical mind is cut out of circuit in full or in part, the
reactive mind cuts in in full or in part. In other words, if the analytical mind is unfused so that it
is half out of circuit, the reactive mind is half in circuit. No such sharp percentages are actually
possible, but this is to give an approximation.
When the individual is “unconscious” in full or in part, the reactive mind is cut in in full
or in part. When he is fully conscious, his analytical mind is fully in command of the organism.
When his consciousness is reduced, the reactive mind is cut into the circuit just that much.
The moments which contain “unconsciousness” in the individual are contra-survival
moments, by and large. Therefore it is vital that something take over so that the individual can
go through motions to save the whole organism. The fighter who fights half out on his feet, the
burned man who drags himself out of the fire -- these are cases when the reactive mind is
valuable.
The reactive mind is very rugged. It would have to be in order to stand up to the pain
waves which knock out other sentience in the body. It is not very refined. But it is most
awesomely accurate. It possesses a low order of computing ability, an order which is sub-moron,
but one would expect a low order of ability from a mind which stays in circuit when the
body is being crushed or fried.
The reactive bank does not store memories as we think of them. It stores engrams. *
These engrams are a complete recording, down to the last accurate detail, of every perception
present in a moment of partial or full “unconsciousness.” They are just as accurate as any other
recording in the body. But they have their own force. They are like phonograph records or
motion pictures, if these contained all perceptions of sight, sound, smell, taste, organic
sensation, etc.
The difference between an engram and a memory, however, is quite distinct. An
engram can be permanently fused into any and all body circuits and behaves like an entity.
In all laboratory tests on these engrams they were found to possess “inexhaustible”
sources of power to command the body. No matter how many times one was reactivated in an
individual, it was still powerful. Indeed, it became even more able to exert its power in
proportion to its reactivation.
The only thing which could even begin to shake these engrams was the technique which
developed into dianetic therapy, which will be covered in full in the third section of this
volume.
This is an example of an engram: A woman is knocked down by a blow. She is
rendered “unconscious.” She is kicked and told she is a faker, that she is no good, that she is
always changing her mind. A chair is overturned in the process. A faucet is running in the
kitchen. A car is passing in the street outside. The engram contains a running record of all these
perceptions: sight, sound, tactile, taste, smell, organic sensation, kinetic sense, joint position,
thirst record, etc. The engram would consist of the whole statement made to her when she was
“unconscious”: the voice tones and emotion in the voice, the sound and feel of the original and
later blows, the tactile of the floor, the feel and sound of the chair overturning, the organic
sensation of the blow, perhaps the taste of blood in her mouth or any other taste present there,
the smell of the person attacking her and the smells in the room, the sound of the passing car’s
motor and tires, etc.
These would all be considered something on the order of a “positive suggestion.” But
there is something else here which is new, something which is not in the standard banks except
by context: pain and painful emotion.
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These things are what make the difference between the standard banks and the reactive
engram banks: physical pain and painful emotion. Physical pain and painful emotion are the
difference between an engram, which is the cause of aberration, all aberration, and a memory.*
* In dianetics, a memory is considered to be any concept of perceptions stored in the standard
memory banks which is potentially recallable by the “I.” A scene beheld by the eyes and
perceived by the other senses becomes a record in the standard memory banks and later may be
recalled by “I” for reference.
We all have heard that bad experience is helpful to living and that without bad
experience, man never learns. This may be very, very true. But it doesn’t embrace the engram.
That isn’t experience. That is commanded action.
Perhaps before Man had a large vocabulary, these engrams were of some use to him.
They were survival in ways which will be developed later. But when Man acquired a fine,
homonymic (words that sound the same but mean different things) language, and indeed, when
he acquired any language, these engrams were much more a liability than a help. And now with
Man well evolved, these engrams do not protect him at all but make him mad, inefficient and
ill.
The proof of any assertion lies in its applicability. When these engrams are deleted
from the reactive mind bank, rationality and efficiency are enormously heightened, health is
greatly increased and the individual computes rationally on the survival conduct pattern, which
is to say, he enjoys himself and the society of those around him and is constructive and
creative. He is destructive only when something actually threatens the sphere of his dynamics.
These engrams, then, are entirely negative in value in this stage of Man’s development.
When he was nearer the level of his animal cousins (who have, all of them, reactive minds of
this same kind), he might have had use for the data. But language and his changed existence
make any engram a distinct liability, and no engram has any constructive value.
The reactive mind was provided to secure survival. It still pretends to act in that
fashion. But its wild errors now lead only in the other direction.
There are actually three kinds of engrams, all of them aberrative: First is the contra-survival
engram. This contains physical pain, painful emotion, all other perceptions and
menace to the organism. A child knocked out by a rapist and abused receives this type of
engram. The contra-survival engram contains apparent or actual antagonism to the organism.
The second engram type is the pro-survival engram. A child who has been abused is ill.
He is told, while he is partially or wholly “unconscious,” that he will be taken care of, that he is
dearly loved, etc. This engram is not taken as contra-survival but pro-survival. It seems to be in
favor of survival. Of the two this last is the most aberrative since it is reinforced by the law of
affinity which is always more powerful than fear. Hypnotism preys on this characteristic of the
reactive mind, being a sympathetic address to an artificially unconscious subject. Hypnotism is
as limited as it is because it does not contain, as a factor, physical pain, and painful emotion:
things which keep an engram out of sight and moored below the level of “consciousness.”
The third is the painful emotion engram which is similar to the other engrams. It is
caused by the shock of sudden loss such as the death of a loved one.
The reactive mind bank is composed exclusively of these engrams. The reactive mind
thinks exclusively with these engrams. And it “thinks” with them in a way which would make
Korzybski swear, for it thinks in terms of full identification, which is to say identities, one
thing identical to another.
If the analytical mind did a computation on apples and worms, it could be stated,
probably, as follows: some apples have worms in them, other don’t; when biting an apple one
48.49
occasionally finds a worm unless the apple has been sprayed properly; worms in apples leaves
holes.
The reactive mind, however, doing a computation on apples and worms as contained in
its engram bank, would calculate as follows: apples are worms are bites are holes in apples are
holes in anything are apples and always are worms are apples are bites, etc.
The analytical mind’s computations might embrace the most staggering summations of
calculus, the shifty turns of symbolic logic, the computations requisite to bridge-building or
dress-making. Any mathematical equation ever seen came from the analytical mind and might
be used by the analytical mind in resolving the most routine problems.
But not the reactive mind! That’s so beautifully, wonderfully simple that it can be
stated, in operation, to have just one equation: A = A = A = A = A.
Start any computation with the reactive mind. Start it with the data it contains, of
course. Any datum is just the same to it as any other datum in the same experience.
An analytical computation done on the woman being kicked, as mentioned, would be
that women get themselves into situations sometimes when they get kicked and hurt and men
have been known to kick and hurt women.
A reactive mind computation about his engram, as an engram, would be: the pain of the
kick equals the pain of the blow equals the overturning chair equals the passing car equals the
faucet equals the fact that she is a faker equals the fact that she is no good equals the fact that
she changes her mind equals the voice tones of the man equals the emotion equals a faker
equals a faucet running equals the pain of the kick equals organic sensation in the area of the
kick equals the overturning chair equals changing one’s mind equals.... But why continue?
Every single perception in this engram equals every other perception in this engram. What?
That’s crazy? Precisely!
Let us further examine our post-hypnotic positive suggestion of the touched tie and the
removed coat. In this we have the visible factors of how the reactive mind operates.
This post-hypnotic suggestion needs only an emotional charge and physical pain to
make it a dangerous engram. Actually it is an engram of a sort. It is laid in by sympathy
between the operator and subject, which would make it a sympathy engram -- pro-survival.
Now we know that the operator had only to touch his tie to make the awakened subject
remove his coat. The subject did not know what it was which caused him to remove his coat
and found all manner of explanation for the action, none of which was the right one. The
engram, the post-hypnotic suggestion in this case, was actually placed in the reactive mind
bank. It was below the level of consciousness, it was compulsion springing from below the
level of consciousness. And it worked upon the muscles to make the subject remove his coat. It
was data fused into the circuits of the body below the command level of the analytical mind and
operated not only upon the body but also upon the analytical mind itself.
If this subject took off his coat every time he saw somebody touch a necktie, society
would account him slightly mad. And yet there was no power of consent about this. If he had
attempted to thwart the operator by refusing to remove the coat, the subject would have
experienced great discomfort of one sort or another.
Let us now take an example of the reactive mind’s processes in a lower echelon of life:
a fish swims into the shallows where the water is brackish, yellow, and tastes of iron. He has
just taken a mouthful of shrimp when a bigger fish rushes at him and knocks against his tail.
The small fish manages to get away but he has been physically hurt. Having negligible
analytical powers, the small fish depends upon reaction for much of his choice of activity.
49.50
Now he heals his tail and goes on about his affairs. But one day he is attacked by a
larger fish and gets his tail bumped. This time he is not seriously hurt, merely bumped. But
something has happened. Something within him considers that in his choice of action he is now
being careless. Here is a second injury in the same area.
The computation on the fish reactive level was: shallows equals brackish equals yellow
equals iron taste equals pain in tail equals shrimp in mouth, and any one of these equals any
other.
The bump in the tail on the second occasion keyed-in the engram. It demonstrated to the
organism that something like the first accident (identity thought) could happen again.
Therefore, beware!
The small fish, after this, swims into brackish water. This makes him slightly
“nervous.” But he goes on swimming and finds himself in yellow and brackish water. And
still he does not turn back. He begins to get a small pain in his tail. But he keeps on swimming.
Suddenly he gets a taste of iron and the pain in his tail turns on heavily. And away he goes like
a flash. No fish was after him. There were shrimp to be had there. But away he went anyway.
Dangerous place! And if he had not turned away, he would have really gotten himself a pain in
the tail.
The mechanism is survival activity of a sort. In a fish it may serve a purpose. But in a
man, who takes off a coat every time somebody touches a tie, the survival mechanism has long
outlived its time. But it is there!
Let us further investigate our young man and the coat. The signal for the coat removal
was very precise. The operator touched his tie. This is equivalent to any or all of the
perceptions the fish received and which made the fish turn back. The touch of the tie could have
been a dozen things. Any one of the dozen might have signaled the removal of the coat.
In the case of the woman who was knocked out and kicked, any perception in the
engram she received has some quality of restimulation. Running water from a faucet might not
have affected her greatly. But water running from a faucet plus a passing car might have begun
some slight reactivation of the engram, a vague discomfort in the areas where she was struck
and kicked, not enough yet to cause her real pain but there all the same. To the running water
and the passing car we add the sharp falling of a chair and she experiences a shock of mild
proportion. Add now the smell and voice of the man who kicked her and the pain begins to
grow. The mechanism is telling her that she is in dangerous quarters, that she should leave. But
she is not a fish, she is a highly sentient being, to our knowledge the most complex mental
structure so far evolved on Earth, organism of the species, Man. There are many other factors
in the problem than this one engram. She stays. The pains in the areas where she was abused
become a predisposition to illness or are chronic illness in themselves, minor it is true in the
case of this one incident, but illness just the same. Her affinity with the man who beat her may
be so high that the analytical level, being assisted by a normally high general tone, may counter
against these pains. But if that level is low, without much to assist it, then the pains can
become major.
The fish that was so struck and received an engram did not disavow shrimp. Shrimp
might have made him a little less enthusiastic afterwards, but the survival potential of shrimp-eating
made shrimp equal far more pleasure than it did pain.
A pleasant and hopeful life in general -- and never think we intimate that the woman
stays for food alone whatever the wits say about women -- has a high survival potential, and
that can overcome a very great deal of pain. As the survival potential diminishes, however, the
level of pain (Zone 0 and Zone 1) is more closely approached and such an engram could begin
to be reactivated severely.
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There is another factor here, however, besides pain -- in fact, several more factors. If
the young man with the detachable coat had been given one of the neurotic positive suggestions
as listed a few pages back, he would have reacted to it on signal.
The engram this woman has received contains a neurotic positive suggestion quite in
addition to the general restimulators such as the faucet and the car and the overturning chair.
She has been told that she is a faker, that she is no good, and that she is always changing her
mind. When the engram is restimulated in one of the great many ways possible, she has a
“feeling” that she is no good, a faker, and she will change her mind.
There are several cases to hand which peculiarly illustrate the sadness of this. One case
in particular which was cleared had been beaten severely many times and told a similar thing
each time, all derogatory. The content inferred that she was very loose morally and would
cohabit with anyone. She was brought in as a case by her father -- she had since been divorced
-- who complained that she was very loose morally and had cohabited with several men in as
many weeks. She herself admitted that she was, she could not see how it could be and it
worried her, but she just “could not seem to help it.” Examination of the engrams in her
reactive mind bank brought forth a long series of beatings with this content. Because this was a
matter of research, not treatment -- although that was given -- her former husband was
contacted. An examination, independent of her knowledge, demonstrated his rage dramatization
to contain these very words. He had beaten his wife into being a morally loose woman because
he was afraid of morally loose women.
All cases examined in all this research were checked, the patient’s engrams against the
engrams in the donor. The contents of the incidents were verified wherever possible and were
found uniformly to agree. Every safeguard was made to prevent any other method of
communication between donor and patient. Everything found in the “unconscious” periods of
every patient, when checked against other source, was found to be exact.
The analogy between hypnotism and aberration bears out well. Hypnotism plants by
positive suggestion one or another form of insanity. It is usually a temporary planting, but
sometimes the hypnotic suggestion will not “lift” or remove in a way desirable to the hypnotist.
The danger of running experiments with hypnosis. on uncleared patients is found in another
mechanism of the reactive kind.
When an engram such as our example above exists, the woman obviously was
“unconscious” at the time she received the engram. She had no standard bank memory (record)
of the incident beyond the knowledge that she had been knocked out by the man. The engram
was not, then, an experience as we understand the word. It could work from below to aberrate
her thinking processes, it could give her strange pains -- which she attributed to something else
-- in the areas injured. But it was not known to her.
The key-in was necessary to activate the engram. But what, precisely, could key it in?
At some later time when she was tired the man threatened to strike her again and called her
names. This was conscious level experience. It was found to be “mentally painful” by her. And
it was “mentally painful” only because there was real, live, physical pain unseen under it,
which had been “keyed-in” by the conscious experience. The second experience was a lock. It
was a memory but it had a new kind of action in the standard banks. It had too much power
and it gained that power from a past physical blow. The reactive mind is not too careful about
its time clock. It can’t tell one year old from ninety, in fact, when a key-in begins. The actual
engram moved up under the standard bank.
She thinks she is worried about what he said in the lock experience. She is actually
worried about the engram. In this way memories become “painful.” But pain doesn’t store in
the standard banks. There is no place in that bank for pain. None. There is a place for the
concept of pain and these concepts of what is painful are good enough to keep the sentient
organism called Man away from all the pain he believes is actually dangerous. In a clear there
51.52
are no pain-inducing memories because there is no physical pain record left to ruin the
machinery from the reactive mind bank.
The young man with the detachable coat did not know what was worrying him or what
made him do what he did. The person with an engram does not know what is worrying him.
He thinks it is the lock and the lock may be a very long way removed from anything resembling
the engram. The lock may have similar perceptic content. But it may be on another subject
entirely.
It is not very complicated to undersand what these engrams do. They are simply
moments of physical pain strong enough to throw part or all the analytical machinery out of
circuit; they are antagonism to the survival of the organism or pretended sympathy to the
organism’s survival. That is the entire definition. Great or little “unconsciousness,” physical
pain, perceptic content and contra-survival or pro-survival data. They are handled by the
reactive mind, which thinks exclusively in identities of everything equals everything. And they
enforce their commands upon the organism by wielding the whip of physical pain. If the
organism does not do exactly as they say (and believe any clear, that’s impossible!), the
physical pain turns on. They steer a person like a keeper steers a tiger -- and they can make a
tiger out of a man in the process without much trouble -- and give him mange into the bargain.
If man had not invented language, or, as will be demonstrated, if his languages were a
little less homonymic and more specific with their personal pronouns, engrams would still be
survival data and the mechanism would work. But Man has outgrown their use. He chose
between language and potential madness and for the vast benefits of the former he received the
curse of the latter.
The engram is the single and sole source of aberration and psycho-somatic illness.
An enormous quantity of data has been sifted. Not one single exception has been
found. In “normal people,” in the neurotic and insane, the removal of these engrams wholly or
in part, without other therapy, has uniformly brought about a state greatly superior to the
current norm. No need was found for any theory or therapy other than those given in this book
for the treatment of all psychic or psycho-somatic ills.
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CHAPTER III
The Cell and the Organism
The reason the engram so long remained hidden as the single source of aberration and
psycho-somatic ills is the wide and almost infinitely complex manifestations which can derive
from simple engrams.
Several theories could be postulated as to why the human mind evolved exactly as it
did, but these are theories, and dianetics is not concerned with structure. A comment or two as
a stimulation to future workers in that field might be made, however, wholly as a postulate, that
there is a definite connection between any electriclike energy in the body and the energy
effusion of cells undergoing injury. A theory could be constructed along the lines that injured
cells, further injuring their neighbors by a discharge of electric-like energy, forced the
development of a special cell which would act as a conduit to “bleed off” this painful charge.
The conduits of cells might have become neurons and the charge might have been better
distributed so through the body with less likelihood of local incapacitation at the point of the
injury impact. These conduits -- neurons -- might have been started in formation by impacts at
the extremity of the body toward the direction of locomotion. This would make the skull the
greatest mass of neurons. Man, walking upright, might have had another new point of impact,
the forehead, and so gained his pre-frontal lobes. And maybe not. That is just theory, with
only a few data to support it which have a scientific value. And it has not been subjected to
experiment of any kind whatever.
This much, however, has to be advanced as theory on structure. The cell is one of the
basic building blocks of the body. Cells, the better to survive, seem to have become colonies
which, in turn, had the primary interest, survival. And the colonies developed or recruited into
aggregations which in turn were organisms, also with the sole purpose of survival. And the
organisms developed minds to coordinate the muscles and resolve the problems of survival.
Again, this is still theory and even if it was the track of reasoning which led toward dianetics, it
can be completely wrong. It works. It can be pulled away from dianetics and dianetics will
remain a science and go on working. The concept of the electronic brain was not vital but only
useful to dianetics and it could be swept away as well -- dianetics would still stand. A science is
a changing affair as far as its internal theory goes. In dianetics we have our wedge into an
enormous scope of research. As dianetics stands, it works and it works every time and without
exception. The reasons why it works will undoubtedly be mulled over and changed here and
there to its betterment -- if they aren’t, an abiding faith in this generation of scientists and the
future generations will not have been justified.
Why we talk about cells will become apparent as we progress. The reason we know
that past concepts of structure are not correct is because they don’t work as function. All our
facts are functional and these facts are scientific facts, supported wholly and completely by
laboratory evidence. Function precedes structure. James Clerk Maxwell’s mathematics were
postulated and electricity was widely and beneficially used long before anyone had any real idea
about the structure of the atom. Function always comes before structure. The astounding lack
of progress in the field of the human mind during the past thousands of years is partly
attributable to its “organ of thought” lying within a field, medicine, which was and long may be
an art, not a science. Basic philosophy to explain life will have to come before that art makes
much further progress.
What the capabilities of the cell are, for instance, have been but poorly studied. Some
work has been carried on in recent years to find out more, but basic philosophy was absent.
The cell was being observed, not predicted.
The studies of cells in Man have been largely done from dead tissue. An unknown
quality is missing from dead tissue, the important quality -- life.
53.54
In dianetics, on the level of laboratory observation, we discover much to our
astonishment that cells are evidently sentient in some currently inexplicable way. Unless we
postulate a human soul entering the sperm and ovum at conception, there are things which no
other postulate will embrace than that these cells are in some way sentient. Entering a new field
with postulates which work in all directions -- and the basic philosophy of survival is a pilot
which leads us on and on into further and further realms, explaining and predicting phenomena
on every hand -- it is inevitable that data will turn up which does not agree with past theory.
When that data is as scientific as the observation that when an apple is dropped under usual
conditions on Earth it falls, one cannot help but accept it. Abandoning past theories may do
damage to treasured beliefs and one’s nostalgic love of the old school tie, but a fact is a fact.
The cells as thought units evidently have an influence, as cells, upon the body as a
thought unit and an organism. We do not have to untangle this structural problem to resolve our
functional postulates. The cells evidently retain engrams of painful events. After all, they are
the things which get injured. And they evidently retain a whip hand of punishment for every
time the analyzer fails them. The story of the engram seems to be a story of a battle between the
troops and the general every time the general gets some of the troops killed off. The less
fortunate this general is in protecting these troops, the more power the troops assume. The cells
evidently pushed the brain on an upward evolution toward higher sentience. Pain reversed the
process as though the cells were sorry they had put so much power in the hands of a central
commander.
The reactive mind may very well be the combined cellular intelligence. One need not
assume that it is, but it is a handy structural theory in the lack of any real work done in this field
of structure. The reactive engram bank may be material stored in the cells themselves. It does
not matter whether this is credible or incredible just now. Something has to be said about it to
give one a mental hold on what happens during moments of “unconsciousness.”
The scientific fact, observed and tested, is that the organism, in the presence of physical
pain, lets the analyzer get knocked out of circuit so that there is a limited quantity or no quantity
at all of personal awareness as a unit organism. It does this either to protect the analyzer or to
withdraw its power in the belief that an engram is best in an emergency -- with which the
analyzer, by the way, on observed experience, does not agree.
Every percept present, including physical pain, is recorded during these non-analytical
moments. Whenever pain is present -- physical pain -- that is, the analyzer gets shut down to a
small or large extent. If the duration of the pain is only an instant, there is still an instant there
of analytical reduction. This can be proven very easily -- just try to recall the last time you were
seriously hurt and see if there isn’t at least a momentary blank period. Going to sleep under
anaesthetic and waking up some time later is a more complicated sort of shut-down in that it
includes physical pain but is initially caused by a poison (and all anaesthetics are poisons,
technically). Then there is the condition of suffocating, as in drowning, and this is a shut-down
period to greater or lesser extent. And there is the condition caused by blood, for one cause or
another, leaving the area or areas which contain analytical power -- wherever they are -- and
this again causes a greater or lesser degree of analytical shutdown: such incidents include shock
(in which the blood tends to lake in the center of the body), the loss of blood by surgery or
injury or anemia and the closing of the arteries leading through the throat. Natural sleep causes
a reduction of analytical activity but is actually not very deep or serious; by dianetic therapy any
experience occurring during sleep can be recovered with ease.
It can now be seen that there are many ways in which analytical power can be shut
down. And it can be seen that there is greater or lesser reduction. When one burns one’s finger
with a cigarette, there is a small instant of pain and a small amount of reduction. When one
undergoes an operation, the duration may be in terms of hours and the amount of shut-down
may be extreme. The duration and the amount of reduction are two different things, related but
quite dissimilar. This is not so very important but it is mentioned.
54.55
We have seen, reading in dianetics this far, that the principle of the spectrum has been
quite useful to us. And it can be seen that the amount of reduction in analytical power can be
described in the same way that survival potential can be described. There can be a very little bit
and there can be a very great deal. Going back and taking a look at the survival potential range,
one can see that there would be death at the bottom and immortality at the top. There is
“infinite” survival. Whether or not there can be infinite analytical power is a matter of
mysticism. But that there is a definite relationship between individual tone and the amount of
analytical shutdown is a scientific fact. Put it this way: with the individual well and happy and
enthusiastic, analytical power can be considered to be high (Zones 3 and 4). With the individual
under the wheels of a truck, “unconscious” and in agony, the analytical power may be
considered to be ranging in Zone 0. There is a ratio between potential survival and analytical
power. As one goes down, so does the other. There is more data to be concluded from this
than one would think at first glance. It is a very important ratio.
All the percepts are included in an engram. Two of these percepts are physical pain and
painful emotion. A third is organic sensation, which is to say, the condition of the organism
during the moment of the engram. And how was the organism when the engram was received?
Greater or lesser “unconsciousness” was present. This meant that there was an organic
sensation of reduced analytical power, since analytical power derives, evidently, from an organ
or organs in the body. If an engram is reactivated by a restimulator or restimulators -- that is to
say if the individual with an engram receives something in his environment similar to the
perceptions in the engram -- the engram puts everything it contains -- its percepts such as
faucets and words -- into greater or lesser operation.
There can be greater or lesser restimulation. An engram can be put into force just a little
bit by restimulators in the environment of the individual or, with many restimulators present
and the body in an already reduced state, the engram can go into a full force display (which is
covered later). But whether the engram is slightly restimulated or greatly restimulated,
everything in it goes into effect one way or another.
There is just one common denominator of all engrams, just one thing which every
engram has and which is possessed by every other engram. Each contains the datum that the
analyzer is more or less shut-down. There is a shut-down datum in every engram. Therefore,
every time an engram is restimulated, even though physical pain has not been received by the
body, some analytical power turns off, the organ or organs which are the analyzer are fused out
of circuit in some degree.
This is highly important to an understanding of the mechanics of aberration. It is a
scientific fact, susceptible of proof, and it never varies. This always happens: when an engram
is received, the analyzer is shut down by the physical pain and emotion; when the engram is
restimulated the analyzer shuts down as part of the commands of the engram. Actually this is a
very mechanical thing. Engram is restimulated, part of the analytical power is shut down. This
is as inevitable as turning on and off an electric light. Pull the cord and the light goes off. The
reduction of the analyzer is not that sharp -- there are grades of light -- but it is just as
mechanical.
Put a man under ether, hurt him in the chest. He has received an engram because his
analytical power was turned off first by ether and then by a chest pain. While he was there on
the operating table, the reactive mind recorded the click of instruments, everything said, all
sounds and smells. Let us suppose that a nurse was holding one of his feet because he was
kicking. This is a complete engram.
The engram will be keyed-in by something in the future, a similar incident. After this,
in greater or lesser degree, whenever he hears clicks like instrument clicks he gets nervous. If
he pays attention to what is happening in his body at that minute, he may find that his foot feels
slightly as if it were being held. But he is not likely to give any attention to his foot because if
55.56
he had any attention to give, the chest pain would be found present in some degree. But his
analytical ability has been turned off slightly. As the foot felt it was being held, so does the
analyzer have the conception of being shut down by ether and pain. The restimulator (the
clicking) tended to bring the whole engram slightly into being and part of the engram command
is a reduced analytical power.
This is “push-button” in its precision. If one knew another’s main restimulators
(words, voice tones, music, whatever they are -- things which are filed in the reactive mind
bank as parts of engrams) one could turn another’s analytical power almost completely off,
actually render him unconscious.
We all know people who make us feel stupid. There can be two causes for that but both
of them are from engrams and one of them is the fact that no matter what engram is brought
into restimulation, part of the analytical power is turned off.
Engrams can, if environment is uniform, be held in chronic restimulation. This means a
chronic partial shutdown of analytical power. The recovery of intelligence by a clear and the
rise of that intelligence to such fantastic heights results in part from the relief of word
commands in engrams that he is stupid and in a larger part from the relief of this chronic shut-down
condition.
This is not theory. This is scientific fact. It is strictly test-tube. The engram contains the
percept of a shutdown analyzer; when it is restimulated the engram puts that datum back into
force in some degree.
Engrams, then, being received in “unconsciousness” cause a partial “unconsciousness”
to exist every time they are restimulated. The person who has an engram (any aberree) need not
receive new physical pain to have a new moment of partial “unconsciousness” take place.
Feeling “dopey” or “sleepy” or “dull” results in part from a partially shut-down analyzer. Being
“nervous” or in a rage or frightened also carries with it partially shutoff analytical power.
The hypnotist has “success” where he does because he is able, by talking to people
about “sleep,” to put into restimulation some engram which contains the word sleep and shut-down
analytical power. This is one of the reasons hypnotism “works.”
The whole society, however, is liable to analytical shutdown in greater or lesser degree
by the restimulation of engrams.
The number of engrams a person’s reactive bank contains may not, however, establish
the amount of analytical reduction to which he is subjected. A person may have engrams and
they may not have been keyed-in. And if they have been keyed-in, he might not be in an
environment which contains any great number of restimulators. Under these conditions his
survival zone position may be high even though he is possessed of a great many engrams. And
again, he might have educated himself over and above these engrams to some slight degree.
But a person who has keyed-in engrams and does exist in the area of many
restimulators is liable to an enormous amount of restimulation and analytical shut-down. This is
a normal condition. If a person has a large number of engrams and they are keyed-in and he
lives around many restimulators his condition can vary from normal to insane. And in a single
day -- as in the case of a man who experiences moments of rage or a woman who drops into
apathies -- the condition of a person may vary from normal to insane and back to normal. We
take here the word “insane” to mean utter irrationality. So there is temporary or chronic
insanity.
The court of law which goes through the lugubrious process of having a man
pronounced sane or insane after that man has murdered somebody is itself being irrational. Of
course the man was insane when he committed the murder. What the court is asking now is
whether or not the man is chronically insane. This has little bearing on the matter. If a man has
56.57
gone insane enough to murder once, he will go insane enough in the future to murder again.
Chronic, then, means either a chronic cycle or a continuous condition. The law says sanity is
the “ability to tell right from wrong.” When Man is subject to a mechanism (and all men are)
which lets him be rational one minute and restimulated the next, none in the society, if
uncleared, can be considered able to always tell right from wrong. This is completely aside
from what the law means by “right” and what it means by “wrong.”
This is an example of the roller-coaster sanity curve of the aberree. All aberrees possess
engrams (the normal number is probably in the hundreds per individual). Analytically people
have a wide latitude of choice and they can deal even with philosophic rights and wrongs. But
in aberrated persons the engram bank is always susceptible of restimulation. The “sanest”
aberree of Tuesday may be a murderer on Wednesday if the exactly right situation occurs to trip
the exact engram. A clear is not entirely predictable in any given situation -- he has such a wide
power of choice. But an aberrated person transcends all predictability for the following reasons:
(1) what engrams an aberree has in his reactive engram bank none know including himself; (2)
what situation will contain what restimulators is a matter of chance; and (3) what his power of
choice will be with the factors in the engrams on a reactive level cannot be established.
The variety of conduct which one can evolve out of these basic mechanics is so wide
that it is no wonder that Man was considered to be a rather hopeless case by some
philosophies.
The cells, if the engram bank is retained on a cellular level, might be theoretically
supposed to have made sure that the analyzer did not get too adventurous in this life and death
matter of living. They therefore could be considered to have copied down all data contained in
every moment of physical pain and emotion resulting in or contained in “unconsciousness.”
Then when any data similar to this appeared in the environment they could be wary and, with a
large number of restimulators in sight, they could be considered to shut down the analyzer and
proceed on reaction. This has a crude safety factor. Obviously, if the organism survived
through one period of “unconsciousness,” it could be theorized by the cells that the placing of
the data and action in effect under circumstances which threatened to be similar would result
once more in survival. What’s good enough for grandpa is good enough for me. What was
good enough in the bus accident is good enough in a bus.
This moronic “thinking” is typical of the reactive mind. It is just the sort of thinking it
does. It is the ultimate in conservatism. It misses the point and important data at every turn, it
overloads the body with pain, it is a whirlpool of confusion. If there were just one engram per
situation, maybe it would get by. But there may be ten engrams with similar data in them (an
engram lock chain) and yet the data may be so contradictory that when a new emergency arises
which contains the restimulators of the chain, no proper past conduct can be put forth to meet
it.
Obviously the x factor is language. The cells, if this is a problem in cells (for recall, this
part is theory based on data in an effort to explain what happens and a theory can be altered
without altering the scientific usefulness of the facts), probably do not understand languages
very well. If they did they wouldn’t evolve such “solutions.”
Take two engrams about baseball bats. In the first, the individual is hit on the head and
knocked out and somebody yells, “Run! Run! Run!” In the second the individual is knocked
out by the bat in the same environment and somebody yells, “Stay there! You’re safe!” Now
what does he do when he hears a baseball bat or smells one or sees one or hears these words?
Run or stay there! He has a similar pain for each action. What actually happens? He gets a
headache. This is that thing called conflict. This is anxiety. And anxiety can become very acute
indeed on a purely mechanical level when one has ninety engrams pulling him south and
eighty-nine pulling him north. Does he go north or south? Or does he have a “nervous
breakdown?”
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The level of brilliance of the reactive mind is about the same as a phonograph. The
needle gets put on the record and the record plays. The reactive mind merely puts on the needle.
When it tries to select several records out and play them all at once, things happen.
By intentional construction or accident in design or by-pass in evolution -- where the
old, useless organ is still built -- the cells managed to hide this engram bank fairly well. Man is
conscious in his analytical mind. When he is “unconscious,” his analytical mind is unable to
monitor the incoming data and the data is not to be found in the thing we call, by analogue, the
standard banks. Therefore whatever came in passed by consciousness. And having passed by,
consciousness cannot (without dianetic process) recall it, since there is no channel for recall.
The engram enters when consciousness is absent. It thereafter operates directly into the
organism. Only by dianetic therapy can the analyzer come into possession of this data (and the
removal of it does not depend upon the analyzer contacting it at all, despite an old belief that the
“realization” of something cures it: “realize” an engram and one is in quick trouble, without
dianetic technique). The engram is received by the cellular body. The reactive mind could be
the very lowest level of analytical power, of course, but this does not alter the scientific fact that
the engram acts as if it were a soldered-in connection to the life function regulator and the
organic co-ordination and the basic level of the analytical mind itself. By “soldered-in” is meant
“permanent connection.” This keying-in is the hook-up of the engram as part of the operating
machinery of the body. An analytical thought process is not permanently hooked in but can be
thrown in and out of circuit at the will of the analyzer. This is not true of the engram, thus the
term, “soldered-in.”
The analytical mind lays down a training pattern; on a stimulus-response basis this
training pattern will work smoothly and well whenever it will do the organism the most good.
An engram is a training pattern, all complete in a package, “permanently” hooked into the
circuits (without dianetic therapy) and it goes into operation like a training pattern without any
consent whatever from the analyzer.
Influenced itself by the engram in the several ways of reduced analytical power and
positive suggestion in the engram, the analytical mind is unable to discover any truly valid
reason for the conduct of the organism. It therefore makes up a reason, for its job is to make
sure the organism is always right. Just as the young man with the detachable coat gave forth a
number of silly explanations as to why he was detaching his coat so does the analytical mind,
observing the body engaged in irrational actions, including speech, for which there seems to be
no accounting, justify the actions. The engram can dictate all the various processes incident to
living; it can dictate beliefs, opinions, thought processes or lack of them and actions of all
kinds, and can establish conditions remarkable for their complexity as well as their stupidity.
An engram can dictate anything it contains and engrams can contain all the combinations of
words in the entire language. And the analytical mind is forced, in the light of irrational
behavior or conviction, to justify the acts and conditions of the organism, as well as its own
strange blunders. This is justified thought.
There are three kinds of thought, then, of which the organism is capable: (a) analytical
thought, which is rational as modified by education and viewpoint, (b) justified thought,
analytical thought attempting to explain reactions, and (c) reactive thought, which is wholly in
terms of everything in an engram equals everything in an engram equals all the restimulators in
the environment and all things associated with those restimulators.
We have all seen somebody make a blunder and then give forth an explanation of just
why that blunder had been made. This is justified thought. The blunder was made, unless out
of education or viewpoint, by an engram. The analytical mind then had to justify the blunder to
make sure that the body was right and that its computations were right.
Now there are two other conditions which can be caused by engrams. One is
dramatization and the other is valence.
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You have seen some child come forth with a tirade, a tantrum. You have seen some
man go through a whole rage action. You have seen people go through a whole irrational set of
actions. These are dramatizations. They come about when an engram is thoroughly
restimulated, so thoroughly that its soldered-in aspect takes over the organism. It may come
into circuit slightly or wholly, which is to say that there are degrees of dramatization. When it
is in full parade, the engram is running off verbatim and the individual is like an actor, puppet-like,
playing his dictated part. A person can be given new engrams which will make these old
ones take secondary importance. (Society’s punishment complex is aimed squarely at giving
anti-engram education.)
Dramatization is survival conduct -- in the silly, reactive mind way of thinking -- based
on the premise that the organism, in a “similar” situation lived through it because these actions
were present.
The woman who was knocked down and kicked would dramatize her engram,
possibly, by doing and saying exactly the same things done and said to her. Her victim may be
her child or another woman. It could or would be the person who gave her the engram if she
were strong enough to overcome him. Just because she has this engram does not mean she will
use it. She may have a hundred other engrams she can use. But when she dramatizes one, it is
as if the engram, soldered-in, were taking over a puppet. As much analytical power as she has
left may be devoted to altering the pattern. Therefore she can make a similar or an identical
dramatization.
This aspect of dramatization is strictly “tooth and claw” survival. This is the sort of
thing which made observers think that “tooth and claw” was a primary rule.
In went the engram, by-passing rationality and the standard memory banks. Now it is
in the organism but the organism does not know it in the level of consciousness. It is keyed-in
by a conscious level experience. Then it can be dramatized. And far from becoming milder the
more it is used, the more an engram is dramatized the more solid is its hold in the circuits.
Muscles, nerves, all must comply.
“Tooth and claw” survival. The cells were making sure. And here we come to valence.
Valens means “powerful” in Latin. It is a good term because it is the second half of ambivalent
(power in two directions) and exists in any good dictionary. It is a good term because it
describes (although the dictionary did not mean it to) the intent of the organism when
dramatizing an engram. Multi-valence would mean “many powerfuls.” It would embrace the
phenomena of split personality, the strange differences of personality in people in one and then
another situation. Valence in dianetics means the personality of one of the dramatic personnel in
an engram.
In the case of the woman being knocked out and kicked, there were two valences
present: herself and her husband. If another person had been present the engram would have
contained three valences, providing he took any part: herself, her husband and the third person.
In an engram, let us say, of a bus accident where ten people speak or act, there would be, in the
“unconscious” person an engram containing eleven valences, the “unconscious” person and the
ten who spoke or acted.
Now in the case of the woman beaten by her husband, the engram contains just two
valences. Who won? Here is the law of “tooth and claw,” the aspect of survival in engrams.
Who won? The husband. Therefore it is the husband who will be dramatized. She didn’t win.
She got hurt. Aha! When these restimulators are present, the thing to do is to be the winner, the
husband, to talk like him, to say what he did, to do what he did. He survived. “Be like him!”
say the cells.
Hence, when the woman is restimulated into this engram by some action, let us say, on
the part of her child, she dramatizes the winning valence. She knocks the child down and kicks
him, tells him he is a faker, that he is no good, that he is always changing his mind.
59.60
What would happen if she dramatized herself? She would have to fall down, knocking
over a chair, pass out and believe she was a faker, no good and was always changing her mind
and she would have to feel the pain of all blows!
“Be yourself” is advice which falls on deaf reactive mind ears. Here is the scheme.
Every time the organism gets punished by life, the analytical mind, according to the reactive
mind, has erred. The reactive mind then cuts the analytical mind out of circuit in ratio to the
amount of restimulation present (danger) and makes the body react as if it were the person who
won in the earlier but similar situation where the organism was hurt.
Now what happens if “society” or the husband or some exterior force told this woman,
who is dramatizing this engram, that she must face reality? That’s impossible. Reality equals
being herself, and herself gets hurt. What if some exterior force breaks the dramatization? That
is to say, if society objects to the dramatization and refuses to let her kick and yell and shout!
The engram is still soldered-in. The reactive mind is forcing her to be the winning valence.
Now she can’t be. As punishment, the reactive mind, the closer she slides in to being herself,
approximates the conditions of the other valence in the engram. After all, that valence didn’t
die. And the pain of the blows turns on and she thinks she is a faker, that she is no good and
that she always changes her mind. In other words, she is in the losing valence. Consistent
breaking of dramatization will make a person ill just as certainly as there are gloomy days.
A person accumulates, with the engrams, half a hundred valences before he is ten.
Which were the winning valences? You will find him using them every time an engram is
kicked into restimulation. Multiple personality? Two persons? Make it fifty to a hundred. In
dianetics you can see valences turn on and off in people and change with a rapidity which
would be awesome to a quick-change artist.
Observe these complexities of conduct, of behavior. If one set out to resolve the
problem of aberration by a system of cataloguing everything he observed and were unaware of
the basic source, he would end up with as many separate insanities, neuroses, psychoses,
compulsions, repressions, obsessions and disabilities as there are combinations of words in the
English language. Discovery of fundamentals by classification is never good research. And the
unlimited complexities possible from the engrams (and the severest, most thoroughly controlled
experiments discovered these engrams to be capable of just such behavior as is listed here) is
the whole catalogue of aberrated human conduct.
There are a few other basic, fundamental things that engrams do. These will be covered
under their own headings: parasite circuits, emotional impaction and psycho-somatic ills. With
the few fundamentals listed here, the problem of aberration can be resolved. These
fundamentals are simple, they have given rise to as much trouble as individuals and societies
have experienced. The institutions for the insane, the prisons for the criminals, the armaments
accumulated by nations, yes and even the dust which was a civilization of yesterday exist
because these fundamentals were not understood.
The cells evolved into an organism and in the evolution created what was once a
necessary condition of mind. Man has grown up to a point where he creates now the means of
overcoming that evolutionary blunder. Examination of the clear proves he no longer needs it.
He is now in a position where he can take an artificial evolutionary step on his own. The bridge
has been built across the canyon.
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CHAPTER IV
The “Demons”
For a moment let us leave such scientific things as cells and consider some further
aspects of the problem of understanding the human mind.
People have been working on problems related to Man’s behavior for a good many
millenia. Hindu, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and our own philosophers and researchers of the
past few hundred years have been struggling against a superabundance of complexity.
Dianetics could be evolved only by the philosophic compartmentation of the problem
into its elements and the invention of several dozen yardsticks such as The Introduction of an
Arbitrary, The Law of Affinity, The Dynamic, The Equation of the Optimum Solution, The
Laws of the Selection of Importances, The Science of Organizing Sciences, Nullification by
Comparison of Authority to Authority and so forth and so forth. All this is fine matter for a
tome on philosophy, but here is dianetics, which is a science. It should be mentioned,
however, that one of the first steps taken was not invented but borrowed and modified: that
was the Knowable and Unknowable of Herbert Spencer.
Absolutism is a fine road to stagnation and I do not think Spencer meant to be so
entirely absolute about his Knowable and Unknowable. SURVIVE! is the demarcation point
between those things which can be experienced by the senses (our old friends Hume and
Locke) and those things which cannot necessarily be known through the senses but which
possibly may be known but which one does not necessarily need to solve the problem.
Amongst those things which one did not necessarily need to know (the dianetic version
of the Unknowable) were the realms of mysticism and metaphysics. Many things, in the
evolution of dianetics, were by-passed solely because they had not yielded solution to anyone
else. Therefore mysticism got short shrift despite the fact that the author studied it, not in the
little understood, secondhand sources commonly used as authority by some western mental
cults, but in Asia where a mystic who can’t make his “astral self” get out and run errands for
him is strictly a second rate character indeed. Well aware that there were pieces in this jig-saw
puzzle which were orange with yellow spots and purple with carmine stripes, one found it
necessary to pick up only those pieces which were germane. Someday a large number of pieces
-- about structure with the rest -- will come in and there will be answers to telepathy, prescience
and so on and on. Understand that there are a lot of pieces in the construction of a philosophic
universe. But none of the mystic pieces were found necessary to the creation of a uniformly
applicable and aberration-resolving science of mind. No opinion will be delivered at this stage
of dianetics about ghosts or the Indian rope trick beyond the fact they are seen to be
multicolored pieces and the only ones we want are white. We have most of the white pieces and
it makes a good, solid whiteness where there was blackness before.
Imagine, then, the consternation one must have felt when “demons” were discovered.
Socrates had a demon, you’ll remember. It told him not what to do but whether or not he had
made the right decision. Here we had been pursuing a course in the finite universe which
would have pleased Hume himself for its tenacity to those things which could be sensed. And
up popped “demons.”
A thorough examination of a number of subjects (14) revealed that every one apparently
had a “demon” of some sort. They were randomly selected subjects in various conditions in
society. Therefore the “demon” aspect was most alarming. However, unlike some of the cults
(or schools as they call themselves), the temptation to sail off into romantic inexplicable and
confounding labels was resisted. A bridge had to be built across a canyon and demons are
darned bad girders.
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Out in the Pacific islands -- Borneo, the Philippines -- I had seen quite a bit of
demonology at work. Demonology is fascinating stuff. A demon gets into a person and makes
him sick. Or it gets in and talks in lieu of him. Or he goes crazy because he has a demon in him
and runs around with the demon shouting. This is demonology in a narrow sense. The
shaman, the medicine man, these people deal pretty heavily in demonology (it pays well). But,
while not skeptical particularly, it had always seemed to me that demons could be explained a
little more easily than in terms of ectoplasm or some such unsensible material.
To find “demons” living in one’s civilized fellow countrymen was disturbing. But there
they were. At least there were the manifestations which the shaman and medicine man had said
were caused by demons. It was found that these “demons” could be catalogued. There were
“commanding demons,” “critical demons,” ordinary “tell-you-what-to-say demons” and
“demons” which stood around and yelled or “demons” which simply occluded things and kept
them out of sight. These are not all the classes, but they cover the general field of
“demonology.”
A few experiments with drugged subjects showed that it was possible to set these
“demons” up at will. It was even possible to set up the whole analytical mind as a “demon.” So
there was something wrong with demonology. Without proper ritual, simply by word of
mouth, one could make new demons appear in people. So there are no real demons in dianetics
(that’s underscored in case some mystic runs around telling people that a new science of mind
believes in demons).
A dianetic demon is a parasitic circuit. It has an action in the mind which approximates
another entity than self. And it is derived entirely from words contained in engrams.
How this demon gets there is not very hard to understand, once you’ve inspected one,
close up, papa, while baby is unconscious, yells at Mama that she’s got to listen to him and
nobody else, by God. The baby gets an engram. It is keyed-in sometime between babyhood
and death. And then there’s the demon circuit at work.
An electronics engineer can set up demons in a radio circuit to his heart’s content. In
human terms it is as if one ran a line from the standard banks toward the analyzer but before it
got there he put in a speaker and a microphone and then continued the line to the plane of
consciousness. Between the speaker and the microphone would be a section of the analyzer
which was an ordinary, working section but compartmented off from the remainder of the
analyzer. “I” on a conscious plane wants data. It should come straight from the standard bank,
compute on a sub-level and arrive just as data. Not spoken data. Just data.
With the portion of the analyzer compartmented off and the speaker-microphone
installation and the engram containing the above words “got to listen to me, by God” in chronic
restimulation, another thing happens. The “I” in the upper level attention units wants data. He
starts to scan the standard banks with a sub-level. The data comes to him spoken. Like a voice
inside his head.
A clear does not have any “mental voices!” He does not think vocally. He thinks
without articulation of his thoughts and his thoughts are not in voice terms. This will come as a
surprise to many people. The “listen to me” demon is common in the society, which is to say
this engram circulates widely. “Stay right there and listen to me” fixes the engram in present
time (and fixes the individual in the time of the engram to some extent). After it is keyed-in and
from there on, the individual thinks “out loud,” which is to say, he puts his thoughts into
language. This is very slow. The mind thinks out solutions (in a clear) at such speed that the
word stream of consciousness would be left at the post.
Proving this was very easy. In clearing every case without exception one or another of
these demons was discovered. Some cases had three or four. Some had ten. Some had one. It
is a safe assumption that almost every aberree contains a demon circuit.
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The type of engram which makes a critical demon is, “You are always criticizing me.”
There are dozens of such statements contained in engrams, any one of which will make a
critical demon, just as any combination of words resulting in a demand to listen and obey
orders will make a commanding demon.
All these demons are parasitic. That is to say, they take a part of the analyzer and
compartment it off. A demon can think only as well as the person’s mind can think. There is no
extra power. No benefit. All loss.
It is possible to set up the whole computer (analyzer) as a demon circuit and leave “I”
on a tiny and forlorn shelf. This, on the surface, is a pretty good stunt. It makes it possible for
the whole analytical mind to work out computations undisturbed and relay the answer to the
“I.” But in practice it is very bad, for “I” is the will, the determining force of the organism, the
awareness. And very soon “I” becomes so dependent upon this circuit that the circuit begins to
absorb him. Any such circuit, to last, would have to have pain and be chronic. It would have
to be, in short, an engram. Therefore, it would have to be reductive of the intellect and would
victimize the owner by eventually making him ill one way or another.
Of all the engram demon circuits found and removed, those which contained a
seemingly all-powerful exterior entity which would solve all problems and answer every want
were the most dangerous. As the engram keyed-in further and further and was constantly
restimulated, it eventually made a spineless puppet out of “I”; because other engrams existed,
the sum of the reduction tended toward insanity of a serious sort. If you want a sample, just
imagine what you would have to say to a hypnotized person to make him think that he was in
the hands of a powerful being who gave him orders and then imagine this as the phrase spoken
when an individual had been knocked unconscious one way or another.
There is another full class of demons, the occlusion demons, the demons who shut
things off. These are not properly demons because they don’t talk. A bona-fide demon is one
who gives thoughts voice or echoes the spoken word interiorly or who gives all sorts of
complicated advice like a real, live voice exteriorly. (People who hear voices have exterior
vocal demons -- circuits which have tied up their imagination circuits.) The occlusion demon
doesn’t have anything to say. It is what he doesn’t permit to be said or done that makes the
mental derangement.
An occlusion demon can exist for a single word. For instance, a child receives an
engram by falling off her bicycle and losing consciousness; a policeman tries to assist her; she
is still unconscious but moving and mutters that she can’t move (an old engram at work); the
officer says, cheerfully, “Never say can’t!” Some time later she has a conscious level
experience such as another fall but without injury. (We keep mentioning this second necessary
step, the lock, because it is the thing old time mystics thought was causing all the trouble -- it is
“mental anguish.”) Now she has difficulty saying “can’t.” Dangerous in any event. What if she
had that common engram expression, “Never say no!”?
Occlusion demons hide things from “I.” It is as easy for one to mask many words. The
individual having one will then omit these words or alter them or misspell them and make
mistakes with them. The demon is not the only reason words get altered but he is a specific
case. An occlusion demon can be of a much higher strength and breadth. He can be created
with the phrase, “Don’t talk!” or “Never talk back to your elders,” or “You can’t talk here.
Who said you could talk?” Any of these phrases might produce a stammerer.
Other things besides speech can be occluded. Any ability of the mind can be inhibited
by a demon specifically designed to obstruct that ability. “You can’t see!” will occlude visual
recall. “You can’t hear!” will occlude audio recall. “You can’t feel!” occludes pain and tactile
recall (homonymic stuff, English).
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Any perception can be occluded in recall. And whenever it is occluded in recall, it
affects actual perception and the organ of perception as well. “You can’t see!” may reduce not
only recall but the actual organic ability of the eyes, as in astigmatism or myopia.
One can imagine, with the entire English language (or in other lands with other tongues,
any language) susceptible to inclusion within engrams just how many abilities of the mind’s
operation can be occluded. An extremely common one is “You can’t think!”
So far now “you” has been used in illustrations and examples in order to keep the
similarity to hypnotic or drug tests. Actually sentences which contain “I”, are more destructive.
“I can’t feel anything,” “I can’t think,” “I can’t remember.” These and their thousands and
thousands of variations, when spoken within the hearings of an “unconscious” person, are
applicable to himself when he gets the engram keyed-in to circuit.
“You” has several effects. The statement, “You are no good,” to an awake person
makes that person feel very angry perhaps when he has an engram to that effect.
Within him he feels, possibly, that people think he is no good. He may have a demon
that tells him he is no good. And he will dramatize by telling other people that they are no
good. It can be sprayed off by being dramatized. A person who has an engram to the effect
that he is sexually sterile, for instance, will tell people that they are sexually sterile. (“Don’t do
as I do, do as I say.”) If he has an engram that says, “You are no good, you have to eat with
your knife,” he may eat with his knife but he gets excited about people eating with their knives,
and he would grow very angry if somebody said he ate with his knife.
Thus, there are “compulsion demons” and “confusion demons” and so forth and so on.
The engram has a command value. There is a power of choice exercised in the reactive
mind about which and what engrams will be used. But any engram, strongly enough
restimulated, will come to the surface to be dramatized. And if dramatization is blocked, it will
turn on the individual either temporarily or chronically.
The literalness of this reactive mind, in its interpretation of commands and the
literalness of their action within the poor, harassed analytical mind is a strange thing in itself.
“It is too horrible to be borne” might be interpreted to the effect that a baby was in such bad
condition that it had better not be born. There are thousands of cliches in any language which,
when literally taken, mean quite the opposite from what the speaker intends.
The reactive engram bank takes them, stores them with pain and emotion and
“unconsciousness” and with moronic literalness, hands them forth to be LAW and
COMMAND to the analytical mind. And when the happy little moron who runs the engram
bank sees it possible to use up some analytical mind circuits with some of these confounded
demons, it is done.
The analytical mind, then, can be seen to be subject to yet another form of attrition. Its
circuits, ordinarily intended for smooth, rapid computation, become tied up and overloaded
with demon lash-ups. The demons are parasites. They are pieces of analytical mind
compartmented off and denied to larger computation.
Is it any wonder that, when these demons are deleted, I.Q. soars as it can be observed
to do in a clear? Add the demon circuits to the shut-down aspect of restimulation, and truth can
be seen in the observation that people run on about one-twentieth of their mental power.
Research and scientific tabulation indicate that with the “unconsciousness” aspect and the
demon circuits deleted from the engram bank and the data restored into the standard bank as
experience where it should be, about forty-nine fiftieths of the mind have been placed at the
service of “I” which he never could use as an aberree.
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CHAPTER V
Psycho-somatic Illness
Psycho-somatic illnesses are those which have a mental origin but which are
nevertheless organic. Despite the fact that there existed no precise scientific proof of this before
dianetics, an opinion as to their existence has been strong since the days of Greece, and in
recent times various drug preparations have been concocted and sold which were supposed to
overcome these sicknesses. Some success was experienced, sufficient to warrant a great deal of
work on the part of researchers. Peptic ulcers, for instance, have yielded to persuasion and
environmental change. A recent drug called ACTH has had astonishing but wildly
unpredictable results. Allergies have been found to yield more or less to things which
depressed histamine in the body.
The problem of psycho-somatic illness is entirely embraced by dianetics, and by
dianetic technique such illness has been eradicated entirely in every case.
About seventy per cent of the physician’s current roster of diseases falls into the
category of psycho-somatic illness. How many more can be so classified after dianetics has
been in practice for a few years is difficult to predict, but it is certain that more illnesses are
psycho-somatic than have been so classified to date. That all illnesses are psycho-somatic is, of
course, absurd, for there exist, after all, life forms called germs which have survival as their
goals.
The work of Louis Pasteur formulated the germ theory of disease. With dianetics is
gained the non-germ theory of disease. These two, with bio-chemistry, complement each other
to form the whole field of pathology so far as can be determined at this time, providing of
course that the virus is included under the germ theory.
Dianetics adds an additional leaf to the germ theory in that it includes predisposition.
There are three stages of pathology: predisposition, by which is meant the factors which
prepared the body for sickness, precipitation, by which is meant the factors which cause the
sickness to manifest itself, and perpetuation, by which is meant the factors which cause the
sickness to continue.
There are two kinds of illness: the first could be called autogenetic, which means that it
originated within the organism and was self-generated, and exogenetic, which means that the
origin of the illness was exterior. Actually, although this is good medicine, it is not quite as
precise as dianetics could desire. Mental illness itself is actually exterior in origin. But
medically, we consider that the body can generate its own sicknesses (autogenetic) or that the
sickness can come from an exterior source such as bacteria (exogenetic). The Pasteur germ
theory would be the theory of exogenetic -- exteriorly generated -- illness. Psycho-somatic
illness would be autogenetic, generated by the body itself.
Treatment for accidental injury, surgery for various things such as malformation
inherent in the body on a genetic basis, and orthopedics, which actually can be classed under
both, remain properly outside the field of dianetics, although it can be remarked in passing that
almost all accidents are to be traced to dramatization of engrams and that clears rarely have
accidents.
Psycho, of course, refers to mind and somatic refers to body; the term psycho-somatic
means the mind making the body ill or illnesses which have been created physically within the
body by derangement of the mind. Naturally such diseases, when one has resolved the
problem of human aberration, become uniformly susceptible to cure.
Arthritis, dermatitis, allergies, asthma, some coronary difficulties, eye trouble, bursitis,
ulcers, sinusitis, etc. form a very small section of the psycho-somatic catalogue. Bizarre aches
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and pains in various portions of the body are generally psycho-somatic. Migraine headaches
are psycho-somatic and, with the others, are uniformly cured by dianetic therapy. (And the
word cured is used in its fullest sense.)
Just how many physical errors are psycho-somatic depends upon how many conditions
the body can generate out of the factors in the engrams. For example, the common cold has
been found to be psycho-somatic. Clears do not get colds. Just what, if any, part the virus
plays in the common cold is not known, but it is known that when engrams about colds are
lifted, no further colds appear -- which is a laboratory fact not so far contradicted by 270 cases.
The common cold comes about, usually, from an engram which suggests it and which is
confirmed by actual mucus present in another engram. A number of germ diseases are
predisposed and perpetuated by engrams. Tuberculosis is one.
The engram itself, as has been covered, follows a cycle of action. The body is
predisposed to the conduct and conditions contained in the engram when that engram is first
received. Then a conscious-level experience keys-in the engram and other experience or the
content of the engram itself may make it chronic. This is predisposition, precipitation and
perpetuation in the mental plane.
Engrams and inherited disabilities and accidents and germs are the four ways an
organism can be reduced physically from the optimum. Many conditions which have been
called “inherited disabilities” are actually engramic Engrams predispose people to accidents.
Enengrams predispose and perpetuate bacterial infections. Therefore the catalogue of ills
affected by dianetics is very long. This is not a book listing effects but a book stating causes,
and so the reader is asked to call upon his own knowledge or consult a medical text to
understand just how many thousands and thousands of conditions result from engrams to
disturb or derange the body.
At the present time dianetic research is scheduled to include cancer and diabetes. There
are a number of reasons to suppose that these may be engramic in cause, particularly malignant
cancer. This is remarked so that attention may be given to the possibility; no tests of any kind
have been made on cancer or diabetic patients, and the thought is purely theory and is not to be
taken as any kind of an avowal about a cancer cure. Those diseases which were catalogued
above, however, have been thoroughly tested and have uniformly yielded to dianetic therapy.
The mechanism by which the mind is able to cause a physical disability or predispose
the body to an illness and perpetuate sickness is, in its basic cause, a very simple thing. The
complexity arrives when one begins to combine all the factors possible; then a staggering list of
potential illnesses can be written.
A series of simple tests can be made on drugged or hypnotic patients which will prove
clinically in other laboratories this basic mechanism. A series of these tests were run in the
formulation of dianetics with uniform success.
Let us take first something -- which is only mildly psycho-somatic and scarcely an
illness at all. A patient is hypnotized. He is given the positive suggestion that he will be able to
hear much more acutely. This is “extended hearing.” Controlling out other means of his gaining
data (including safeguards against telepathy between operator and subject) the hearing can be
found to be amplifiable many times over. In fact, there exist all around aberrees who have
“extended hearing.” By suggestion the power of the hearing can be tuned down or up so that a
person is nearly deaf or can hear pins fall at a great distance. When the suggestion is removed,
the subject’s hearing returns to its previous normal state.
Similarly, experiments can be performed on the eyes, using light sensitivity. The
patient’s sight is tuned up or down so that his eyes are much more or much less sensitive to
light than is normal for him. This is done entirely on the word suggestion basis such as “The
light will appear very, very bright to you,” or “The light will appear so dim it will be hard for
you to see.” With the former suggestion the patient can be made to see almost as well as a cat,
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although other people around might think it impossible to see objects the patient can unerringly
point out. In the latter suggestion the patient can be placed under light almost blinding and yet
can read through a glare with apparent comfort.
The tactile sense can likewise be tuned up or down by verbal suggestion until touch
becomes painfully acute or so dull it scarcely registers.
So with the various senses. Here we have simply the spoken word going into the mind
and causing physical function to change.
Let us now address the heart. By deep hypnosis or drugs we take a patient into amnesia
trance, a state of being wherein the “I” is not in control but the operator is the “I” (and that’s all
there is, really, to the function of hypnosis: the transfer of analytical power through the law of
affinity from subject to operator, a thing which had a racial development and survival value in
animals which ran in packs).
A caution should be observed that a patient who has a very sound heart and no heart-trouble
history be chosen for this experiment, which, even above any other hypnotic
experiment, can make a patient very ill if he has a heart history. And none of these hypnotic
tests should be performed until one has finished this book and knows how to get rid of the
suggestions; for hypnosis, as practiced, is strictly live fuse stuff and the hypnotist who is
unacquainted with dianetics has no more idea how to get rid of a suggestion he has made than
he has of how to peel an atom. He has thought he had the answer, but dianetics has treated
many, many former hypnotic subjects who were thoroughly, as the engineers interested in
dianetics say, “loused-up.” This is no criticism of hypnosis or hypnotists, who are often very
able people, but it is a comment that there is more to be known about it.
The heart, by positive suggestion alone, can be speeded up, slowed down or otherwise
excited. Here are words spoken into the deep strata of the mind which cause physical action.
Further, blood flow can be inhibited in some area of the body by suggestion alone. (This
experiment, it is warned, particularly overloads the heart.) Blood can be denied to a hand, for
instance, so that if you were to cut a vein in that hand it would bleed slightly if at all. A fine
swami trick; which most amazed the author in India, was the inhibition of blood flow by the
awake individual in himself. On command a cut would bleed or not bleed. It looked fantastic
and made very good press agentry that here was a swami who had so associated himself with
Nirvana that he was in control of all material matters. Awe faded when the author learned that,
via hypnosis, he could make his own body do the same thing and no Nirvana involved. The
mechanism fades out rapidly and in a few days would have to be renewed: the body has its
own optimum operation, and although such a function can be “analytically” handled, it is not an
upper echelon analytical job to keep the blood going in the hand. The point here is that blood
flow can be interrupted by verbal suggestion. Words connect up with the physical being.
How this can come about can be shown by an analogic explanation such as a schematic
diagram, but we are not so much interested in structure as in function at this stage of the science
of mind -- because by knowing function alone we can cure aberrations and psycho-somatic ills
every time, predict new ills and conditions, and generally “work miracles,” as such actions
were once called before Man knew anything about the mind.
Excreta are among the easiest things to regulate by suggestion. Constipation can be
caused or cured by positive suggestion with remarkable speed and facility. The urine can also
be so controlled. And so can the endocrine system.
It is harder to make tests on some of the more poorly understood functions of the
endocrines. Glandular research has not progressed very far at this time. But, by removing
engrams and watching the endocrine system rebalance, it has been made obvious that the
endocrine system is a part of the control mechanism with which the mind handles the body.
The glands are easily influenced. These fluids and secretions -- testosterone, estrogen,
adrenalin, thyroid, parathyroid, pituitrin, etc. -- are the substances the mind uses as one means
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of controlling the body. They form relay circuits, so to speak. Each one has its own action
within the body.
This experiment tends to prove the fallacy of an ancient assumption that the mind was
controlled by the glands. An aberree is given a shot of 25 mg. of testosterone in oil twice a
week. There may be some improvement in his physical status for a short time -- his voice may
deepen and he may grow more hair on his chest. Now, without suggestion, we simply delete
the engrams from his reactive bank so that they can re-form as experience in the standard bank.
Before we have completed this task
his body begins to use more of the testosterone. The dose can be markedly reduced and
still give more benefit than formerly. Finally the dose can be eliminated. This experiment has
also been performed on people who had not been able to receive benefit from glandular
substances such as testosterone and estrogen. And upon people who were made ill by the
administration of these hormones. The deletion of the engrams from the reactive bank
uniformly brought about a condition where they could receive benefit from the hormones but
where such artificial administration was not necessary save in cases of extreme age. What this
means to gerontology, the study of longevity in life, cannot at this time be estimated, but it can
be predicted with confidence that the deletion of engrams from the reactive bank has a marked
effect upon the extension of life. A hundred years or so from now this data will be available,
but no clears have lived that long as yet.
Just now, to our purpose, it is easy to demonstrate the effect of positive suggestion
upon the endocrine system and the lack of effect of artificial hormones upon aberrees.
This sort of an engram has a terribly reductive effect upon testosterone manufacture:
“Sex is horrible; it is nasty; I hate it.”
The autonomic nervous system, which has been supposed to run without much
connection to the mind can be shown to be influenced in its parts by the mind. There is a
dwindling spiral effect (note the lines on the survival potential chart) whereby the engram starts
malfunction in the life function regulator; this produces malfunction in the mind, which in turn
has further effect on the life function regulator; this again reduces physical activity, and the
mind, being part of the organ and, so far as we can tell, organic itself, is further reduced in
tone. Mental tone makes body tone go down. Body tone, then being down, makes mental tone
go down. This is a matter of inverse geometric progression. A man starts to get sick and,
having engrams, he gets sicker. Clears are not subject to this dwindling spiral. Indeed, so
entirely superficial is this horrible stuff called psycho-somatic illness that it is the first thing
which surrenders and can be alleviated without clearing.
Now the reason why various drug preparations which seek to change psycho-somatic
illness meet with such uncertain success lies in the fact that the mind, containing these engrams
which are “survival” (like a fellow needs a hole in his head), handles the life function regulator
to actively produce illnesses. Something comes to take them away (they’re “survival,” you see,
and these confounded cells moronically insist upon it) and the mind has to rapidly reverse the
activity and put an illness back in place again. Try to influence the reactive mind by reason or
needles and it is not any easier to convince than a drug-crazed man bent on murdering
everybody in a bar. He’s “surviving,” too.
A concoction like ACTH has a slightly different effect. It is too exclusive to have any
research done with it, but on reports about it, it seems to affect engrams in the time sense. That
is to say, as will be covered under therapy, the individual’s reactive location in time is shifted
by it. ACTH and perhaps many others in its category move the individual from one chronic
engram into another. This is about as reliable as changing dictators in Europe. The next one
may be twice as bad. It may even be a manic and that’s horrible despite its apparent “euphoria.”
Electric shock treatment, the beatings of Bedlam and other things of their ilk, including
surgical treatment of things psycho-somatic in origin, have another effect but one not dissimilar
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to drugs like ACTH in that they give another shock which transfers the engram pattern to
another part of the body (and switches around the aberrations; when these things work it is
because the new aberration is less violent than the old one). Shocks, blows, surgery and maybe
even things like cobra venom change the effect of the engram bank on the body, not necessarily
for the worse, not necessarily for the better; they just change them. Like shooting dice:
sometimes one gets a seven.
Then there is the deletion of tissue treatment of psycho-somatic ills. This simply
removes the area which is busy dramatizing in the physical line. This can be the removal of a
toe or the removal of a brain. These things are quite commonly used, as this is being written.
The removal of the toe is addressed to one part of the engram content, the somatic, and the
removal of parts of the brain (as in the trans-orbital leukotomy and the pre-frontal lobotomy or
anything else more recent) is addressed mistakenly to “the removal of” the psycho-aberration.
There is a surrender system at work in this as well: the surgeon or the patient has an aberration
about “getting rid of it,” and so bits of the body are cut up or removed.
Some patients surrender anatomy on advice or at their own insistence like old timers
shed blood in a phlebotomy. There is a straight parallel between bleeding the patient to make
him well and cutting away parts of him to make him well. Both are based on a surrender (get
rid of) engram and neither are effective in any way. Barber basin medicine, it is hoped, will
eventually die out as did its patients.
These are the five classes of psycho-somatic ills: (1) those ills resulting from mentally
caused derangement in physical fluid flow, which class subdivides into (a) inhibition of fluid
flow and (b) magnification of fluid flow; (2) those ills resulting from mentally caused
derangement of physical growth, which class subdivides into (a) inhibition of growth and (b)
magnification of growth; (3) those ills resulting from predisposition to disease resulting from a
chronic psycho-somatic pain in an area; (4) those ills resulting from perpetuation of a disease
on account of chronic pain in an area; and (5) these ills caused by the verbal command content
of the engrams.
In Class 1 (a) fall such ordinary things as constipation and such extraordinary things as
arthritis. Arthritis is a complex mechanism with a simple cause and a relatively simple cure.
Remember that there are two things present in an engram: physical pain and verbal command.
In arthritis both must be present (as in the bulk of psycho-somatic ills). There must
have been an accident to the joint or area affected, and there must have been a command during
the “unconsciousness” which attended the injury which would make the engram susceptible to
chronic restimulation. (Such commands as “It is always like this” or “It just goes right on
hurting” or “I’m stuck” will produce similar results). Given this engram and given this engram
keyed-in, there is a chronic pain in the area of the injury. It may be minor, but it is a pain just
the same. (It can be a pain but not be felt if the engram contains a command which is
anaesthetic such as “He’ll never feel this,” which produces a similar condition but makes one
“unconscious” of the pain there.) This pain in the body probably tells the cells and the blood
that this area is dangerous. It is therefore avoided.
The command permits the mind to influence, let us say, the parathyroid, which contains
the secret of the calcium content in the blood stream. A mineral deposit then begins to be laid
down in the area. The mineral deposit is not necessarily the cause of the pain, but it is an
organic restimulator so that the more mineral, the more pain, the more the engram keys-in.
This is the dwindling spiral. And this is arthritis in action. Understand that the
parathyroid and the blood avoidance are theoretical cause; the scientific fact is that when an
engram is picked up and deleted about an area containing arthritis, that arthritis vanishes and
does not return and this is X-ray plate evidence; it happens every time and does not happen
because of any suggestion or medicine; it happens because an engram is picked up and refiled.
As the engram goes away, so goes the pain, so vanishes the arthritis. This forms a whole class
of ills, of which arthritis is only one.
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The mechanisms involved vary slightly. All can be headed under “physical derangement
caused by reduced body fluid flow.”
Class 1 (b) of psycho-somatic ills, magnification of fluid flow, contains such things as
high blood pressure, diarrhea, sinusitis, priapism (overactivity of the male sex glands), or any
other physical condition resulting from a superabundance of fluid.
Class 2 (a) can cause such things as a withered arm, a foreshortened nose,
underdeveloped genital organs or any other underdevelopment of a gland having to do with size
(which cross-classes this with 1 [a]), hairlessness (which also like the rest can be part of the
gene pattern and therefore inherent), and in short reduction in size of any part of the body.
Class 2 (b) causes such things as oversized hands, a lengthened nose, oversized ears,
enlarged organs and other common physical malformations. (Cancer might possibly come
under this heading as overhealing.)
Class 3 would include tuberculosis (some cases), liver trouble, kidney trouble, rashes,
common colds, etc. (cross-classing with others, as do all of these in one way or another).
Class 4 would include those diseases which, arising without psycho-somatic influence,
yet fix upon by accident a previously injured area and by restimulation, keep an engram keyed-in
in that area so that a condition becomes chronic. Tuberculosis could be included here.
Conjunctivitis, all running sores and any condition which refuses to heal, etc.
This fourth class would also include all bizarre pains and sicknesses which cannot be
found to have actual pathology.
Class 5 includes an enormously wide catalogue of conditions, any one of which may
cross-index to other classes or which arise solely out of engrams which dictate the presence or
necessity of an illness. “You always have colds,” “I have sore feet,” etc. announce a psycho-somatic
illness and the mechanisms of the body can furnish one.
Any disease whatever can be precipitated by engrams. The disease may be of germ
origin; the individual possesses an engram to the effect that he may become sick and on this
generalization, becomes sick with whatever is to hand. Further and even more general, the
engram reduces the physical resistance of the body to disease, and when an engram goes into
restimulation (perhaps because of a domestic quarrel, an accident or some such thing), the
ability of the individual to resist sickness is automatically decreased.
Children, as will be explained, have many more engrams than has been supposed.
Almost all childhood illnesses are preceded by psychic disturbance and if psychic disturbance is
present -- keeping an engram restimulated -- such illnesses can be far more violent than they
should be. Measles, for instance, can be just measles or it can be measles in company with
engramic restimulation, in which case it can be nearly or entirely fatal. A check of many
subjects on this matter of childhood illness being predisposed by, precipitated by and
perpetuated by engrams causes one to wonder just how violent the diseases themselves really
are: they have never been observed in a cleared child and there is reason to investigate the
possibility that childhood illnesses are in themselves extremely mild and are complicated only
by psychic disturbance -- which is to say, the restimulation of engrams.
In fact, one could ask this question of the entire field of pathology: what is the actual
effect of disease minus the mental equation? How serious are bacteria?
The field of bacteriology has been without dynamic principles until now; the dynamic,
survival, is applicable to all life forms and “life forms” include germs. The purpose of the germ
is to survive. Its problems are those of food, protection (offense and defense) and procreation.
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To accomplish these things the germ survives at its optimum efficiency. It mutates,
alters with natural selection and changes dynamically from survival necessity (the missing step
of the evolution theory, that last) in order to accomplish the maximum survival possible. It
makes errors by killing the hosts, but to have a purpose to survive does not mean that a form
necessarily survives.
In pathology, the germ, bent on its purpose, acts as a suppressor to the survival
dynamic of the human species.
How serious this suppressor is in the absence of engram suppression in the human has
not been determined; enough data exists to indicate that a human individual with his potential in
the fourth zone is not, apparently, very subject to disease: the common cold, for instance, if it
is a virus or not, passes him by; chronic infections are absent. What antibodies have to do with
this or what this factor is, is yet another question. But it remains that a clear is not easily made
ill. In the aberree illness closely pursues mental depression (depression of the dynamic level).
The aberration of mind and body by engrams leads, then, not only to psycho-somatic
ills but also to actual pathology, which has hitherto been considered more or less independent
of the mental state. As has been proven by clinical research, clearing of engrams does more
than remove psycho-somatic illness, potential, acute or chronic; the clearing also tends to proof
the individual against the receipt of pathology: to what extent it is not yet known, for such a
wide and long term view is required to establish the actual statistics that the project will require
thousands of cases and the observations of medical doctors over a long term.
The amount of aberration which a person manifests, which is to say, the position he
would occupy on a sanity scale, has little to do with psycho-somatic illness. Such illnesses
require only one or two engrams of a specific nature to become manifest. These engrams may
not be aberrative in any other way than to predispose the individual to illness. Having a
psycho-somatic illness is not the same as being “crazy” or having hypochondriacal tendencies.
The hypochondriac thinks he has illnesses, a special case of Class (5) above.
Derangement falls sharply into two categories: the first is the mental derangement, any
irrational condition, which in dianetics we call aberration in order to avoid constant cataloguing
of the thousands, the millions of manifestations irrationality can have. The other derangement
of the individual is somatic: this applies entirely to his physical being and physical ability and
health. Both these things are present in every engram: the aberration and the somatic. But the
engram can manifest itself chronically as either a somatic (a noun has been made out of an
adjective here and it is commonly employed in dianetics to avoid the use of the word pain,
which is not embracive and which is restimulative) or as an aberration or as both together.
An engram must contain physical pain. When an engram is restimulated in everyday
life, that physical pain may appear or it may not. If it does not appear as pain but as aberration,
then the individual is in another valence than his own (the “necessity to manifest his
hostilities”). If he is sane enough to be in his own valence, the physical pain will be present. In
dianetics we say the somatic has appeared. When any somatic appears, unless the individual is
a pre-clear in therapy, some of the aberration is also appearing. In short, the aberration can
appear by itself or the somatic plus some of the aberration can appear. When a person
dramatizes another valence than his own, the aberration is present; when the dramatization,
running off the engram phonograph-record-wise in one or another valence, is suppressed by
some other factor such as the police or a stronger person or even the individual himself (this
has been called repression -- the term is not used here because it is loaded with other
meanings), the somatic most certainly will come into view.
The individual is then apparently “better off,” as the cells meant him to be, to occupy
the survival role in the engram, the winning valence, for he is, at least, not ill. But how many
people have been killed, how many banks have been robbed and how many marital partners
have been driven mad by these dramatizations?
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So the health of the individual would be considered by society, in its effort to protect its
members to be a secondary affair. In fact, “society” has not known about this mechanical
aspect. The individual who dramatizes the survival valence in his engrams may do violent
things to other people. The individual who will not permit himself such a dramatization or who
is forced by society away from such dramatization will most certainly become psycho-somatically
ill. “Heads I win, tails you lose.” The answer is in the alleviation or deletion of the
engram. For there are many additional aspects to the problem: the man who dramatizes his
engrams, society or no society, is not apt to survive, and if he dramatizes them, he is subject to
whatever slurs were leveled at the valence he is in by another valence in that same engram.
The combinations of the classes and aspects of psycho-somatic illness listed and
described here lead to some highly complex situations. It is a scientific fact that no psycho-somatic
ill exists without an aberration. And it is true that no aberration exists without a
potential or actual psycho-somatic ill. One of the psycho-somatic illnesses one would least
expect to find as a psycho-somatic affair is the illness of sexual perversion.
The sexual pervert (and by this term dianetics, to be brief, includes any and all forms of
deviation in Dynamic II such as homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual sadism, etc. and all down
the catalogue of Ellis and Krafft-Ebing) is actually quite ill physically. Perversion as an illness
has so many manifestations that it must be spread through the entire gamut of classes from (1)
to (5) above. Over-development of sexual organs, underdevelopment, seminal inhibition or
magnification, etc. are found some in one pervert, some in another. And the sum of it is that the
pervert is always a very ill person in one way or another, whether he is conscious of it or not.
He is very far from culpable for his condition, but he is also so far from normal and so
extremely dangerous to society that the tolerance of perversion is as thoroughly bad for society
as punishment for it.
Lacking proper means prior to this time, society has been caught between tolerance and
punishment, and the problem of perversion has, of course, not been resolved. A bit off the
subject here, but it can be remarked about perversion that the best previous explanation for it
was something about girls becoming envious of Papa’s penis or boys becoming upset about
that terrible thing, the vulva, which Mama was incautious enough to show one day. It takes a
great deal more than this utter tripe to make a pervert.
It is, rather, something on the order of kicking a baby’s head in, running over him with
a steam roller, cutting him in half with a rusty knife, boiling him in lysol and all the while with
crazy people screaming the most horrifying and unprintable things at him. The human being is
a very tough character. He is so confoundedly tough that he has whipped the whole animal
kingdom and he can shake the stars. And when it comes to throwing his second dynamic out of
balance, what that takes is straight out of Dante and Sax Rohmer combined. Hence the pervert,
containing hundreds and hundreds of vicious engrams, has had little choice between being dead
and being a pervert. But with an effective science to handle the problem, a society which would
continue to endure perversion and all its sad and sordid effects doesn’t deserve to survive.
Perversion can have other aspects. In one society examined, these aberrations had
multiplied so far that a principal mystic cult had sprung up which contended that all mental
illness came from sex; this, of course, gave further impetus to aberrations on the second
dynamic (sex), as such a cultic belief must have been originated by an individual who had
severe aberrations across the second dynamic; this belief that sex was the only source of human
aberration and travail, naturally attracted as its practitioners individuals who had similar
aberrative patterns. And so the cult further enforced existing aberrative factors in the society,
since all their activity was leveled at making sex something ogreish and dreadful by labeling it
the society’s primary source of illness. The prophet of this god was Manichaeus, a Persian of
the third century, who taught that all things about the body, especially sex, were evil; the cult of
Manichaeus carried on well into the Dark Ages and then vanished, to trouble Man no more.
Any dynamic can be blocked, the personal dynamic, the sex dynamic, the group
dynamic or the Mankind dynamic. Each one has been the target at some time of one cult or
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another seeking to cure all Man’s ills and save him. Dianetics is not interested in saving Man,
but it can do much to prevent him from being “saved.” As an organized body of scientific
knowledge dianetics can draw only the conclusion which it observes in the laboratory.
It can be observed that the Church is entirely correct in doing all in its power to prevent
blasphemy. Blasphemy can very often be uttered during the “unconsciousness” of a person
who has been struck. This would enter sacred names and curses into engrams which, reacting
within the individual, give him an unnatural terror and compulsion or repulsion toward God. It
is not the religion which is at fault, it is the blaspheming of the religion. Such blasphemy
makes the insane zealot and the murderous atheist, both of whom the Church would very
gladly do without.
In the realm of psycho-somatic illness any combination of the language is as damaging
a factor in an engram as any other factor. The moronic reasoning of the reactive mind, which
considers everything in an engram equal to everything in an engram, also considers that
everything similar to the engram in the exterior world (the restimulators) is sufficient cause to
place an engram in effect. Hence aberration and illness can come about.
There is, however, a peculiarity in psycho-somatic illnesses which is chronic: the
aberree’s reactive mind exercises a power of choice to the extent that only pro-survival engrams
become chronic. It could be said, on a reactive level, that the aberree will not permit himself to
suffer illness from his engrams unless that illness has a “survival” value. This is very important
in therapy. The chronic psycho-somatic illnesses which a patient displays are those which have
a sympathy (pro-survival) background.
It is not possible to “spoil” a child with love and affection. Whoever postulated that it
was possible was postulating out of bad data and no observation. A child needs all the love and
affection it can possibly get. A test was run in one hospital which tended to show that babies,
when left without attention, ran fevers. When given attention the fevers immediately abated.
The test, while not observed personally by the author, seems to have been conducted with
proper controls according to report. If this is true, it postulates a mechanism in the human
being which uses illness for affection on a genetic basis. There is no reason why not; there
have been enough years of engineering -- almost two billion -- to build anything into the
blueprint. These babies, in several groups, were left in the hospital by their parents for the test;
they uniformly became ill when not given affection. Here is the law of affinity at work, if these
tests were accurately conducted, their purpose was not to help dianetics but to show that the
leaving of a baby in the hospital after his birth because he has a slight illness invariably
increases that illness.
A series of severely controlled dianetic experiments over a much longer period
demonstrated that the law of affinity, as applicable to psycho-somatic illness, was more
powerful than fear and antagonism by a very wide margin. So great is this margin that it could
be compared as the strength of a steel girder to a straw. It was found, as above, that chronic
psycho-somatic ills existed only when they had a sympathy engram behind them. The law of
affinity might be interpreted as the law of cohesion; “affinity” might be defined as “love” in
both its meanings. Deprivation of or absence of affection could be considered as a violation of
the law of affinity. Man must be in affinity with man to survive. The suicide ordinarily commits
the act on the computation that the removal of self will some way benefit other selves -- this, on
the reactive mind level is a very ordinary computation, deriving exclusively from engrams. The
violent industrial chieftain with his merciless mien, when he suffers from a psycho-somatic ill,
ordinarily derives it out of a sympathy engram.
The sympathy engram pretends to be pro-survival. As one preclear said, a man is not
victimized by his enemies but by his friends. An engram comes about always from a greater or
lesser moment of “unconsciousness.” There is no engram without “unconsciousness.” It is
only when the analyzer is out of circuit that the exterior world can come interior, unrationalized,
and work from within. The second the analyzer identifies one of those engrams as such, that
engram loses about twenty percent of its value to aberrate and usually a hundred percent of its
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value to cause a psycho-somatic illness. Pain is extremely perishable. Pleasure is recorded in
bronze. (Not poetry here, science. Physical pain will delete with brief attention, a pleasant or
even a media-media experience is so solidly fixed in the mind that no treatment known to
dianetics will shake it and a great deal of effort has been leveled at pleasure recordings just to
test them for permanence. They are permanent; physical pain is perishable. Too bad,
Schopenhauer, but you were a most mistaken man.)
Exposing a lock to the analyzer -- a moment of “mental anguish” -- once the engram
which gave it power is gone causes that lock to blow away like chaff. The analyzer works on
the Doctrine of the True Datum: it has no truck with anything which it once discovers to be
false. Just exposing an engram without relieving it has some therapeutic value -- twenty percent
-- and this gave rise to a belief that all one had to do was know about his ills and they would
vanish. Nice if it were so.
The most aberrative engram, then, is one which is held down by the reactive mind’s --
that moron’s -- concept that it is needed in the survival of the individual. This sympathy engram
is the one which comes forward and stays chronic as a psycho-somatic illness. There are two
reasons for this: one is usually in one’s own valence when a sympathy engram is received; and
one’s reactive mind, knowing well the value of affinity, puts forward the psycho-somatic
illness to attract affinity. There is no volition here on the part of the individual’s “I” analytical
self. But there is every “volition” on the part of the reactive mind.
A sympathy engram would go something like this: a small boy, much victimized by his
parents, is extremely ill. His grandmother attends him and while he is delirious soothes him
and tells him she will take care of him, that she will stay right there until he is well. This puts a
high “survival” value on being sick. He does not feel safe around his parents; he wants his
grandmother present (she is a winning valence because she orders the parents around), and he
now has an engram. Minus the engram there would be no psycho-somatic illness. Sickness,
“unconsciousness” and physical pain are essential to the receipt of this engram. But it is not a
contra-survival engram. It is a pro-survival engram. It can be dramatized in one’s own valence.
The psycho-somatic illness, in such a case as this, would be a “precious possession.”
“I” doesn’t even know the computation. The analyzer was out when the engram went in. The
analyzer cannot recall that engram with anything short of dianetic therapy. And the engram will
not clear away.
Now with this engram we have a patient with sinusitis and a predisposition to lung
infections. It may be that he was luckless enough to marry a counterpart of his mother or his
grandmother. The reactive mind cannot tell the difference between grandmother or mother and
wife if they are even vaguely similar in speech, voice-tone or mannerisms. The wife is not
sympathetic. In goes the engram to demand that sympathy. And even if the wife thinks that
sinusitis and lung infection are repulsive enough to lead to divorce, the reactive mind keeps that
engram keyed-in. The more hatred from the wife, the more that engram keys-in. You can kill a
man that way.
The above is a standard sympathy engram. When a therapist tries to get that engram
away from the patient, the reactive mind balks. The “I” doesn’t balk. The analyzer doesn’t
balk. These are hopeful that this engram will spring. But the reactive mind keeps it nailed down
until the dianeticist puts a crowbar under it. Then it is gone. (Enough locks may be lifted, by
the way, to alleviate this condition. But the patient will dig up another engram!)
Resistance to past therapies has resulted from these sympathy engrams. Yet they lie
right there on the surface, fully exposed as chronic psycho-somatic illness.
Feeding a patient with a psycho-somatic ill any number of drugs can result in only
temporary relief. “I” doesn’t want the illness. The analyzer doesn’t want it. But the body has it
and if anybody succeeds in curing it short of removing that engram, the body, at the command
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of the reactive mind, will find something else to substitute for that ill or develop an “allergy” to
the drug or annul the effect of the drug entirely.
Of course one can always rip living tissue out of the skull with knives, ice-picks or
shock in wholesale quantities. This will cure a psycho-somatic ill. It also, unhappily, cures the
personality, the intellect and all too often, life itself.
In dianetics the application of technique to relieve the engrams causing these ills has
brought the uniform relief of all patients treated without relapse. In short and in brief, psycho-somatic
ills can now be cured. All of them.
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CHAPTER VI
Emotion and the Dynamics
Emotion is a theta quantity, which is to say that it is so involved with life forces that
dianetics at this stage handles it with invariable success but does not attempt to give forth more
than a descriptive theory. Much research must be done on emotion; but so long as the therapy
embraces it and releases it with success, further data can be dispensed with up to a point.
Emotion would have to be divided sharply into minus emotions and plus emotions. The
minus emotion would be non-survival in character, the plus emotion would be pro-survival.
The pleasant and pleasurable emotions are not of any great concern to us here. It is believed that
all emotion is the same thing but in its aspects above Zone 1 it can be by-passed as unnecessary
to explain at this time for the purpose of this book.
In Zones 1 and 0, emotion becomes very important to therapy. As has been covered
earlier, Zones 1 and 0 are the anger and apathy zones respectively. From death up to the border
between anger and fear is Zone 0. From this borderline to the beginning of boredom is anger,
Zone 1.
It is as if the survival dynamic, in becoming contracted into Zone 1, first began to
display hostility, then, on further suppression toward death, anger. On further suppression,
rage began to be displayed. Then fear as the next lower level, then terror and finally, just above
death, apathy.
And as the dynamic is suppressed, the cells react forcefully to the menace, it could be
said, by resisting the menace. The analyzer resists down to the top border of Zone 1, but in
ever decreasing control. From here on down the cells, the actual organism, do the resisting in a
last ditch effort. The reactive mind is thoroughly in command from the top border of Zone 1
straight on down to death, and it is in ever increasing command of the organism as the dynamic
is suppressed.
Emotion seems to be inextricably connected up with the actual force of life. That there is
a life force no engineer could doubt. Man and medicine usually look at the pitcher and forget
that the pitcher is only there to hold milk and that the milk is the important quantity. Life force
is the helium which fills the free balloon. Out goes the helium, down comes the balloon. When
this type of energy is located and isolated as itself -- if it is just an energy type -- then medicine
can start moving forward in strides which will make all former steps look like those of a man in
a sack race. Medicine doesn’t have any spare helium, for one thing.
How high this life force can go on the survival scale is not known. Above Zone 3 is the
area of question marks. A clear goes up into a level of persistence, vigor, tenacity, rationality
and happiness. Perhaps some day a clear will attain the nebulosity the author used to hear about
in India which marked the man who was all soul.
How far down it can go is definitely known. A man dies. He doesn’t move or think.
He dies as an organism, then he dies as cells. There are different periods of “life after death”
for the cells and biologists remark that the hair and nail cells do not die for months. So here is a
spectrum of death, first the organism and then, colony by colony, the cells.
That is from the bottom of Zone 0 downward. But what we are interested in is the area
from Zone 1 down to the bottom of Zone 0. It could be postulated that the analytical mind has
its greatest bounce against the suppressor, its highest ability to care for the organism, when it is
in the third zone. As the suppressor thrusts downward against it, the analyzer, within lower
Zone 3 thrusts heavily back. This is necessity at work. The necessity level can rise, in this
action, to a point which keys-out all engrams!
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It must be realized that the analyzer considers future suppressors and is continually
engaged upon computations which pose problems of the future which the analyzer resolves --
this is one of the functions of the imagination; it must further be realized that the analyzer is
engaged upon a multitude of computations about the present: for the analytical mind is dealing
continually with an enormous number of factors which comprise the suppressor of the present
and the suppressor of the future. It computes for instance on the alliances with friends and
symbiotes and its greatest victories are achieved by taking some of the suppressor and turning it
into an alliance factor.
The individual can be visualized, on the survival spectrum, as being at the tip of the
survival dynamic. The suppressor thrusts down, or future suppressors threaten a thrust and the
analytical mind thrusts up with solutions. The level of the individual is determined by how well
these suppressors are apparently met.
We speak now of the clear and until further mention we will continue to use the clear.
The clear is an unaberrated person. He is rational in that he forms the best possible solutions he
can on the data he has and from his viewpoint. He obtains the maximum pleasure for the
organism, present and future, as well as for the subjects along the other dynamics. The clear
has no engrams which can be restimulated to throw out the correctness of computation by
entering hidden and false data into it. No aberration. Hence the reason we use him here as an
example.
The survival dynamic is high, more than balancing the suppressor. Take this as a first
condition. This would place the dynamic in Zone 3, Tone 3.9. Now increase the suppressor.
The dynamic is pushed back to Tone 3.2. Necessity surges up. The suppressor is thrust back.
The dynamic is once more at Tone 3.9. This action could be termed an enthusiastic resurgence.
The individual has actually gotten “angry” -- that is to say, he has called upon his being to
furnish power for thought and action.
Mentally he calls upon whatever constitutes mental energy. Physically, if the
suppression was physical, he would call upon his adrenalin. This is proper use of the
endocrines, to use them for regaining position in relation to the suppressor. Any and all body
function is under analytical (but not necessarily monitored) command.
Now let us suppose that the suppressor surges down against the dynamic and drives the
dynamic to 3.0. Necessity level comes up. Action is taken. The full force of the being is
thrown against the suppressor. Now let us suppose that a new factor comes into the suppressor
and makes it much, much stronger. The individual still attempts to resurge against it. But the
suppressor weighs heavier and heavier against him. He is beginning to exhaust his supplies of
mental or physical energy (and this suppressor can be on either a mental or physical level.)
Wearying, the individual drops down to a 2.5. The suppressor again increases. Resurgence is
attempted once more. The last supply of available energy or data is thrown out. And another
factor comes into the suppressor, increasing its weight. The individual sags down to 2.0.
At exactly this point the analyzer, having failed, finally cuts out. Here is entered the top
of Zone 1. Hostility sets in. The suppressor is down, pressing down against actual cellular
survival. And it drops lower. The individual goes into anger, recruiting cellularly but not
sentiently, the last forces. Again the suppressor gets new weight. The individual goes into
rage. Once more the suppressor drops. The individual goes into fear, Tone 0.9. Again the
suppressor lowers, recruiting new factors. The individual is thrust down to 0.6 and here is in
terror. Once more the suppressor drops with new force. The individual slides into fear
paralysis, 0.2.
Suppose we parallel this in a very simple, dramatic example so that we do not have to
consider a thousand subtle factors.
A clear, inexperienced in hunting, determines to shoot a grizzly. He has a fine rifle. The
grizzly appears to be easy game. The man is at 3.9 or above. He feels good. He is going to get
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that grizzly as the grizzly has been threatening the man’s stock. High enthusiasm carries him to
the lair. He waits, he finally sees the grizzly. There is a cliff above the man which he could not
ordinarily climb. But to get a good shot before the grizzly vanishes, the man has to climb the
cliff. Seeing he was in danger of losing the game brought the man down to 3.2. Necessity
sends him up the cliff. He fires but in firing falls back down the cliff. The grizzly is wounded.
He starts toward the man. Necessity surges up. The man recovers the gun and shoots again.
He is at 3.0 the moment he shoots. He misses. He fires again but the miss, with the grizzly
charging, brought him down to 2.5. He shoots once more. The grizzly takes the ball and keeps
on coming. The man shoots again but he has suddenly realized that his rifle is not going to stop
this grizzly. His tone drops to 2.0. He begins to snarl and feverishly work his gun. His bullets
go wild. He experiences rage at the gun, the grizzly, the world, and throws the gun away,
ready to meet the grizzly, almost upon him, with bare hands. Suddenly the man knows fear.
His tone is 1.2. It drops to 0.9 with a smell in his nostrils of the bear. He knows the bear will
kill him. He turns and tries to claw up the cliff and get away but his efforts are frenzied. He is
at Tone 0.6, stark terror. The bear strikes him and knocks him from the cliff-side. The man lies
still, breathing almost halted, heart-beat slowed to nearly nothing. The bear hits him again and
the man lies still. Then the bear decides he is dead and walks away. Shaken, the man eventually
comes around, his tone gradually rising up to 2.0, the point where his analyzer shut off. He
stirs more and gets up. His tone is back to 2.5: he is analytically afraid and cautious. He
recovers his gun. He begins to leave the scene. He feels a great necessity to recoup his own
self-esteem and his tone comes to 3.2. He walks away and reaches a safe area. Suddenly it
occurs to him that he can borrow a friend’s Mauser. He begins to make plans to get that bear.
His enthusiasm mounts. But, completely aside from the engram received when the bear
knocked him out, he acts on his experience. Three days later he kills the bear and his tone rises
to 4.0 for the space of contemplation and telling the tale and then his mind occupies itself with
new matters.
Life is much more complicated than the business of killing grizzlies, usually a lot less
dramatic but always full of situations which cause a fluctuation of the suppressor. The gaining
of all pleasurable goals -- a bear killed, a woman kissed, a seat in the front row at the opera, a
friend won, an apple stolen -- are sweeps through various levels of tone. And the individual is
generally carrying on three or three thousand computations at once and there are thirty or thirty
thousand variables in his computations. Too many unknowns, too many entrances of “didn’t
know the gun was loaded” factors, all these can throw the analyzer from a direct alignment into
the scattered dispersal of non-function. The analyzer can be considered to cut out when Tone
2.0 is reached. From 2.5 down the computations it makes are not very rational -- too many
unknowns, too many unexpected factors, too many discoveries of miscalculations.
This is living on a “clear” basis. When our hunter was hit by the bear he received an
engram. That engram, when it keyed-in, would give him a fear, an apathy attitude, in the
presence of certain factors: every perceptic present -- the smell of that ground, twigs, bear-breath,
etc. But he killed the bear. The chances of that engram keying-in are remote. Not
because he killed the bear but because he was, after all, a grown man. And, if a clear, he could
have thought back and cleared the whole thing himself.
This is a complete cycle of emotion. Enthusiasm and high pleasure are at the extreme
top. Fear and paralysis are at the bottom. Feigned death, in Man, is very close to the actual
thing on the tone scale. It is a valid mechanism. But it is complete apathy.
So long as the analyzer is operating, the receipt of an engram is impossible. Everything
files in the standard banks. As soon as the border 2.0 is passed on the way down,
“unconsciousness” can be judged to have set in and anything registered, in company with pain
or painful emotion, is an engram. This is not a shift of definition. The analyzer cuts out, with
surgical anaesthetic, at 2.0. The anaesthetic may depress the level of awareness further. Pain
may depress it even more. But depressing the level of awareness is not necessarily depressing
emotion.
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How much conceived danger or sympathy is present in the environment? This is what
depresses the tone scale. There can be a reactive engram which contains a Tone 4.0 or one that
contains a 1.0 or another that contains a 0.1. This is not, then, quite two-dimensional, this
emotion.
The level of depth of consciousness can be affected by painful emotion, poisons or
other things which depress awareness. After that it is all engram and the engrams have their
own tone scale which runs from 4.0 down to 0.1.
It can be seen now that two things are at work. First is the state of physical being. It is
this which tunes down the analyzer. Then there is the mental state of being.
This is what tunes down the emotional tone scale.
But remember that in engrams there is another factor present: valence. Once its own
analyzer is out the body will assume the evaluation or emotional condition of any other analyzer
present. Here we have affinity at work in earnest. “Unconscious” in the presence of other
beings, an individual picks up a valence for every other being present. Some of these valences
are incidental. He will pick first that valence which is most sympathetic as a desirable future
friend (or some similar person). And he will pick that valence which is the top valence (highest
survival, the boss, the winner) for his dramatization. He will also take the valence of the
winning entity (winning over himself or others) for emotional tone. If the winning valence is
also the sympathetic valence, he has an engram which can be utilized to its fullest extent.
Let us make this an example: a man is under nitrous oxide (the most vicious anaesthetic
ever invented as it is actually not anaesthetic but a hypnotic) undergoing exodontistry. As usual
everybody present around the “unconscious” patient chatters and yaps about the patient, the
weather, the most popular movie star, or baseball. The exodontist is a tough character, bossy
to the nurse, apt to be angry about trifles; he is also very sympathetic toward the patient. The
nurse is a blue-eyed blonde who is sexually aberrated. The patient, actually in agony, receiving
an engram amongst engrams which may ruin his life (terrible stuff, nitrous oxide; really hands
out a fancy engram as any dianeticist can attest) is unanalytical. Everything said to him or
around him is taken literally. He takes the valence of the exodontist as both the top valence
present and the sympathetic valence. But every phrase uttered is aberrative and will be
interpreted by that happy little moron, the reactive mind, on the order of Simple Simon who
was told he had to be careful how he stepped in the pies, so he stepped in them carefully. These
people may be talking about somebody else but every “I” or “he” or “you” uttered is engramic
and will be applied to others and himself by the patient in the most literal sense. “He can’t
remember anything” says the exodontist. All right, when the engram keys-in, this patient will
have an occlusion on memory in greater or lesser degree. “He can’t see or feel it”: this means
an occlusion on sight, pain and tactile. If the patient has his eyes watering in agony at the
moment (though completely “under”) he may get actual bad vision as well as poor visual recall
from this experience.
Now they put him in the hands of this blonde nurse to let him sleep off the drug and
recover. She is an aberree amongst aberrees.
She knows patients do weird things when they are still “out” so she pumps him for
information about his life. And she knows they are hypnotic (yes, she sure does) so she gives
him some positive suggestions. Amusing herself. She says he’ll like her. That she’ll be good to
him. And stay there now for the present.
So the poor patient, who has had two wisdom teeth, impacted, taken out, has a full
anger-sympathy dramatization. The general tone he takes is the tone the exodontist showed to
the others in the room. The exodontist was angry at the nurse. With his recalls all messed up,
the patient a few years later meets a woman similar to this nurse. The nurse has given him
compulsions toward her.
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The silly little moron, the reactive mind, sees in this entirely different person enough
similarity to create an identity between the nurse and this new woman. So the patient divorces
his wife and marries the pseudo-nurse.
Only now that he has married the pseudo-nurse the dental engram begins to key-in in
earnest. Physically he gets ill: the two molars adjacent to where the wisdom teeth came out
develop large cavities and begin to rot (circulation shut down, pain in the area but can’t be felt
because there’s a pain recall shut-off). His memory goes to pieces. His recalls become worse.
He begins to develop eye trouble and a strange conjunctivitis. Further (because the dentist
leaned on his chest and stomach with a sharp elbow from time to time) he has chest and
stomach pains. The nitrous oxide hurt his lungs and this pain is also in chronic restimulation.
But most horrible: he believes that this pseudo-nurse will take care of him and he stops to some
degree taking care of himself in any way; his energy dissipates; and analytically he knows it is
all wrong and that he is not himself. For he is now fixed in the valence of the exodontist who is
angry with this nurse and so he beats the pseudo-nurse because he senses that from her all evil
flows. The girl he married is not and was not the nurse: she sounds something like her and is a
blonde. She has her own engrams and reacts. She attempts suicide.
Then, one day, since this is one engram among many, the mental hospital gets our
patient and the doctors there decide that all he needs is a good solid series of electric shocks to
tear his brain up, and if that doesn’t work, a nice ice-pick into each eyeball after and during
electric shock, the ice-pick sweeping a wide arc to tear the analytical mind to pieces. His wife
agrees. Our patient can’t defend himself: he’s insane and the insane have no rights, you know.
Only the cavalry, in this one case, arrived in the form of dianetics and cleared the patient
and the wife and they are happy today. This is an actual engram and an actual case history. It is
a sympathy engram, pro-survival on the moronic reactive mind level.
This is to show the ebb and flow of emotion within this one engram. The physical
being is out and in agony. The mental being is given a variety of emotional tones on a
contagion principle. The actual emotional tone of the patient, his own, is beaten apathy; hence
he can no longer “be himself.”
In passing it should be mentioned that only absolute silence, utter silence and tomb-like
silence, should attend an operation or injury of any kind. There is nothing which can be said or
given as a perceptic in any moment of “unconsciousness” which is beneficial to a patient.
Nothing! In the light of these researches and scientific findings (which can be proven in
any other laboratory or group of people in very short order), speech or sound in the vicinity of
an “unconscious” person should be punished criminally as, to anyone who knows these facts,
such an act would be a willful effort to destroy the intellect or mental balance of an individual.
If the patient is complimented, as in hypnosis or during an injury or operation, a manic is
formed which will give him temporary euphoria and eventually plunge him into the depressive
stage of the cycle.
The golden rule could be altered to read: If you love your brother, keep your mouth
shut when he is unconscious.
Emotion can be seen then to exist in two planes, the personal plane and the extra-valence
plane. It is communicable in terms of identical thinking. Rage present when a man is
“unconscious” will give him a Tone 1 engram: it will contain rage. Apathy present in the
vicinity of an “unconscious” person will give him a Tone 0 engram. Happiness present during
an engram is not very aberrative but will give a Tone 4 engram. And so forth. In other words,
the emotion of those present around an “unconscious” person is communicated into the person
as part of his engram. Any mood can be so communicated.
In dramatizing an engram, the aberree always takes the winning valence and that
valence is not, of course, himself. If only one other person is present and the other is talking in
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terms of apathy, then the apathy is the tone value of the engram. When an apathy engram is
restimulated, the individual, unless he wants to be hurt severely, is apathetic and this tone,
being the nearest to death, is the most dangerous one to the individual. The rage emotion
communicated to an “unconscious” person gives him a rage engram he can dramatize. This is
most harmful to the society. A merely hostile tone present around an “unconscious” person
gives him a merely hostile engram (covert hostility). With two people present, each having a
different mood, the “unconscious” person receives an engram with two valences other than his
own. When this happens he will first dramatize the winning valence with its mood and, if
forced from this, will dramatize the second valence with its mood. Driven from this in a chronic
engram, he goes insane.
Nothing here should be construed to mean that a person only uses or dramatizes
sympathy engrams. This is very far from the case. The sympathy engram gives him the chronic
psycho-somatic illness. He can dramatize any engram he has when it is restimulated.
Emotion, then, is communication and a personal condition. The cellular level evaluation
of a situation depends upon any other analyzer present, even if that analyzer is thoroughly
hostile to it. Lacking such evaluation, the individual takes his own tone for the moment.
There is another condition of emotion which is of extreme and useful interest to the
therapist since it is the first thing with which he will have to deal in opening a case. We do not
mean here to start discussing therapy but to describe a necessary part of emotion.
Great loss and other swift and severe suppressor action dams up emotion in an engram.
Loss itself can be a shock to reduce analytical power. And an engram is received. If it is the
loss of a sympathetic person on whom an individual has depended, it seems to the individual as
if death itself stalks him. When such a suppressor effect occurs, it is as if a strong steel spring
had been compressed within the engram. When it releases it comes with a terrible rush of
emotion (if this discharge is, indeed, emotion, though we hardly know what other name to call
it).
Life force apparently gets dammed up at these points in life. There may be enormous
quantities of that life force available but some of it becomes suppressed into a loss engram.
After that the person does not seem to possess as much fluid vitality as before. This may be not
emotion but life force itself. The mind then has below it, as in a cyst, a great quantity of sorrow
or despair. The more of these charges exist in such an encysted state, the less free are the
emotions of the individual. This may be on a basis of suppression to a point from which there
is no swift rising. Nothing in the person’s future seems to bring him up to any plane like those
he occupied before.
The glory and color of childhood vanishes as one progresses into later years. But the
strange part of it is that this glamor and beauty and sensitivity to life are not gone. They are
encysted. One of the most remarkable experiences a clear has is to find, in the process of
therapy, that he is recovering appreciation of the beauty in the world.
Persons, as they live forward from childhood, suffer loss after loss, and each loss takes
from them a little more of this ; Ø quantity which may be, indeed, life force itself. Bound up
within them, that force is denied them and indeed, reacts against them.
Only this emotional encysting can, for instance, compartment the mind of a person who
is multi-valent or who cannot see or hear his past. The analytical mind, worked upon by the
reactive bank, compartments and divides with loss after loss until there is no free flow left.
Then a man dies.
Thus we could say that emotion, or what has been called emotion, is really in two
sections: first, there is the endocrine system which, handled either by the analytical mind in the
upper two zones or the reactive mind in the lower two zones, brings emotional responses of
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fear, enthusiasm, apathy, etc.; second, there would be life force itself becoming compartmented
by engrams and being sealed up, little by little, in the reactive bank.
It is possible that a therapy could be formulated which would spring out these various
life force charges only and create thereby a full clear. Unfortunately, to date, this has not been
possible.
The odd part of emotion is that it is so ordinarily based on the word content of engrams.
If an engram says, “I am afraid,” then the aberree is afraid. If an engram says, “I am calm,”
even if the rest of the engram gives him chattering shakes, the aberree still has to be “calm.”
The problem of emotion as endocrine balance and life force has another complication in
that the physical pain in an engram is often mistaken for a particular emotion named in the
engram. For instance, the engram can say with verbal content that the individual is “sexually
excited” and have as a pain content an ache in the legs and have as an actual emotional content
(the valence that says “I’m sexually excited”) anger. This, to the aberree dramatizing it is a
complex affair. When he is “sexually excited” -- he has an idea what that means as just
language -- he is also angry and has an ache in the legs. This is actually very amusing in many
cases and has led to a standard set of clinical jokes, all of which begin with, “You know, I feel
like everybody else.”
Dianeticists, having discovered that people evaluate the emotions, beliefs, intelligence
and somatics of the world in terms of their own engramic reactions, delight in discovering new
concepts of “emotion.” “You know how people feel when they’re happy. Their ears burn.” “I
feel just like anybody else when I’m happy; my feet and eyes ache.” “Of course I know how
people feel when they’re happy; just pin prickles going all over them.” “I wonder how people
can stand to be passionate when it makes their noses hurt so.” “Of course I know how people
feel when they’re excited: they have to go to the toilet.”
Probably every person on earth has his own peculiar definition for every emotional state
in terms of engram command. The command plus the somatics and perceptics make what they
call an “emotional state.”
Actually the problem, then, should be defined in terms of the clear, who can function
without engramic orders from the reactive mind. So defined it breaks down in terms of the
endocrine system and the varying level of life force free to resurge against the suppressor.
Laughter, it should be added, is not, strictly speaking, an emotion but a relief from
emotion. The early Italians had a very definite idea, as represented by their folk tales, that
laughter was of therapeutic value. Melancholy was the only mental illness these tales consider
and laughter was its only cure. In dianetics we have a great deal to do with laughter. In therapy
patients vary, in their laughter reaction, from the slight chuckle to hilarious mirth. Any engram
which really releases may be expected to begin somewhere between tears and boredom and end
with laughter; the nearer the engram’s tone is to tears at the first contact, the more certainly
laughter will appear as it is relieved.
There is a stage of therapy often reached by the preclear when his entire past life seems
to be a subject of uncontrollable mirth. This does not mean he is clear but it means that a large
proportion of the encysted charges have been tapped. A pre-clear has laughed for two days
almost without ceasing. Hebephrenia is not the same thing as this laughter for the relief of the
pre-clear on realizing the shadowy aspect and completely knowable character of his past fears
and terrors is hearty.
Laughter plays a definite role in therapy. It is quite amusing to see a pre-clear, who has
been haunted by an engram which contained great emotional charge, suddenly relieve it, for the
situation, no matter how gruesome it was, when relieved, is in all its aspects a subject of great
mirth. The laughter fades away as he becomes disinterested in it and he can be said to be “Tone
3” about it.
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Laughter is definitely the relief of painful emotion.
[The complete Tone Scale, its use in predicting the behavior of others as well as assisting in
auditing, is given in the book SCIENCE OF SURVIVAL by L. Ron Hubbard, 1951, 580
pages.]
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CHAPTER VII
Prenatal Experience and Birth
Old women less than a hundred years ago talked wisely about “prenatal influence” and
how a woman marked her child. Many such intuitive thoughts are based, actually, on observed
data. It can be observed that the child born out of wedlock is often a luckless creature (in a
society which frowns upon such bearings). These tenets have been held in the market place for
a great many millenia. Just because they have been held is no reason they are true, but they
make an excellent beginning for a chapter on prenatal experience and birth.
If dianetics had worked on obscure theories such as those of the old women or those of
the mystics who believe that “childish delusions” are capable of aberrating a child, dianetics
would not be a science of mind. But it was no obscure theory which brought about the
discovery of the exact role prenatal experience and birth play in aberration and psycho-somatic
ills.
Many schools of mental healing from the Aesculapian to the modern hypnotist were
studied after the basic philosophy of dianetics had been postulated. Much data was
accumulated, many experiments were made. The fundamentals about engrams had been
formulated and “unconsciousness” had been discovered as being a period of actual recording
when the theory began to predict new phenomena not hitherto observed.
There has been, in recent years, a practice called “narco-synthesis.” This was actually a
branch of “hypno-analysis” and “deep analysis.” It did not produce clears and it did not even
produce alleviation in the majority of its cases. But it was discovered to be an aberrative factor
in itself. A thing which aberrates may well lead to something which removes aberrations if it is
studied scientifically. Narco-synthesis was so studied. Several cases were examined on which
narco-synthesis had been employed. Some of these cases had experienced relief from
narcosynthesis. Others had become a great deal worse.
Working with hypno-analysis it was discovered that the technique could be varied until
it would actually remove the aberrative charge contained in locks. In treating schizophrenics
with narco-synthesis it was found that the locks (periods of mental anguish not including
physical pain or “unconsciousness”) would sometimes spring (clear) and sometimes not.
Narco-synthesis is a complicated name for a very ancient process quite well known in
Greece and India. It is drug hypnotism. And it is generally employed either by those
practitioners who do not know hypnosis or on those patients who will not succumb to ordinary
hypnotism. A shot of sodium pentothal is given intravenously to the patient and he is asked to
count backwards. Shortly he stops counting at which the injection is also stopped. The patient
is now in a state of “deep sleep.” That this is not sleep seems to have missed both narco-synthesists
and hypnotists. It is actually a depressant on the awareness of an individual so that
those attention units which remain behind the curtain of his reactive bank can be reached
directly. These attention units are up against the standard banks. The by-pass circuits (demon
circuits) which lie between these banks and “I” have themselves been by-passed. In other
words, a section of the analytical mind has been exposed which is not aberrated. It is not very
powerful and it is not highly intelligent, but it has the advantage of being hard up against the
standard banks. This is basic personality. The intent and purpose and persistence of these few
attention units have the same quality and direction as the whole analytical mind would have if it
were clear. It is a very nice, co-operative group of attention units and it is very useful; for basic
personality has all recalls -- sonic, audio, tactile, smell, pain, etc. It can get at anything that is in
the banks -- which is everything perceived or thought in a lifetime, minute by minute. These
qualities of basic personality have been very poorly described in hypnotism, and it is doubtful
even if it was generally known that sonic was part of the recall system disclosed by deep
hypnotism or the drug hypnotism called narco-synthesis.
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A study of basic personality in a multi-valent subject who had poor memory, no good
recalls and scant imagination disclosed the information that BP (the attention units called basic
personality) was more able to select out data than AP (aberrated personality as represented by
the awake subject). It was further discovered that AP could ordinarily return better than BP so
far as time-distance went but that when AP arrived at the earliest place it was unable to manage
recall. But if AP had gone back and established a vague contact with an incident, drug
hypnotism or standard hypnotism used on him when he was in present time (no longer returned
would then permit BP to return. Drug hypnotism has seldom been able to force back very early
into a patient’s life. But by making the strength of AP go back and then using BP for the recall,
some very early incidents could be reached. This trick was invented to overcome some of the
difficulties which had made drug hypnosis relatively uncertain in results.
Then another factor was discovered. All those patients who had been treated by narco-synthesis
had become worse every time the people doing the work had crossed over but left
(because “everybody knew” an “unconscious” person didn’t record) a period of
“unconsciousness.” When one of these “unconscious” periods was so probed -- by the drug
hypnosis called narco-synthesis -- the patient usually became worse, not better. Doing a little
more probing than had been done by the usual practitioners, dianetic research entered some of
the late life “unconscious” periods and, with much labor, laid them bare.
Now all drug hypnosis, whether it is called narco-synthesis or a visit from the god
Aesculapius, is still hypnosis. Whatever is said to a hypnotized subject remains as a positive
suggestion, and these positive suggestions are simply engrams with a somewhat lighter effect
and a shorter duration. When a drug is present the hypnotism is complicated by the fact that
hypnotic drugs are, after all, poisons; the body is then possessed of a permanent (at least until
dianetics was discovered) somatic to go along with the suggestion. Drug hypnotism invariably
creates an engram. Whatever a practitioner says to a drugged subject becomes engramic in
some degree. In the course of dianetic research it first was supposed, playing back the careless
chatter of practitioners out of the minds of patients they had placed under drug hypnosis, that
this carelessness in saying so many aberrative things was responsible for some of the failure.
But this was found to be true in a very limited sense. Then it was discovered that when the
“unconscious” periods were reached by drug hypnosis they refused to lift even when the
patient recounted them scores of times. This was blamed on the drug character of the hypnosis.
Straight hypnotism was then used to reach these late “unconscious” periods and these
periods still failed to lift. Therefore it was adjudged safe to continue drug use on those patients
who refused hypnosis. And the AP-BP alternate trick began to be employed.
It was discovered by drug hypnosis where it was necessary and straight hypnosis
where that was possible that the “schizophrenic” (the multi-valent aberree) could be made to
reach very early periods in every case. And it was further found that an early period of
“unconsciousness” would often lift. Experimentation brought about a scientific axiom: The
earlier the period of “unconsciousness” the more likely it is to lift. That is a fundamental axiom
of dianetic therapy.
Manic-depressives who had sonic recall were worked upon, most of them by straight
hypnosis, and it was discovered that they also followed this rule. But it was most dramatic in
the multi-valent aberree: for when the engram did not lift it impinged against his analytical mind
when he was awakened and created a variation in his psychoses and brought with it psycho-somatic
illnesses as well.
This brought about an understanding of why the multi-valent aberree, under narco-synthesis,
was made worse whenever some practitioner had glided over (but not entered, of
course) a late-life period of “unconsciousness.” Now came the problem of applying the axiom.
It was postulated that the primary engram must in some way suppress later engrams. In view of
other data and postulates, this was an entirely reasonable assumption. The earlier a person
went in the life of a multi-valent aberree the less likelihood there was of restimulating him
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artificially. Often an engram at around two or three years of age would lift entirely and give him
a great deal of relief.
The problem of this research was very far from the same problem of those who, not
knowing about the reactive mind and “unconsciousness,” tried merely to find computing
factors on a rational level or incidents of everyday life as aberrative factors in a patient.
When an engram is touched, it is very resistive, particularly above the age of two years.
Further, the whole reactive bank was buried deeply under foggy layers of “unconsciousness”
and was further safeguarded by a mechanism of the analytical mind which tended to prohibit it
from touching pain or painful emotion. The reactive bank was protecting itself all the way
through the research but it was obviously the answer. The problem was how to achieve its
relief, if it could be relieved.
Having made several multi-valent personalities intensely uncomfortable, a new
necessity level was reached whereby something had to be done about the problem. But there
was this shining hope, the above axiom. A bridge between insanity and sanity had to be built
and there, in the axiom, one had at least a glimmer of a plan. The earlier one had experienced
this fog and pain, the lighter these engrams seemed to be.
Then, one day, a multi-valent patient, under drugs, went back to his birth. He suffered
the pain -- and it was very painful with this crude technique, for dianetics had not yet smoothed
down to a well-oiled piece of machinery -- and he floundered through the “unconsciousness” of
the period and he fought the doctor who had tried to put drops in his eyes and he generally
resented the entire proceedings. AP had been sent down first, then later, under drugs, BP had
contacted the incident.
This seemed a remarkable day for dianetics. After twenty runs through birth the patient
experienced a recession of all somatics and “unconsciousness” and aberrative content. He had
had asthma. It seemed that this asthma had been caused by the doctor’s enthusiasm in yanking
him off the table just when he was fighting for his first breath. He had had conjunctivitis. That
came from the eye-drops. He had had sinusitis. That had come from the nose swabs used by
the pretty nurse.
Rejoicing was held for he seemed to be a new man. A primary psychosis about being
“pushed around” had vanished. The subjective reality of this incident was intense. Objective
reality did not matter but this patient had a mother near at hand and objective reality was
established simply by returning her in therapy to his birth. They had not communicated about it
in detail. The recording of her sequence compared word for word with his sequence, detail for
detail, name for name. Possibility, even if they had communicated, of such duplication,
outside the dianetic situation, was mathematically impossible. And she had been “unconscious”
during his birth and had always supposed that the affair had been quite different and the return
data collapsed her awake description of it as being so much fable.
In order to make sure that this was no freak (for it is a very poor research man who will
base conclusions on a series of one) two manic-depressives were returned to their births and
both completed the experience. But one of these two birth engrams would not lift!
The postulated axiom was called into play again. If one could find the earliest engram,
then the others would lift each in turn. That was the hope.
The manic-depressive whose birth had not lifted was returned to a period before birth in
an effort to find an earlier engram.
Structural theories, as fondly held for ages, had thoroughly collapsed already when
“unconscious” fog and pain had been penetrated to discover the engram as an aberrative unit.
Tests had held up the discovery that all data, awake, asleep and “unconscious,” from the
moment of conception on was always recorded somewhere in the mind or body. The little
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matter of myelin sheathing, since it had already been disproven by laboratory research which
included the reaching of birth, was discarded. The theory that no recordings can take place in
the mind until the nerves are sheathed depends upon a theoretical postulate, has never been
subjected to scientific research, and depends for its existence upon Authority alone -- and a
“science” which depends on Authority alone is a breath in the wind of truth and is therefore no
science at all. That babies cannot record until the myelin sheathing is formed has about as much
truth, on investigation, as the fact that penis-envy is the cause of female homosexuality. Neither
theory, when applied, works. For the baby, after all, is composed of cells and it is evidenced
now by much research that the cell, not an organ, records the engram.
Thus there was no inhibition about looking earlier than birth for what dianetics had
begun to call basic-basic (the first engram of the first chain of engrams). And an earlier engram
was reached.
It has since been discovered that a great deal of recording is done by the child in the
womb which is not engramic. For a time it was thought that the child in the womb records on
the proposition of “extended hearing,” where hearing tunes up in the presence of danger and
particularly during “unconsciousness.” But the first research discovered prenatal engrams to be
most easily reached when they contained a great deal of pain. Cells, not the individual, are
evidenced to record pain. And the reactive engram bank is composed only of cells.
Recourse to nature rather than recourse to Authority is the very building block of
modern science. So long as Galen remained an Authority on blood, none but “madmen” like Da
Vinci, Shakespeare and William Harvey even thought to experiment to find out what truly was
the action of blood! So long as Aristotle remained the Authority for All, the Dark Ages reigned.
Advance comes from asking free-minded questions of nature, not from quoting the works and
thinking the thoughts of by-gone years. Recourse to precedent is an assertion that yesterday’s
mentors were better informed than today’s: an assertion which fades before the truth that
knowledge is compounded of the experience of yesterdays, of which we have more, most
certainly, than the best-informed mentor of yesterday itself.
In that dianetics was based on a philosophy that used the cell as the basic building
block, the fact that recording of engrams was done by cells came with less surprise than it
otherwise might have. The engram is not a memory; it is a cellular trace of recordings impinged
deeply into the very structure of the body itself.
The experience of which cells themselves were capable had already been tested. It had
been found that a monocell divided not only its substance but gave its total experience, as a
master disc will make duplicates, to its offspring. Now this is a peculiarity of monocells: they
survive as identities. Each is personally its fore-bearer.
Cell A divides to a first generation; this generation is also Cell A; the second generation,
the second division, creates an entity which is still Cell A. Lacking the necessity of such
laborious processes as construction and birth and growth before reproduction, the monocell
simply splits. And everything it has learned could be postulated to be contained in the new
generation. Cell A dies but through generations from it, the latest generation is still Cell A.
Man’s belief that he is to live in his progeny might possibly derive from this cellular identity of
procreation. Another interesting possibility lies in the fact that even neurons exist in embryo in
the zygote and neurons do not themselves divide but are like organisms (and may have the
virus as their basic building block).
Dianetics, as a study of function and the science of mind, does not need any postulate
concerning structure, however. The only test is whether or not a fact works. If it does work
and can be used, it is a scientific fact. And the prenatal engram is a scientific fact. Tested and
checked for objective reality, it still stands firm. And as for subjective reality, the acceptance of
the prenatal engram as a working fact alone makes possible the clear.
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At the end of a series of 270 clears and alleviations a short series of five cases was
taken to finally settle the argument. These five cases were not permitted to admit anything
before birth. They were treated with everything dianetics, hypnotism and other therapeutics
could offer, and no clear was obtained. This ruled out the “personality of the operator” or
“suggestion” or “faith” as factors in dianetics. These five cases had never been informed of
prenatal engrams. Each swerved in toward them but was restrained without informing him that
engrams existed that early. The five were alleviated as to some variety of psycho-somatic ills
but the ills were only alleviated, not completely cured. The aberrations remained but little
changed. They are extremely disappointed since each had heard something of “the miracles
dianetics could perform.” Before then 270 cases had been worked and 270 cases had reached
prenatal engrams. And 270 cases had been cleared or alleviated as the dianeticist chose and time
permitted. All could have been cleared with an additional average of 100 or so hours for each of
the persons who were alleviated. In short, on random cases -- and selected cases so that at least
two of each classification of neurosis or psychosis was included in the clearing -- when
prenatal engrams and birth were taken into account and used in therapy, results were obtained.
When these factors were not taken into account, results were no more favorable than those
attained in the best successes of past schools -- which is not nearly good enough for a science
of mind.
Dianetics had prenatal and birth engrams wished off on it as facts existing in the nature
of things. That past schools have been passing over these engrams and into the prenatal area
without success does not mean that prenatals could not be found any more than it means that
these past schools found much value in prenatal experience when they considered it at all. The
problem is slightly more complex: the difficulty lay in finding the reactive bank which was
occluded by “unconsciousness” which had never before been penetrated wittingly as
“unconsciousness.” The discovery of this reactive bank led to the discovery of prenatal
engrams, which are quite different from “prenatal memory.”
After a few cases had been examined as to objective and subjective reality dianetics was
forced to accept, if it wished a clear, the fact that the cells of the foetus record. A few more
cases and a little more experience discovered that the embryo cells record. And suddenly it was
discovered that recording begins in the cells of the zygote -- which is to say, with conception.
That the body recalls conception, which is a high level survival activity, has little to do with
engrams. Most patients to date sooner or later startle themselves by finding themselves
swimming up a channel or waiting to be connected with. The recording is there. And there’s
little use arguing with a pre-clear that he cannot recall being a sperm, engramic or not as the
case may be. It must be remarked because any dianeticist will encounter this.
Anyone postulating that “return to the womb” was an ambition should have examined
life in the womb a little more carefully. Even a poor scientist would have at least tried to find
out if anybody could recall it before he made a statement that there was a memory of it. But life
in the womb does not seem to be the Paradise it has been poetically, if not scientifically,
represented. Actuality discloses that three men and a horse in a telephone booth would have but
little less room than an unborn baby. The womb is wet, uncomfortable and unprotected.
Mama sneezes, baby gets knocked “unconscious.” Mama runs lightly and blithely into a
table and baby gets its head stoved in. Mama has constipation and baby, in the anxious effort,
gets squashed. Papa becomes passionate and baby has the sensation of being put into a running
washing machine. Mama gets hysterical, baby gets an engram. Papa hits Mama, baby gets an
engram. Junior bounces on Mama’s lap, baby gets an engram. And so it goes.
People have scores of prenatal engrams when they are normal. They can have more
than two hundred. And each one is aberrative. Each contains pain and “unconsciousness.”
Engrams received as a zygote are potentially the most aberrative, being wholly reactive.
Those received as an embryo are intensely aberrative. Those received as the foetus are enough
to send people to institutions all by themselves.
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Zygote, embryo, foetus, infant, child, adult: these are all the same person. Time has
been considered the Great Healer. That can be filed with the things “everybody knew.” On a
conscious level it may be true. But on a reactive level Time is nothing. The engram, whenever
received, is strong in proportion to the degree it is restimulated.
The mechanism of an engram has an interesting feature. It is not “reasoned” or analyzed
nor does it have any meaning until it has been keyed-in. A baby before speech could have an
engram in restimulation but that engram must have been keyed-in by the analytical data the baby
has.
The reactive mind steals meaning from the analytical mind. An engram is just so many
wave-recordings until it is keyed-in, and those recordings, by such restimulation, become
effective upon the analytical mind. It may be that the engram never has any reason or meaning
in itself but only thrusts its waves forward as unreasoned things at the body and analyzer, and
the body and analyzer, through mechanisms, give them meaning. In other words, the engram is
not a sentient recording containing meanings. It is merely a series of impressions such as a
needle might make on wax. These impressions are meaningless to the body until the engram
keys-in, at which time aberrations and psycho-somatics occur.
Thus it can be understood that the prenatal child has no remotest idea of what is being
said in terms of words, It does learn, being an organism, that certain things may mean certain
dangers. But this is every bit as far as it goes with recording. The mind must become more or
less fully formed before the engram can impinge into the analytical level.
The prenatal child can, of course, experience terror. When the parents or the
professional abortionist start after it and thrust it full of holes, it knows fear and pain. It has,
however, this prenatal child, an advantage in its situation. Being surrounded by amniotic fluid
and dependent for nutrition on its mother, being in a state of growth and easily reformed
physically, it can repair an enormous amount of damage and does. The recovery qualities of the
human body are never higher than before birth. Damage which would maim an infant for life or
would kill a grown man can be taken in stride by the prenatal child. Not that this damage does
not make an engram -- it certainly does, complete with all data and speech and emotion -- but
that this damage does not easily kill it is the point here.
Why people try to abort children is a problem which has its answer only in aberration,
for it is very difficult to abort a child. One can say that in the attempt the mother herself is in
more danger of dying than the child, no matter what method is used.
A society which suppresses sex as evil and which is so aberrated that any member of it
will attempt an abortion is a society which is dooming itself to ever-rising insanity. For it is a
scientific fact that abortion attempts are the most important factor in aberration. The child on
whom the abortion is attempted is condemned to live with murderers whom he reactively
knows to be murderers through all his weak and helpless youth! He forms unreasonable
attachments to grandparents, has terrified reactions to all punishments, grows ill easily and
suffers long. And there is no such thing as a guaranteed way to abort a child. Use
contraceptives, not a knitting needle or the douche bag, to hold down population. Once the
child is conceived, no matter how “shameful” the circumstances, no matter the mores, no
matter the income, that man or woman who would attempt an abortion on an unborn child is
attempting a murder which will seldom succeed and is laying the foundation of a childhood of
illness and heartache. Anyone attempting an abortion is committing an act against the whole
society and the future; any judge or doctor recommending an abortion should be instantly
deprived of position and practice, whatever his “reason.”
If a person knows he has committed this crime against a child who has been born, he
should do all possible to have that child “cleared” as soon as possible after the age of eight and
in the meantime should treat that child with all the decency and courtesy possible in order to
keep the engram out of restimulation. Otherwise he may send that child to an institution for the
insane.
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A large proportion of allegedly feeble-minded children are actually attempted abortion
cases, whose engrams place them in fear paralysis or regressive palsy and which command
them not to grow but to be where they are forever.
However many billions America spends yearly on institutions for the insane and jails
for the criminals are spent primarily because of attempted abortions done by some sex-blocked
mother to whom children are a curse, not a blessing of God.
Antipathy toward children means a blocked second dynamic. Physiological examination
of anyone with such blockage will demonstrate a physical derangement of the genitalia or
glands. Dianetic therapy would demonstrate attempted abortion or an equally foul prenatal
existence and would clear the individual.
The case of the child who, as this is read, is not yet born but upon whom abortion has
been attempted, is not hopeless. If he is treated with decency after he is born and if he is not
restimulated by witnessing quarrels, he will wax and grow fat until he is eight and can be
cleared, at which time he will probably be much startled to learn the truth But that startlement
and any antagonism included in it will vanish with the finishing of the clear and his love of his
parents will be greater than before.
All these things are scientific facts, tested and rechecked and tested again. And with
them can be produced a clear on whom our racial future depends.
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CHAPTER VIII
Contagion of Aberration
Disease is contagious. Germs, traveling from one individual to another, wander
through an entire society, respecting none until stopped by such things as sulfa or penicillin.
Aberrations are contagious. Like germs they respect none and carry forward from
individual to individual, from parents to child, respecting none until they are stopped by
dianetics.
The people of yesterday supposed that genetic insanity must exist, for it could be
observed that the children of aberrated parents were often themselves aberrated. There is
genetic insanity but it is limited to the case of actually missing parts. A very small percentage of
insanity falls into such a category and its manifestation is mental dullness or failure to
coordinate and beyond these has no aberrative quality whatever (such people receive engrams
which complicate their cases).
The contagion of aberration is too simple in principle to be much labored here. In
dianetics we learn that only moments of “unconsciousness,” short or long and of greater or
lesser depth, can contain engrams. When a person is rendered “unconscious,” people in his
vicinity react more or less at the dictates of their engrams: in fact, the “unconsciousness” is
quite ordinarily caused by somebody’s dramatization. A clear, then, could be rendered
unconscious by an aberree who is dramatizing and the aberree’s dramatization of his engram
would enter as an engram into the clear.
The mechanics are simple.
People under stress, if aberrated, dramatize engrams. Such dramatization may involve
the injury of another person and render him more or less “unconscious.” The “unconscious”
person then receives as an engram the dramatization.
This is not the only way contagion of aberration gets about. People on operating tables,
under anaesthetic, are subjected to the more or less aberrated conversation of those present.
This conversation enters into the “unconscious” person as an engram. Similarly, at the scene of
accidents, the emergency nature of the experience may excite people into dramatizations, and if
a person is “unconscious” because of the accident, an engram is received.
Aberrated parents are certain to infect their children with engrams. The father and
mother, in dramatizing their own engrams around sick or injured children, pass them along just
as certainly as if those engrams were bacteria. This does not mean that the total reactive bank of
a child is composed solely of the parents’ engrams, for there are many exterior influences to the
home which can enter into the child when it is “unconscious.” And it does not mean that the
child is going to react to the same engrams the way either parent might react, for the child, after
all, is an individual with an inherent personality, a power of choice and a different experience
pattern. But it does mean that it is utterly inevitable that aberrated parents will in some way
aberrate their children.
Misconceptions and poor data in a society’s culture become engrams because not all the
conduct around an “unconscious” person is dramatization. If some society believed that fish-eating
brought on leprosy, it is quite certain that this false datum would find its way into
engrams and sooner or later some one would develop a leprosy-like disease after having eaten
fish.
Primitive societies, being subject to much mauling by the elements, have many more
occasions for injury than civilized societies. Further, such primitive societies are alive with
false data. Further, their practice of medicine and mental healing is on a very aberrative level by
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itself. The number of engrams in a Zulu would be astonishing. Moved out of his restimulative
area and taught English he would escape the penalty of much of his reactive data; but in his
native habitat the Zulu is only outside the bars of a madhouse because there are no madhouses
provided by his tribe. It is a safe estimate and one based on better experience than is generally
available to those who base conclusions on “modern man” by studying primitive races that
primitives are far more aberrated than civilized peoples. Their savageness, their
unprogressiveness, their incidence of illness all stem from their reactive patterns, not from their
inherent personalities. Measuring one set of aberrees by another set of aberrees is not likely to
lead to much data. And the contagion of aberration, being much greater in a primitive tribe, and
the falsity of the superstitious data in the engrams of such a tribe both lead to a conclusion
which, observed on the scene, is carried out by actuality.
Contagion of aberration is very easily studied in the process of clearing any aberree
whose parents fought. Mother, for instance, might be relatively unaberrated at the beginning of
the marriage. If she is beaten by her husband who is, after all, dramatizing, she will begin to
pick up his aberrations as part of her own reactive pattern. This is particularly noticeable when
one is clearing a person who was conceived shortly after his parents’ marriage or before it.
Papa may begin with a certain dramatization which includes beating a wife. Whatever he says
in such a dramatization will sooner or later begin to affect the wife and she may -- unless
extraordinarily well balanced -- begin to dramatize these things on her own. Eventually, when
the child is born, she will begin to dramatize on the child, thus putting him into a continual state
of restimulation.
Birth is one of the most remarkable engrams in terms of contagion. Here the mother and
child both receive the same engram which differs only in the location of pain and the depths of
“unconsciousness.” Whatever the doctors, nurses and other people associated with the delivery
say to the mother during labor and birth and immediately afterwards before the child is taken
away is recorded in the reactive bank, making an identical engram in both mother and child.
This engram is remarkably destructive in several ways. The mother’s voice can
restimulate the birth engram in the child and the presence of the child can restimulate the giving-birth
engram in the mother. Thus they are mutually restimulative. In view of the fact that they
have all the other restimulators also in common a later life situation can cause them each to
suffer simultaneously from the engram. If birth included a slammed window, a slammed
window may trigger birth dramatization in both, simultaneously, with resultant hostilities or
apathies.
Should a doctor become angry or despairing, the emotional tone of birth can be severe.
And if the doctor talks at all, the conversation takes on its full reactive literal meaning to both
mother and child.
Many cases were cleared where both mother and child were available. One such case
found the mother (as heard by the child in dianetic clearing) moaning, “I’m so ashamed, I’m so
ashamed,” over and over. The child had a neurosis about shame. When the mother was
cleared, it was found that her mother at birth was moaning, “I’m so ashamed, I’m so
ashamed.” One can presume that this has been going along, by contagion, since Cheops built
his tomb.
In the larger sphere of society contagion of aberration is extremely dangerous and
cannot but be considered as a vital factor in undermining the health of that society.
The social body behaves similarly to an organism in that there are social aberrations
which exist within the society. The society grows and may fade like an organism which has
people, not cells, for its parts. Where pain is leveled by the head of the society at any member
in that society, a source of aberration is begun which will be contagious. The reasons against
corporal punishment are not “humanitarian,” they are practical. A society which practices
punishment of any kind against any of its members is carrying on a contagion of aberration.
The society has a social engram, society size, which says punishment is necessary. Punishment
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is meted. The jails and institutions fill. And then one day some portion of the society,
depressed into Zone 1 by a government’s freedom with government engrams, jumps up and
wipes the government out. And a new set of aberrations is formed from the violence attending
the destruction. Violent revolutions never win because they begin this cycle of aberration.
A society filled with aberrees may feel it necessary to punish. There has been no
remedy other than punishment. The provision of a remedy for unsocial conduct by members of
the group is of more than passing interest to a government for a continuance of its own corporal
practices; adding these to the continuing aberrations of the past seriously depresses the survival
potential of that government and will some day cause that government to fall. After many
governments so fall, its people too perish from this earth.
Contagion of aberration is never more apparent than in that social insanity called war.
Wars never solve the need of wars. Fight to save the world for democracy or save it from
Confucianism and the fight is inevitably lost by all. War has become associated in the past with
competition, and it has been believed, therefore, by shifty logic, that wars were necessary. A
society which advances into a war as a solution of its problems cannot but depress its own
survival potential. No government was ever permitted to enter a war without costing its people
some of their liberties. The end product is the apathy of a ruling priesthood, where mystery and
superstition alone can band the insane remnants of a people together. This is too easily
observed in past histories to need much amplification. A democracy engaging in war has
always lost some of its democratic rights. As it engages in more and more wars, it eventually
comes under the command of a dictator (rule by a single engram). The dictator, forcing his
rule, increases the aberrations by his activity against minorities. Revolt begins to follow revolt.
Priesthoods flourish. Apathy awaits. And after apathy comes death. So went Greece, so went
Rome. So goes England. So goes Russia. And so goes the United States and with it goes
Mankind.
Rule by force is a violation of the law of affinity for force begets force. Rule by force
reduces the self-determinism of the individuals in a society and therefore the self-determinism
of the society itself. Contagion of aberration sweeps along like a forest fire. Engrams beget
engrams. And unless the dwindling spiral is interrupted by new lands and mongrel races which
escape their aberrative environments, or by the arrival of a means to break the contagion of
aberration by clearing individuals, a race will reach downward to the end of the cycle -- Zone 0.
A race is as great as its individual members are self-determined.
In the smaller sphere of the family, as in the national scenes, contagion of aberration
produces an interruption of optimum survival.
Self-determinism is the only possible way a computer can be built to give rational
answers. Holding down seven in an adding machine causes it to give wrong answers.
Entering fixed and not-to-be-rationalized answers into any human being will cause him
to compute wrong answers. Survival depends on right answers. Engrams enter from the
exterior world into the hidden recesses below rational thinking and prevent rational answers
being reached. This is exterior-determinism. Any interference with self-determinism cannot but
lead to wrong computations.
In that a clear is cooperative, a society of clears would cooperate. This may be an
idyllic, Utopian dream and it may not be. In a family of clears there is observable harmony and
cooperation. A clear can recognize a superior computation when he sees one. He does not have
to be slugged and held down and made to obey to make him put a shoulder to the wheel. If he
is made to obey, independent of his thinking, his self-determinism is interrupted to a point
where he cannot get right answers; the society which holds him has penalized itself his ability
to think and act rationally. The only way a clear could so be forced would be to give him
engrams or turn a neuro-surgeon loose upon his brain. But a clear does not need to be forced
for if the job is important enough to do in terms of general need, he will most certainly do it
according to his intelligence and do it as well as possible. One never observes the forced
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individual doing a job well, just as one never observes a forced society winning against an
equally prosperous free society.
A family which runs on the godhead plan, where somebody must be obeyed without
question, is never a happy family. Its prosperity may be present in some material aspects but its
apparent survival as a unit is superficial.
Forced groups are invariably less efficient than free groups working for the common
good. But any group which contains aberrated members is likely to become entirely aberrated
as a group through contagion. The effort to restrain aberrated members of a group inevitably
restrains the group as a whole and leads to further and further restraint.
Clearing one member of a family of aberrees is seldom enough to resolve the problems
of that family. If the husband has been aberrated, he will have aberrated or restimulated his
wife and children in one way or another, even when he used no physical violence upon them.
The parents implant their mutual aberrations in the children and the children, being potentially
self-determined units, revolt back to stir up the aberrations of the parents. In that so many of
these aberrations, by contagion, have become mutual and held in common with the whole
family, the happiness of the family is severely undermined.
The corporal punishment of children is just another facet of the problem of the forced
group. If any one cares to argue over the necessity of punishing children, let him examine the
source of the misbehavior of the children.
The child who is aberrated may not have his engrams entirely keyed-in. He may have to
wait until he himself is married and has children or a pregnant wife to have restimulators
enough to cause him to become, suddenly, one of these things they call a “mature adult” blind
to the beauty of the world and burdened by all its griefs. But the child is nevertheless aberrated
and has many dramatizations. The child is in a very unlucky situation in that he has with him
his two most powerful restimulators -- his mother and father. These assume the power of
physical punishment over him. And they are giants to him. He is a pygmy. And he has to
depend upon them for food, clothing and shelter. One can speak very grandly about the
“delusions of childhood” until he knows the engram background of most children.
The child is on the unkind receiving end of all the dramatizations of his parents. A
cleared child is a most remarkable thing to observe: he is human! Affinity alone can pull him
through. The spoiled child is the child whose decisions have been interrupted continuously and
who is robbed of his independence. Affection could no more spoil a child than the sun could be
put out by a bucket of gasoline.
The beginning and end of “child psychology” is that a child is a human being, that he is
entitled to his dignity and self-determinism. The child of aberrated parents is a problem because
of the contagion of aberration and because he is denied any right to dramatize or counter. The
wonder is not that children are a problem but that they are sane in any action for, by contagion,
punishment, and denial of self-determinism the children of today have been denied all the
things required to make a rational life. And these are the future family and the future race.
This is not a dissertation on children or politics, however, but a chapter on contagion of
aberration. Dianetics covers human thought, and human thought is wide ground. When one
gazes at the potentialities inherent in the mechanism of contagion, respect for the inherent
stability of Man cannot but arise. No “wild animal” reacting with inherent “asocial tendencies”
could have built Nineveh or Boulder Dam. Carrying the contagion mechanism like some Old
Man of the Sea, we have yet come far. Now that we know it, perhaps we shall truly reach the
stars.
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CHAPTER IX
Keying-in the Engram
The single source of inorganic mental illness and organic psycho-somatic illness is the
reactive engram bank. The reactive mind impinges these engrams upon the analytical mind and
the organism whenever they are restimulated after being keyed-in.
There are many known incidents in a lifetime which apparently have a profound
influence upon the happiness and mental condition of the individual. The individual remembers
these and to them attributes his troubles. In a measure he is right: he is at least looking back at
incidents which are held in place by engrams. He does not see the engrams. In fact, unless he
is acquainted with dianetics, he does not know the engrams are there. And even then he will not
know their contents until he has undergone therapy.
It can be demonstrated with ease that any moment of “conscious level” unhappiness
which contained great stress or emotion was not guilty of the charge of causing aberration and
psycho-somatic illness. These moments, of course, played a role in the matter: they were the
key-ins.
The process of keying-in an engram is not very complex. Engram 105, let us say, was
a moment of “unconsciousness” when the prenatal child was struck via Mother, by Father. The
father, aware or not of the child, uttered the words, “God damn you, you filthy whore: you’re
no good!” This engram lay where it was impressed, in the reactive bank. Now it could lie there
for seventy years and never become keyed-in. It contains a headache and a falling body and the
grating of teeth and the intestinal sounds of the mother. And any of these sounds, post-birth,
may be present in large quantities without keying-in this engram.
One day, however, the father becomes exasperated at the child. The child is tired and
feverish, which is to say that his analytical mind may not be at its highest level of activity. And
the father has a certain set of engrams which he dramatizes and one of these engrams is the
above incident. And the father reaches out and slaps the child and says, “God damn you:
you’re no good!” The child cries. That night he has a headache and is much worse physically.
And he feels both an intense hatred and a fear of his father. The engram has keyed-in. Now the
sound of a falling body or grating teeth or any trace of anger of any kind in the father’s voice
will make the child nervous. His physical health will suffer. He will begin to have headaches.
If we take this child who has now become an adult and rake back over his past, we
shall discover (though it may be occluded) a lock like the above key-in. And now not only the
key-in; we may discover half a hundred, half a thousand, such locks just on this one subject.
One would say, unless he knew dianetics, that this child was ruined post-natally by being
beaten by the father, and one might attempt to bring the patient’s mind back into better
condition by removing these locks.
There are literally thousands, tens of thousands of locks in the average life. To take all
of these locks away would be a task for Hercules. Every engram a person has, if it has been
keyed-in, may have its hundreds of locks.
If conditioning existed as a mechanism of pain and stress, Mankind would be in very
bad condition. Fortunately conditioning does not so exist. It appears to exist but the
appearance is not the fact. One would think that if a child were daily thrust around and reviled
he would eventually becomed conditioned into a belief that this was the way life was and that
he had better turn against it.
Conditioning does not, however, exist. Pavlov may have been able to drive dogs mad
by repeated experiments: this was simply bad observation on the part of the observer. The dogs
might be trained to do this or that.
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But it was not conditioning. The dogs went mad because they were given engrams if
and when they did go mad. A series of such experiments, properly conducted and observed,
proves this contention.
The boy who was daily told he was no good and who apparently went into a decline
solely because of that declined only because of the engram. This is a happy fact. The engram
may take a while to locate -- a few hours -- but when it is alleviated or refiled in the standard
memory banks, everything which had locked on to it also refiles.
People trying to help others with their aberrations who did not know about engrams
were, of course, operating with 2.9 strikes against any success. In the first place, the locks
themselves may vanish down into the reactive bank. Thus we get a patient who says, “Oh, my
father wasn’t so bad. He was a pretty good guy.” And we discovered, and the patient
discovers, when an engram is sprung, that father was customarily to be found dramatizing.
What the patient knows about his past before engrams are sprung is not worth cataloguing. In
another case we may find a patient saying, “Oh, I had a terrible childhood, a terrible childhood.
I was beaten seriously.” And we discover, when we get the engrams refiled, that the parents of
this patient never laid a hand on him in punishment or wrath in his entire life.
An engram may coast along without being keyed-in for decades. One of the most
remarkable types of case is one which spent an entire youth without displaying any aberration.
Then suddenly, at the age of twenty-six, we discover him to be so aberrated, so suddenly, that
it appears he must have been hexed. Perhaps most of his engrams were concerned with the
action of getting married and having children. He has never been married before. The first time
he is weary or ill and realizes he has a wife on his hands, the first engram keys-in. Then the
dwindling spiral begins to go to work. This one shuts down the analyzer enough so that others
can be keyed-in. And finally we may discover him in an institution.
The young girl who has been happy and carefree to the age of thirteen and then
suddenly goes into a decline has not, that moment, received an engram. She has had an engram
key-in which let another key-in. Fission reaction. This key-in may have required nothing more
than the discovery that she was bleeding from the vagina. She has an emotional engram about
this; she becomes frantic. The other engrams, as the days follow, may swing into position to
impinge upon her. And so she becomes ill.
The first sexual experience may be one which keys-in an engram. This is so standard
that sex has gotten a rather bad name for itself here and there as being an aberrative factor all by
itself. Sex is not and never has been aberrative. Physical pain and emotion which incidentally
contain sex as a subject are the aberrative factors.
It may be that a patient is urgent in her insistence that her father raped her when she was
nine and that this is the cause of all her misery. Large numbers of insane patients claim this.
And it is perfectly true. Father did rape her, but it happened she was only nine days beyond
conception at the time. The pressure and upset of coitus is very uncomfortable to the child and
normally can be expected to give the child an engram which will have as its content the sexual
act and everything that was said.
Drug hypnosis is dangerous when one is trying to treat psychotics as has been
mentioned. And there are other reasons it is dangerous. Any operation under anaesthetic or any
drugging of a patient may bring about the keying-in of engrams. Here is the analyzer shut
down, there is the reactive bank open to be stirred by any comment made by the people around
the drugged subject.
Hypnotism itself is a condition in which engrams may be keyed-in which have never
before been restimulated: the glassy-eyed stare of the person who has been “too often
hypnotized,” the lack of will seen in people too often hypnotized, the dependence of the subject
upon the hypnotic operator, all these things stem from the keying-in of engrams. Any time the
body is rendered “unconscious” without physical pain, no matter how light the degree of
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“unconsciousness” is, even if it is only the lightness of weariness, an engram may be keyed-in.
And when “unconsciousness” is complicated by new physical pain, a new engram is formed
which may gather up with it an entire bundle of old engrams not hitherto keyed-in. Such a late
engram would be a “cross-engram” in that it crosses chains of engrams. And if such an engram
resulted in a loss of sanity, it would be called a “break-engram.”
There are some aspects to various drug “unconsciousnesses” which have been very
perplexing in the past. Psychotic women often maintain, after they are awakened from a
drugged sleep (and sometimes a hypnotic sleep), that they have been raped. Men occasionally
maintain that the operator has tried to perform a homosexual act upon them while they were
drugged. Although it occasionally occurs that people are raped after being drugged, the largest
number of such assertions are merely an aspect of the key-in mechanism. Almost any child has
been put through the prenatal discomfort of coitus. Often there was violent emotion other than
passion present. Such an engram may stay out of circuit for years until drugged
“unconsciousness” or some such thing keys it in. The patient goes to sleep without a keyed-in
engram; he wakes up with one. He tries to justify the strange sensations he has (and engrams
are timeless things unless they are arranged properly on the time track) and comes out with the
“solution” that he must have been raped.
Childhood rapes are very seldom the responsible cause in sexual aberration. They are
the key-in.
One looks at the conscious-level locks and sees sadness, mental anguish and
misfortune. Some of the experience there seems to be so terrible that it must certainly cause
aberration. But it does not. Man is a tough, resilient creature. These conscious-level
experiences are at best only guide-posts leading toward the actual seat of trouble, and that is not
known in any detailed way to the individual.
The engram is never “computed.” An example of this, on a lightly aberrative level, can
be found in a child’s punishment. If one examines a childhood where punishment has been
corporal and frequent, he begins to understand the utter futility of the pain-drive theory.
Punishment actually and literally and emphatically does no good of any kind whatsoever but
accomplishes quite the reverse, since it occasions a reactive revolt against the punishment
source and is likely to cause not only a disintegration of a mind but also a continual bedevilment
of the punishment source. Man reacts to fight sources of pain. When he stops fighting them he
is mentally broken and of little use to anyone, much less himself.
We take a case of a boy who was beaten with a hair-brush every time he was “bad.” In
researching this case the most searching inquiry fails to reveal any vivid recall of why he was
punished but only that he was punished. The progress of the event would go something like
this: activity more or less rational, fright at threatened punishment, punishment, sorrow over
punishment, renewed activity. The mechanics of the case showed the person to have been
engaged on some activity which, whether others would consider it so or not, was nevertheless
survival activity to him, giving him either pleasure or actual gains or even the assertion that he
could and would survive; the moment punishment is threatened old punishments go into
restimulation as minor engrams, resting usually on major engrams: this shuts down the
analytical power to some extent and the recording is now being done on a reactive level; the
punishment takes place, submerging analytical awareness so that the punishment records in the
engram bank only; the sorrow following is still in the period of analytical shut-down; the
analyzer gradually turns on; full awareness returns, and then activity on an analytical plane can
be resumed. All corporal punishment runs this gamut and all other punishments are, at best,
locks, following this same pattern with only the complete shut-down resulting from pain
missing.
If the analyzer wants this data for computation, it is not available. There is a reaction in
the reactive mind when the matter is approached. But there are five courses the reactive mind
can take with this data! And there is no guarantee and no method between land and sky of
knowing what course the reactive mind will take with the data except knowing the full engram
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bank -- and if that is known, the person could be cleared with a few more hours work and
would need no punishment.
These five ways of handling data make corporal punishment an unstable and unreliable
thing. A ratio exists which can be tested and proven in any man’s experience: A man is evil in
the direct ratio that destructiveness has been leveled against him. An individual (including those
individuals society is liable to forget as individuals: children) reacts against the punishment
source whether that source be parents or government. Anything which sets itself forward
against an individual as a punishment source will be considered in greater or lesser degree (as it
is in proportion to benefits) as a target for the reactions of the individual.
The little accidental milk glass upsets of children, that noise which just accidentally
occurs on the porch where the children are playing, that little accidental ruination of Papa’s hat
or Mama’s rug, these are often cold, calculated reactive mind actions against pain sources. The
analytical mind may temporize about love and affection and the need of three square meals. The
reactive mind runs off the lessons it has learned and devil take the meals.
If one turned an idiot loose on an adding machine to let him audit the company books
and let him prevent the auditor from touching equipment and data which has to be his if any
answers will be right, one would get very little in the way of correct answers. And if one kept
feeding the idiot and made him fat and powerful, the firm would sooner or later go to ruin. The
reactive mind is the idiot, the auditor is “I” and the firm is the organism. Punishment feeds the
idiot.
The helpless amazement of police about the “confirmed criminal” (and the police belief
in the “criminal type” and the “criminal mind”) comes about through this cycle. Police, for
some reason or other, like governments, have become identified with society. Take any one of
these “criminals” and clear him and the society regains a rational being of which it can use all it
can get. Keep up the punishment cycle and the prisons will get more numerous and more full.
The problem of the child lashing back at his parents by “negation” and the problem of
Jimmie the Cob blowing a bank guard apart in an armed robbery stem both from the same
mechanism. The child, examined on the “conscious-level,” is not aware of his causes but will
put forth various justifications for his conduct. Jimmie the Cob, waiting for this oh so very
sentient society to tie him down with straps in an electric chair and give him an electric shock
therapy which will cause him to cease and desist forever, examined for his causes, will pour
forth justifications to explain his life and conduct. The human mind is a pretty wonderful
computing machine. The reasons it can evolve for unreasonable acts have staggered one and all
and particularly social workers. Without knowing the cause and the mechanism, the chances of
drawing a correct conclusion by comparing all conducts available are as remote as winning at
fantan from a Chinese. Hence, the punishments have continued as the muddled answer to a
very muddled society.
There are five ways in which a human being reacts toward a source of danger. These
are also the five courses he can take on any given problem. And it might be said that this is
five-valued action.
The parable of the black panther* is appropriate here. Let us suppose that a particularly
black-tempered black panther is sitting on the stairs and that a man named Gus is sitting in the
living room. Gus wants to go to bed. But there is the black panther. The problem is to get
upstairs. There are five things that Gus can do about this panther: (1) he can go attack the black
panther; (2) he can run out of the house and flee the black panther; (3) he can use the back stairs
and avoid the black panther; (4) he can neglect the black panther; and (5) he can succumb to the
black panther.
These are the five mechanisms: attack, flee, avoid, neglect or succumb.
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All actions can be seen to fall within these courses. And all actions are visible in life. In
the case of a punishment course, the reactive mind can succumb, neglect, avoid, flee or attack
it. The action is dictated by a complexity of engrams and depends upon which one comes into
restimulation. This maelstrom of reaction generally resolves itself, however, in one of the five
courses. * In dianetics considerable slang has been developed by patients and dianeticists and
they call the “black panther mechanism” a neglect of the problem. One supposes this stems
from the ridiculousness of biting black panthers.
If a child is punished and thereafter obeys, he can be considered to have succumbed.
And the value of a child who will succumb to punishment is so slight that the Spartans would
long since have drowned him, for it means he has sunk into an apathy unless it so happens that
he himself has computed the idea, by-passing all reaction, that the thing for which he was
punished was not bright (he can’t be assisted in this computation if punishment is entered into
the reactive mind by the source trying to assist him). He can flee the punishment source, which
at least is not apathy but merely cowardice by popular judgment. He can neglect the matter
entirely and ignore the punishment source -- and would have been called a Stoic by the
ancients, but might be called merely dull-witted by his friends. He can avoid the punishment
source, which might give him the doubtful compliment of being sly or cunning or pandering.
Or he can attack the punishment source either by direct action or by upsetting or fouling the
person or the possessions of the source -- in which instance he would be called, on direct
action, a valiant fool, taking parental size into account, or in a less direct fashion he could be
called “covertly hostile” or could be said to be “negating”; as long as a human being will attack
as a response to a valid threat, he can be said to be in fair mental condition -- “normal” -- and a
child is said to be “just acting like any normal child.”
Enter punishment into the computation and it no longer computes. It is entirely different
in the case of “experience.” Life has plenty of painful experience waiting for any human being
without other human beings complicating the score. A person who is still unblocked in his
dynamics or who has been unblocked by dianetics can absorb the most amazing amount of
hammering in the business of living. Here, even when the reactive receives engrams as a result
of some of this experience, the analytical mind can continue to cope with the situation without
becoming aberrated in any way. Man is a tough, resilient, competent character. But when the
law of affinity begins to be broken and such a breaking of affinity gets into the reactive bank,
human beings, as antagonistic sources of non-survival, become a punishment source. If no
contra-survival engrams involving human beings are in the earlier (before 5 years) content of
the engram bank, pro-survival engrams are taken as a matter of course and are not severely
aberrative. In other words, it is the breaking of affinity with his fellows on an engramic level
which most solidly blocks the dynamics. Man’s affinity with Man is far more a scientific fact
than it is a poetic and idyllic idea.
The cycle, then, of life which will be “normal” (current average state) or psychotic is an
easy thing to draw. It begins with a large number of engrams before birth, it gathers more in
the dependent and rather helpless condition post-birth. Punishment of various kinds entering
now as locks key-in the engrams. New engrams which will involve the earlier ones enter. New
locks accumulate. Illness and aberrated action set in most certainly by the age of forty or fifty.
And death ensues sometimes afterwards.
Short of the optimum solution of clearing the engrams, there are several things which
can be done about aberration and psycho-somatic ills. That these methods are uncertain and of
only limited value does not mean that they will not occasionally meet with some astonishingly
beneficial responses.
Such methods can be classified under the headings of environmental change, education
and physical treatment. Taking factors out of the environment of an aberree or taking the
aberree out of the environment in which he is unhappy or ineffective can bring about some
astonishingly swift recoveries: this is valid therapy; it removes the restimulators from the
individual or takes the individual away from the restimulators. It is ordinarily quite hit-or-miss
and more miss than hit, and it will not remove all the restimulators by nine-tenths since the
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individual himself carries the bulk of these around with him or is compelled to contact them.
One is reminded of a case which had severe asthma. He had received it in a very severe birth
engram; his frantic parents carried him to every mountain asthma resort suggested and spent
tens of thousands of dollars in these jauntings. When this patient was cleared and the engram
refiled, it was discovered that the restimulator for his asthma was clean, cold air! The only
certainty in the environment approach is that a sickly child will recover when removed from
restimulative parents and taken where he is loved and feels safe -- for his sickness is the
inevitable result of restimulation of prenatal engrams by one or the other or both his parents.
Somewhere along the line there is probably a husband or a wife who has descended chronically
into the first two zones after marriage after having married pseudo-mother or pseudo-father or
pseudo-abortionist.
In the educational field, new data or enthusiasms may very well key-out engrams by
overbalancing the reactive mind in the light of a new analytical surge. If a man can simply be
convinced he has been fighting shadows or if he can be persuaded to hang his fears on some
indicated cause, whether that cause is true or not, he can be benefited. Sometimes he can be
“educated” into a strong faith in some deity or cult which will cause him to feel so invulnerable
that he rises above his engrams. Raising his survival potential in any way will raise his general
tone to a point where it is no longer on a par with the reactive bank. Giving him an education in
engineering or music, where he can receive a higher level of respect, will often defend him
from his restimulators. A rise to a position of esteem is actually a change of environment, but it
is also educational since he is now taught he is valuable. If a man can be made busy at a hobby
or work by personal or exterior education that it is good for him, another mechanism comes
into being -- the analytical mind becomes so engrossed that it takes to itself more and more
energy for its activity and begins to align with a new purpose.
Physical treatment resulting in improved physical condition will bring about hope or
change a man’s reactions by shifting him on his time track. It may key-out engrams.
These methods are valid therapy: they are also, in reverse, the things which cause
aberrations to manifest themselves. There are wrong ways to act and wrong things to do and
wrong ways to treat men which, in the light of what we know now, are criminal.
Thrusting a man into an environment which restimulates him and making him stay there
is a slice of murder. Making him keep an associate who is restimulative is bad: making a man
or a woman stay with a marriage partner who is restimulative is unworkable mores unless
dianetic therapy is used; making a child stay in a home where he is restimulated is most
certainly inhibitive, not only of his happiness but of his mental and physical development -- a
child should have many more rights about such things, more places to go.
On the physical therapy level anything as violent as surgery or exodontistry in the
psycho-somatic plane is utter barbarism in the light of dianetics. “Toothache” is normally
psycho-somatic. Organic illnesses enough to fill several catalogues are psycho-somatic. No
recourse to surgery of any kind should be had until it is certain that the ailment is not psycho-somatic
or that the illness will not diminish by itself if the potency of the reactive mind is
reduced. Mental-physical therapy is too ridiculous, with the source of aberration now a science,
to be seriously mentioned. For no thinking doctor or psychiatrist possessed of this information
would touch another electrode for electric shock therapy or even glance at a scalpel or ice-pick
to perform an operation on the pre-frontal lobes of the brain unless that doctor or psychiatrist is
himself so thoroughly aberrated that the act springs, not from any desire to heal but from the
most utter and craven sadism to which engrams can bring a man.*
* Many persons investigating the treatment of the mentally ill by psychiatrists and others in
charge of mental institutions are prompted, when they discover just what the pre-frontal
lobotomy, the trans-orbital leukotomy and electric shock actually do to patients, to revile the
psychiatrist as unworthy of trust and accuse him of using it to conduct vivisection experiments
on human beings. That any possible hope of recovery via dianetics may be gone for these
unfortunate patients in the majority of cases should not be blamed upon the psychiatrist and
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neuro-surgeon. These people have only followed their teachings in various universities and
have practiced such actions merely because they believed the problem of the mind could not be
solved by anyone. A witch-burning attitude toward these people is very far from the one
adopted by dianetics. Pointing to the fact that they have murdered minds which would
otherwise have recovered, labeling them “mind snatchers” and making a horror story out of
their actions is far from rational conduct. On the whole these people have been entirely sincere
in their efforts to help the insane. By contagion of aberration such people have been subjected
to enormous stresses in this work, having had their own engrams in continual restimulation.
They can be cleared and their experience is valuable. Legislation against them such as that
recently mentioned by a senator who was familiar with dianetics, horror stories about them in
newspapers and a general public antipathy as well as the medical doctor’s traditional distrust of
them cannot but bring about a disorderly condition. Dianetics is a newly discovered science and
is nonpartisan.
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CHAPTER X
Preventive Dianetics
There are many branches in dianetics. It is actually a family of sciences covered by a
single set of axioms. There is, for instance, Educational Dianetics, which contains the body of
organized knowledge necessary to train minds to their optimum efficiency and to an optimum
of skill and knowledge in the various branches of the works of Man. And there is Political
Dianetics, which embraces the field of group activity and organization to establish the optimum
conditions and processes of leadership and inter-group relations. And again there is Medical
Dianetics. And there is Social Dianetics. There are many such subdivisions which are sciences
within themselves guided by their own axioms.
We are dealing in this volume, actually, with basic dianetics and dianetic therapy as
applied to the individual. This is the most immediately important and the most valuable to the
individual.
But no book on dianetic therapy would be complete without a mention of a branch of
dianetics which, some say, is even more important to the race than the therapy. This is
Preventive Dianetics.
If one knows the cause of something, he can usually prevent the cause from going into
effect. The discovery and proof of Ronald Ross that the malaria germ was carried by the
mosquito makes it possible to prevent the disease from committing the ravages it once enjoyed
at the expense of Mankind. Similarly, when one knows the cause of aberration and psycho-somatic
illness, he can do a great deal toward preventing them.
While Preventive Dianetics is a large subject, infiltrating the fields of industry and
agriculture and other specialized activities of Man, its basic principle is the scientific fact that
engrams can be held to minimal content or prevented entirely with large gains in favor of mental
health and physical well-being as well as social adjustment.
The engram is actually a very simple thing: it is a moment when the analytical mind is
shut down by physical pain, drugs or other means, and the reactive bank is open to the receipt
of a recording. When that recording has verbal content, it becomes most severely aberrative.
When it contains antagonism on an emotional level, it becomes very destructive. When it is
intensely pro-survival in content it is most certainly capable of thoroughly deranging a life.
The engram, amongst other things, determines fate. The engram says that a man has to
fail to survive and so he contrives numerous ways to fail. The engram commands that he can
only experience pleasure amongst the members of another race and so he goes amongst them
and abandons his own. It commands that he must kill to live and so he kills. And far more
subtly, the engram weaves its way from incident to incident to cause the catastrophe which it
dictates.
A recent case was plotted out to have actually gone to enormous lengths to break his
arm, for with a broken arm he received the sympathy without which the engram said he could
not live. The plot covered three years and half a hundred apparently innocent incidents which,
when netted together, told the story.
The accident prone person is a case where the reactive mind commands accidents. He is
a serious menace in any society for his accidents are reactively intentional and they include the
destruction of other people who are innocent.
Drivers with several accidents on their records are generally accident prone. They have
engrams which command them to have accidents. When you have run a case, just one, you will
see how thoroughly and maliciously disposed this moronic thing, the reactive mind, can be
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about such things. Cleared drivers could have accidents only through two sources: (a)
mechanical failure and, more important, (b) because of accident prone people. The terrible and
awesome death toll taken by our automotive transport is almost all attributable to reactive mind
driving rather than learned response driving. The apathy of this society is measured by the fact
that it does not act severely to prevent all automotive accidents; just one broken windshield is
one too many: now that an answer is to hand action can take place.
The aberree in thousands of ways complicates the lives of others. Preventive Dianetics
makes it possible to sort out the aberree who is accident prone and bar him from activities
which will menace others. This is one general aspect of Preventive Dianetics. That the aberrees
so isolated can be cleared is another type of problem.
The other general aspect of Preventive Dianetics, and the more important, is the
prevention of engrams and modification of content both on the social and the individual scale.
On the social scale one would delete from the society the causes of aberration in that society as
if he were deleting engrams from the individual. In the same way, one can prevent the social
causes from occurring in the first place.
In the individual, the prevention of engrams is a very easy matter. Once the source of
aberration and illness is known, one can prevent the source from entering a life. If the source
has been known to enter, one can prevent the next step, in key-in. Of course, the final answer
in all this is therapy to a clearing, but there is one aspect of the source which is not so
answered.
The child cannot be safely cleared until he is at least five years of age and current
practice is to place this figure at about eight years. Improved address to the problem may reduce
this figure, but it cannot be reduced below the age of speech unless some one in the future
invents a catalyst which simply clears out the reactive mind without further treatment (not as
wild as it may sound). But just now and probably for a long time to come the child will remain
a problem to dianetics.
Childhood illness is chiefly derived from engrams. It is most likely to be severe before
the age of speech and the number of deaths within the first year of life, while medicine may
reduce them, is yet a serious thing.
Preventive Dianetics addresses this problem in two phases: first the prevention of
engrams, and second, the prevention of the key-in.
Taking the key-in first, there are two things which can be done to prevent it. The child
can be given a calm and harmonious atmosphere which is not restimulative or, if the child
appears to be restimulated despite kindly treatment, he can be removed to another environment
which will be minus the two most certain sources: his father and mother, and which will
contain a source of affection. The test of whether or not a child is restimulated, pre-speech or
post-speech, is very simple. Is he susceptible to illness? Does he eat well? Is he nervous? There
can be actual physical things wrong with the child, of course, but these are quickly established
by a doctor and they lie in the category of physical derangement.
Quarrels within the hearing of a child, loud noises, frantic conduct, drooling sympathy
when he is sick or hurt, these things are some of the key-in catalogue. These make a child ill
physically and aberrated mentally by keying-in his engrams. And nobody can say how many he
has!
The primary source of prevention lies in the field, oddly enough, of the regard in which
another person is held -- his mother.
It is not “biological love” which makes mother play such an enormous role in the life of
a human being. It is the simple mechanical truth that Mother is a common denominator to all the
child’s prenatals. The prenatal engram is far more serious than the post-natal. Any such engram
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a person has contains his mother or his mother and another person, but always his mother.
Therefore her voice, the things she says, the things she does, have an enormous and vast effect
upon the unborn child.
It is not true that emotion gets into a child through the umbilical cord as people always
suppose the moment they hear of prenatals. Emotion comes on another (more electrical than
physical) type of wave -- what type is a problem for structure. Therefore, anyone who is
emotional around a pregnant woman is communicating that emotion straight into the child. And
mother’s emotion is, in the same manner, so conducted to his reactive mind.
Whether or not the unborn child is “unanalytical” has no bearing on his susceptibility to
engrams. The prenatal engram is just another engram. Only when the child is actually struck or
hurt by high-blood pressure or orgasms or other sources of injury does he become
“unconscious.” When he becomes “unconscious” he receives all the percepts and words in the
area of the mother as engrams. Analytical power has nothing to do with engrams. If the child
is “unanalytical,” this does not predispose him to engrams. If the child is “unconscious” or hurt
it does.
The presence or absence of “analytical power” has nothing to do with whether or not
engrams are received.
Morning sickness, coughing, all monologuing (mother talking to herself), street noises,
household noises, etc., are all communicated to the “unconscious” child when he is injured.
And the child is very easily injured. He is not protected by formed bones and he has no
mobility. He is there: when something strikes him or presses him, his cells and organs are
injured. A simple experiment to demonstrate how mobility influences this is to lie down in bed
and place one’s head on a pillow. Then have somebody lean a hand on one’s forehead. As
there is no mobility, the pressure of the hand is far stronger than it would be if a hand were laid
on the forehead when one was standing. The tissue and the water around the child form very
slight buffers. In an injury amniotic fluid, as an incompressible medium, presses him, for it
cannot compress itself. The child’s situation is far from armored.
Mother’s act of tying her shoes, in the later stages of pregnancy, even may be severe on
the child. Mother’s strain when lifting heavy objects is particularly injurious. And mother’s
collision with objects like a table edge might well crush a baby’s head. The repair facilities of
the unborn child, as mentioned elsewhere, are far above anything ever before discovered. The
child may have its head crushed but the blueprint is still there and the building materials and
repair can be made. So it is not a case of the child being “all right” just because it can live
through almost anything. It is a case of whether or not these injuries are going to have high
aberrative value as engrams.
Attempted abortion is very common. And remarkably lacking in success. The mother,
every time she injures the child in such a fiendish fashion, is actually penalizing herself.
Morning sickness is entirely engramic, so far as can be discovered, since clears have not so far
experienced it during their own pregnancies. And the act of vomiting because of pregnancy is
via contagion of aberration. Actual illness generally results only when mother has been
interfering with the child either by douches or knitting needles or some such thing. Such
interference causes the mother to become ill and, from an actual physical standpoint, is much
harder on the mother than on the child. Morning sickness evidently gets into a society because
of these interferences such as attempted abortion and, of course, injury.
The cells know when pregnancy occurs. The reactive mind is acquainted with the fact
before the analyzer by process of organic sensation, since the endocrine system is altered.
Hence, the mother’s discovery of pregnancy has little to do with whether or not she was sick
before the discovery.
This entire field has been a subject of considerable research in dianetics. Much more
research must be done. These conclusions are tentative. But the conclusion that the engram is
104.105
received and that it is as violent as its content, rather than its actual pain, is a scientific fact and
not in any way a theory. It is as real a discovery as gravity.
Preventing these engrams is the first consideration. Preventing them from having any
content is the second. Women who lead peasant lives, doing heavy labor, are subject to all
manner of accident. Perhaps such accidents cannot be prevented because of the purpose these
women serve in the society. But when it is known that any injury to the mother can create an
engram in the unborn child, it should be the concern of all those present during such an injury,
including the mother, to maintain a complete and utter silence. Any remark is aberrative in an
engram. Even such a statement as “You can remember this when in dianetic therapy,” made
toward an unborn child, installs an engram so that every word in this statement means a
physical pain just where he received it at the time, and in the future “dianetic therapy” will be
restimulative to him.
The doctor, punching around to find out if mother is pregnant, may say, “Well, it’s
hard to tell this early.” The patient in dianetic therapy years later will return into the vicinity of
this incident only to draw a blank until the dianeticist suddenly guesses the content from how
the patient describes his reactions. If the doctor is very tough and says, “You had better take
good care of yourself, Mrs. Jones. If you don’t, you’ll be mighty sick!” the child,
“unconscious” from the examination no matter how mild it is, will get a mild hypochondria
when the engram keys-in and be very concerned over his health.
If the husband uses language during coitus, every word of it is going to be engramic. If
the mother is beaten by him, that beating and everything he says and that she says will become
part of the engram.
If she does not want the child and he does, the child will later react toward him as an
ally and perhaps have a nervous breakdown when the father dies. If she wants the child and he
doesn’t, the ally computation is reversed.
This is true when abortion is threatened or attempted providing the threat is contained in
an engram.
Should the mother be injured and the father be highly solicitous, the engram has this for
content and the child has a sympathy engram. The way to survive, then, is to be pathetic when
injured, and even see to it that one is injured.
A woman who is pregnant should be given every consideration by a society which has
any feeling for its future generations. If she falls, she should be helped -- but silently. She must
not be expected to carry heavy things. And she should not have coitus forced upon her. For
every coital experience is an engram in the child during pregnancy.
An astonishing number of pregnancies must take place which are never realized. The
violence of coitus, the use of douches and jellies (used because the woman is still contracepting
and does not know she is already pregnant), straining bowel movements, falls and accidents
must account for a large number of miscarriages which come about sometime around the first
period after conception. For the zygote and embryo forms of the child have a rather frail grip on
existence and are very severely injured by things the mother would consider nothing. Once
past the first missed period, the chances of miscarriage rapidly grow less and only when the
child is a genetic monstrosity or when abortion attempts are made can a miscarriage be expected
to take place. The monstrosities are so small a percentage that they are negligible as a
possibility.
The amniotic sac can be pierced many times and repeatedly and emptied of all water
after the first missed period and the child can still survive. Twenty or thirty abortion attempts
are not uncommon in the aberree and in every attempt the child could have been pierced through
the body or brain.
105.106
The child before birth does not depend upon the standard senses for its perceptions.
Engrams are not memories but cellular level recordings. Therefore, the child needs no eardrums
to record an engram. Cases are on hand where whatever hearing mechanism the unborn child
had must have been temporarily destroyed by an abortion attempt. And the engram was still
recorded. The cells rebuilt the apparatus which was to be the source of sound in the standard
banks and stored their own data in the reactive bank.
Release of such engrams means a restoration of rationality to the individual far above
the current norm and a stability and well-being greater than Man ever thought Man possessed.
These engrams have been confirmed by taking the data from a child, from the mother and the
father, and all data checked. So we are dealing here with scientific facts which, no matter how
startling, are nevertheless true.
The mother, then, should be extremely gentle on herself during pregnancy and those
around her should be entirely informed of the necessity for silence after any jar or injury. And
in view of the fact that it is not possible to tell when a woman has become pregnant and in view
also of the high potentiality of aberration in the zygote and embryo engrams, it is obvious that
society must better its ways toward women if the future health of the child is to be preserved.
The woman has to some degree become considered less valuable in this society than in
other societies and times. She is expected to be in competition with men. Such a thing is
nonsense. A woman has as high a plane of activity as man. He cannot compete with her any
more than she can compete with him in the fields of structure and vigorous activity. Much of
the social maelstrom now in existence has as its hub the failure to recognize the important role
of the woman as a woman and the separation of the fields of women and men.
The changes which will come about in the next twenty years need no urging here. But
with the recent discoveries in photosynthesis which should secure enough food to feed Man
better and at less cost, the importance of birth control dwindles. The morality standards have
already changed, no matter what moralists do to try to block the change. And woman,
therefore, can be freed of many of her undesirable chains.
In the custody of Man is the current world and its activity and structure. In the charge of
woman is the care of the person of the human being and his children. Almost sole custodian of
tomorrow’s generation, she is entitled to much more respect than her chattel-period of the past
gave her.
It is not, then, any wild Utopian thought that woman can be placed above the level
hitherto occupied. And so she must be placed if the childhood of tomorrow’s generation is to
reach any high standard, if homes are to be peaceful and unharassed and if society is to
advance.
Preventive Dianetics, in the sphere of the home, must place emphasis on the woman in
order to safeguard the child.
As any first step, a mother should be cleared, for any mother who attempts an abortion
is blocked across the second dynamic and any block menaces her health as well as her
happiness. An antipathy for children has been found to accompany sexual aberration.
Preventive Dianetics, then, on the level of the individual, asks for cleared parents and
then precaution against the aberrating of the child, and further precaution against the keying-in
of any aberration the child might have received.
To do this is very easy. Maintain silence in the presence of injury. Do what has to be
done for the injure ill and do it in silence. Maintain silence in the presence of birth to save both
the sanity of the mother and the child and safeguard the home to which they will go. And the
maintaining of silence does not mean a volley of “Sh’s,” for those make stammerers.
106.107
In a wider field, the maintenance of silence around any “unconscious” or injured person
is second in importance only to preventing the “unconsciousness” in the first place.
Say nothing and make no sound around an “unconscious” or injured person. To speak,
no matter what is said, is to threaten his sanity. Say nothing while a person is being operated
upon. Say nothing when there is a street accident. Don’t talk!
Say nothing around a sick child or an injured child. Smile, appear calm, but say
nothing. Actions do not speak louder than words but actions are all that can be done around the
sick and injured unless one has an active desire to drive them into neurosis or insanity or, at
best, to give them a future illness.
And above all, say nothing around a woman who has been struck or jarred in any way.
Help her. If she speaks, don’t answer. Just help her. You have no idea of whether she is
pregnant or not.
And it is a remarkable fact, a scientific fact, that the healthiest children come from the
happiest mothers. Birth, for one thing, in a cleared mother, is a very mild affair. Only birth
engrams in the mother made it hard. A cleared mother needs no anaesthetic. And that is well
because the anaesthetic makes a dazed child and the engram, when it reacts, makes him appear
a dull child. A happy woman has very little trouble. And even a few engrams, which arrive
despite all precautions, are nothing if the general tone of the mother is happy.
Woman, you have a right and a reason to demand good treatment.
107.108
Book Three
THERAPY
108.109
CHAPTER I
The Mind’s Protection
The mind is a self-protecting mechanism. Short of the use of drugs as in narco-synthesis,
shock, hypnotism or surgery, no mistake can be made by an auditor* which cannot
be remedied either by himself or by another auditor. Those things which are stressed, then, in
this book, are ways to accomplish therapy as swiftly as possible with minimal errors; for errors
take time. Auditors are going to make errors, that is inevitable. If they make the same error
repeatedly, they had better get some one to guide them through therapy.
There are probably thousands of ways to get into trouble with mental healing, but all
these ways can be classed in these groups: (1) use of shock or surgery on the brain; (2) use of
strong drugs; (3) use of hypnosis as such; and (4) trying to cross-breed dianetics with older
forms of therapy.
The mind will not permit itself to be seriously overloaded so long as it can retain partial
awareness of itself; it can only be overloaded when its awareness is reduced to a point where it
cannot evaluate anything: it can then be thoroughly upset. Dianetic reverie leaves a patient fully
aware of everything which is taking place and with full recall of everything which has
happened. Types of therapy which do not do this are possible and useful but they must be
approached with the full knowledge that they are not foolproof. Dianetics, then, uses the
reverie for the majority of its work and using the reverie an auditor cannot possibly get himself
into any trouble from which he cannot extricate himself and the patient. He is working with an
almost foolproof mechanism as long as the mind retains some awareness: a radio or a clock or
an electric motor are far more susceptible to injury in the hands of a workman than the human
mind. The mind was built to be as tough as possible. It will be found that it is difficult to get it
into situations which make it uncomfortable and impossible, with the reverie, to embroil it
enough to cause neurosis or insanity.
In the U.S. infantry manual there is a line about decision: “Any plan, no matter how
poorly conceived, if boldly executed is better than inaction.”
In dianetics, any case, no matter how serious, no matter how unskilled the auditor, is
better opened than left closed. It is better to start therapy if it is to be interrupted after two hours
of work than not to start therapy at all. It is better to contact an engram than to leave an engram
uncontacted even if the result is physical discomfort for the patient -- for that engram will not
thereafter possess as much power and the discomfort will gradually abate.
This is scientific fact. The mechanism dianetics uses is an ability of the brain which
Man as a whole did not know he had. It is a process of thought which everyone possesses
inherently and which was evidently meant to be used in the overall process of thinking but
which, by some strange oversight, Man has never before discovered. Once a person has
learned that he possesses just this one new faculty, he is better able to think than he was before,
and he can learn this faculty in ten minutes.
Further, when one approaches an engram with this faculty (which, when intensified, is
the reverie) some of that engram’s sub-level connections are broken and the aberrative factors
no longer have as much force either in the physical or mental spheres. Further, the knowledge
that there is a solution to mental ills is a stabilizing factor.
Approaching an engram with the reverie is very far from the same as restimulating the
engram exteriorly as is done in life. The engram is a powerful and vicious character only so
long as it is untapped. In place and active it can be restimulated to cause innumerable mental
and physical ills. But approaching it with reverie is approaching it on a new circuit, one that
disarms it. The power of the engram is partly the fear of the unknown -- knowing brings
stability by itself.
109.110
Do not think that you will not make patients uncomfortable. That is not true. The
auditor’s work, when it taps engrams which cannot be lifted, may cause the patient to have
headaches, various aches and pains and even mild physical illness, even when the work is
carefully done. But life has been doing this to the patient on a much grander scale for years and
no matter how badly the case is mauled around, no matter how many aberrations spring into
view to plague the patient for a day or two, none are as serious as those which can be
occasioned by the environment acting upon the untapped engram.
The auditor can do everything backwards, upside down and utterly wrong and the
patient will still be better, provided only that he does not try to use drugs before he has worked
a few cases, that he does not use hypnotism as hypnotism and he does not try to cross dianetics
with some older therapy. He can use drugs in dianetics if he knows his dianetics and if he has
medical concurrence. He can use all the techniques of hypnotism so long as he is thoroughly
experienced with dianetics.
And once he has used dianetics, he will not fall back to mystic efforts to heal minds. In
short, the point which is offered here is that so long as the auditor takes a relatively simple case
at first to see how the mechanisms of the mind work and uses only the reverie he cannot get
into trouble. There will be those, certainly, who believe they are so vastly experienced in tom-tom
beating or gourd rattling that they won’t give dianetics a chance to work as dianetics but
will sail in and begin to plague the patient about “penis-envy” or make him repent his sins, but
the patient who starts to get this will be smart to simply change positions from the couch to the
auditor’s chair and clear up some of the aberrations of the auditor before work proceeds.
Anybody who has read this book once through and procured a patient with sonic recall
for a trial effort will know more about the mind, in those actions, than he has ever known
before, and he will be more skilled and able to treat the mind than anyone attempting to do so,
regardless of reputation, a very short while ago. This does not mean that men who have had
experience with mental patients will not, knowing dianetics (knowing dianetics) have an edge
on those who do not realize some of the foibles of which Man in an aberrated state is capable.
And on the other hand it does not mean that some engineer or lawyer or cook with a few
dianetic cases under his belt, will not be more skilled than all other practitioners of whatever
background or kind. In this case, the sky is no limit.
One could not say, offhand, that an able hypnotist or an able psychologist, ready and
willing to jettison and unlearn yesterday’s mistakes, is not better prepared to practice dianetics.
In the field of psycho-somatic medicine the medical doctor, with a vast fund of experience in
healing, might very well be far and above other auditors in dianetic work. But it is not
necessarily the case, for in research it has been proven that men and women with most unlikely
professional backgrounds have suddenly become auditors superior in skill to those in fields
you might suspect were more closely allied. Engineers particularly are excellent material and
make excellent auditors. Again, dianetics is not being released to a profession, for no
profession could encompass it. It is insufficiently complicated to warrant years of study in
some university. It belongs to Man and it is doubtful if anyone could manage to gain a corner
on it for it does not fall within any legislation of any kind in any place and if dianetics were
legislated into a licensed profession, then it is to be feared that listening to stories and jokes and
personal experience would also have to be legislated into a profession. Such laws would put all
men of good will who lend a sympathetic ear to a friend’s troubles inside the barbed wire.
Dianetics is not psychiatry. It is not psycho-analysis. It is not psychology. It is not personal
relations. It is not hypnotism. It is a science of mind and needs about as much licensing and
regulation as the application of the science of physics. Those things which are legislated against
are a matter of law because they may in some way injure individuals or society.
Legislation exists about psycho-analysis in some three states in the Union, legislation
against or about psychiatry exists everywhere. If an auditor wishes to constitute himself a
psychiatrist with the power of vivisecting human brains, if he wants to constitute himself a
doctor and administer drugs and medicines, if he wants to practice hypnotism and pour
suggestions into a patient, then he must square it with psychiatry, medicine and the local laws
110.111
about hypnotism, for he has entered other fields than dianetics. In dianetics hypnotism is not
used, no brains are operated upon and no drugs are given unless the local medico is part of the
staff. Dianetics is not in any way covered by legislation anywhere for no law can prevent one
man sitting down and telling another man his troubles, and if anyone wants a monopoly on
dianetics, be assured that he wants it for reasons which have to do not with dianetics but with
prof it. There are not enough psychiatrists in the country to begin to staff the mental
institutions.
Surely this generation, particularly with all the iatrogenic field is the treatment of the
insane by definition and that has nothing to do with thee and me. In psychology, dianetics
drops into line without disturbing anything concerned with staffs or research or teaching posts,
for psychology is simply the study of the psyche and now that there exists a science of the
psyche it can go ahead with a will.
Thus dianetics is the enemy of none and dianetics falls utterly outside all existing
legislation, none of which anticipated or made any provision for a science of mind.
111.112
CHAPTER II
Release or Clear
The object of dianetic therapy is to bring about a release or a clear.
A release (noun) is an individual from whom major stress and anxiety have been
removed by dianetic therapy.
A clear (noun) is an individual who, as a result of dianetic therapy, has neither active
nor potential psycho-somatic illness or aberration.
To clear (verb) is to release all the physical pain and painful emotion from the life of an
individual or, as in Political Dianetics -- a society. The result of this will bring about persistence
in the four dynamics, optimum analytical ability for the individual and, with that, all recall. The
experience of his entire life is available to the clear and he has all his inherent mental ability and
imagination free to use it. His physical vitality and health are markedly improved and all
psycho-somatic illnesses have vanished and will not return. He has greater resistance to actual
disease. And he is adaptable to and able to change his environment. He is not “adjusted”; he is
dynamic. His ethical and moral standards are high, his ability to seek and experience pleasure is
great. His personality is heightened and he is creative and constructive. It is not yet known how
much longevity is added to a life in the process of clearing, but in view of the automatic
rebalancing of the endocrine system, the lowered incidence of accident and the improvement of
general physical tone, it is most certainly raised.
A release is an individual from whom have been released the current or chronic mental
and physical difficulties and painful emotion. The value of a release, when compared to a clear,
may not at first thought be considered great, but when one understands that a release is usually
in excess of the contemporary norm in mental stability, it can be seen that the condition is not
without great value.
As a standard of comparison, a clear is to the contemporary norm as the contemporary
norm is to a contemporary institutional case. The margin is wide and it would be difficult to
exaggerate it. A clear, for instance, has complete recall of everything which has ever happened
to him or anything he has ever studied. He does mental computations, such as those of chess,
for example, which a normal would do in a half an hour, in ten or fifteen seconds. He does not
think “vocally” but spontaneously. There are no demon circuits in his mind except those which
it might amuse him to set up -- and break down again -- to care for various approaches to
living. He is entirely self-determined. And his creative imagination is high. He can do a swift
study of anything within his intellectual capacity, which is inherent, and the study would be the
equivalent to him of a year or two of training when he was “normal.” His vigor, persistence
and tenacity to life are very much higher than anyone has thought possible.
The objection that it is dangerous to create too many clears in a society is a thoughtless
one. The clear is rational. The acts which damage a society are irrational. That a handful of
clears could probably handle any number of “normals” is within reason, but that the clear
would handle them to their detriment is unreasonable. The more clears a society possessed the
more chance that society would have to prosper. That a clear is unambitious is not proven out
by scientific observation, for the curve of dwindling ambition follows the curve of reducing
rationality; and those who have been cleared have proven the matter by reactivating all their
skills toward goals they had once desired but had begun to consider unattainable when
“norms.”* That a clear is in some degree separated from the “norm” is attributable to the gulf
between their respective mental abilities, for he has achieved solutions and conclusions before
the “norm” has begun to form an idea of what to conclude; this does not make a clear
intolerable to the “norm,” for the clear has none of that superiority attitude which is actually a
product of engrams. This is a quick glance at the state of being clear, but the state cannot be
described; it has to be experienced to be appreciated.
112.113
A release is a somewhat variable quantity. Anyone well advanced on the road to clear is
a release. There is no comparison between a clear and anything Man has before believed
obtainable and there is no comparison between clearing and any therapy hitherto practiced. In
the case of the release only is there a basis of comparison between dianetics and past therapies
such as “psycho-analysis” and any other. A release can be effected in a few weeks. The
resulting condition will be at least equivalent to that following two years of “psycho-analysis”
with the difference that the release has a guarantee of permanent results and no guarantee of
success has ever been made by “psycho-analysis.” A release does not relapse into any pattern
which has been relieved.
These are the two goals of the dianetic auditor: clear and release. It is not known at this
writing how long is the average time to raise the institutionally insane into the neurotic level: it
has been done in two hours, it has been done in ten and in some cases it has required two
hundred.*
The dianetic auditor should determine beforehand in any case whether he wishes to
attempt a release or a clear. He can achieve either with anyone not organically insane (missing
or seared portions of the brain bringing about insanity, mainly genetic or iatrogenic and
relatively rare except in institutions). But he should make an estimate of the amount of time he
can invest in any one person and regulate his intention accordingly and announce it to his
patient. The two goals are slightly different. In a release one does not attempt entrance into
phases of the case which will or may bring about a necessity of long work and gives his
attention to the location and release of emotional charge. In clearing the auditor gives his
attention to the location of the basic-basic engram, the discharge of emotion and the entire
engram bank.
There is a third goal which could be considered a sub-head of a release.
This is an assist: it is done after injury, or illness following the injury, or illness just
sustained, in order to promote more rapid recovery: to assist the body in its rehabilitation after
injury or illness. This is specialized therapy which will probably be practiced commonly
enough but is of primary benefit to the medical doctor who, with it, can save lives and speed
healing by releasing the engram of that particular illness or injury, thus removing the various
engram conceptions which the furtherance of the injury restimulates. Any dianetic auditor can
practice this. The assist has about the same level of usefulness as a faith healing miracle which
would work every time.
Estimations of the amount of time the case will require are difficult to attain with any
accuracy greater than 50% and it should be understood by the patient that the time in therapy is
variable. It depends in a measure upon the skill of the auditor, the number of unsuspected
engrams never hitherto reactivated, and the amount of restimulation to which the patient is
subject during therapy. Therefore the auditor should not be optimistic in estimating time but
should make his patient understand that greater or lesser time may be consumed in the therapy.
Any person who is intelligent and possessed of average persistency and who is willing
to read this book thoroughly should be able to become a dianetic auditor. When he has cleared
two or three cases he will have learned far more and understood far more than is contained in
this book, for there is nothing which develops an understanding of a machine like handling it in
action. This is the instruction book, the machine in question is ready to hand wherever there
are men. Contrary to superstition about the mind, it is almost impossible to permanently injure
the mechanism. It can be done with an electric shock or a scalpel or an ice-pick, but it is almost
impossible to do it with dianetic therapy.
113.114
CHAPTER III
The Auditor’s Role
The purpose of therapy and its sole target is the removal of the content of the reactive
engram bank. In a release, the majority of emotional stress is deleted from this bank. In a clear,
the entire content is removed.
The application of a science is an art. That is true of any science. The efficacy of its
application depends upon the understanding, skill and ability of whomever applies it. The
chemist has a science of chemistry and yet the profession of being a chemist is an art. The
engineer may have behind him the precision of all the physical sciences and yet the practice of
engineering is an art.
Certain rules of procedure can be laid down after the basic axioms of a science are
understood. Beyond those rules of procedure is the understanding, skill and ability necessary
to application.
Dianetics is extremely simple. This does not mean that cases cannot be extremely
complicated. To cover one case for each kind of case in this book would necessitate two billion
cases and that would only encompass the current population. For each man is a great deal
different from every other man. His inherent personality is different. His composite of
experience is different. And his dynamics are of different strengths. The only constant is the
mechanism of the reactive engram bank and that alone does not vary. The content of that bank
is different from man to man both in quantity and intensity but the mechanism of operation of
the bank and therefore the basic mechanisms of dianetics are constant from man to man, and
were in every age and will be in every future age until Man evolves into another organism.
The target is the engram. It is also the target of the patient’s analytical mind and the
patient’s dynamics as he tries to live his life: it is the target of the auditor’s analytical mind and
the auditor’s dynamics. So bracketed and salvoed it gives up its store of engrams.
This should be extremely plain to any auditor: the amount he relaxes from the position
of auditor and forgets the target, he garners trouble which will consume his time. The moment
he makes the error of thinking that the person, the analytical mind or the dynamics of the patient
are resisting, trying to stop therapy, or giving up, the auditor has made the fundamental and
primary error in the practice of dianetics. Almost anything that goes wrong can be traced back
to this error. It cannot be too emphatically stated that the analytical mind and the dynamics of
the patient never, never, never resist the auditor. The auditor is not there to be resisted. He has
no concern with resistance from anything except the patient’s (and sometimes his own)
engrams.
The auditor is not there as the patient’s driver or adviser. He is not there to be
intimidated by the patient’s engrams or be frightened by their aspects. He is there to audit and
only to audit. If he feels that he is called upon to be lordly to the patient, then the auditor had
better change chair for couch because he has a case of authoritarianism coming into view. The
word auditor is used, not “operator” or “therapist,” because it is a cooperative effort between
the auditor and the patient, and the law of affinity is at work.
The patient cannot see his own aberrations. That is one of the reasons why the auditor
is there. The patient needs to be bolstered to face the unknowns of his life. That is another
reason the auditor is there. The patient would not dare address the world which has gotten
inside him and turn his back upon the world that is outside him unless he has a sentry. That is
another reason the auditor is there.
114.115
The auditor’s job is to safeguard the person of the patient during therapy, to compute
the reasons why the patient’s mind cannot reach into the engram bank, to strengthen the
patient’s nerve and to get those engrams.
There is a three-way case of affinity at work this moment. I am in affinity with the
auditor: I am telling him all that has been discovered and is in practice in dianetics and I want
him to succeed. The auditor is in affinity with the patient: he wants the patient to attack
engrams. The patient is in affinity with the auditor because, with minimal work, that patient is
going to get better and with persistence lent him by the auditor, plus his own, will become a
release or a clear. There are even more affinities at work, a vast network of them. This is a
cooperative endeavor.
The engram bank is the target, not the patient. If the patient swears and moans and
weeps and pleads, those are engrams talking. After a while the engrams that make him swear
and moan and weep and plead will be discharged and refiled. The patient, in whatever state,
knows full well that the action taken is necessary. If the auditor is short of rationality that he
mistakes this swearing or moaning as something directed at him personally, that auditor had
better change places with the patient and undergo therapy.
The only thing which resists is the engram! When it is being restimulated it impinges
against the patient’s analyzer, tends to reduce analytical power, and the patient exhibits a
modified dramatization. Any auditor with two brain cells to click together will never be in any
slightest danger of his person at the hands of the pre-release or pre-clear. If the auditor wants to
use hypnotism and try to run late physically painful engrams such as operations when early
ones are available, he may find himself targeted. But then he has done something very wrong.
If the auditor suddenly gets supermoral and lectures the patient, he may get involved, but again
he has done something very wrong. If the auditor snarls and snaps at the patient, he may get
targeted, but once more a fundamental error has been made.
The target is the engram bank. It is the auditor’s job to attack the pre-clear’s engram
bank. It is the pre-clear’s job to attack that bank. To attack the pre-clear is to permit his engram
bank to attack the pre-clear.
We know that there are five methods of handling an engram. Four of them are wrong.
To succumb to an engram is apathy, to neglect one is carelessness, but to avoid or flee from
one is cowardice. Attack and only attack resolves the problem. It is the duty of the auditor to
make very sure that the pre-clear keeps attacking engrams, not the auditor or the exterior world.
If the auditor attacks the pre-clear, that’s bad gunnery and very poor logic.
The engram bank is best attacked primarily by discharging its emotional charge
anywhere it can be contacted. After that it is best attacked by finding out what the pre-clear, in
reverie, thinks would happen to him if he got well, got better, found out, etc. And then it is
most and always most important, in any way possible, to contact the primary moment of pain
or unconsciousness in the patient’s life. This is basic-basic. Once an auditor has basic-basic,
the case will swiftly resolve. If the preclear’s reactive mind is suppressing basic-basic, then the
auditor should discharge more reactive emotion, discover the computation now in force, and try
again. He will eventually get basic-basic. That’s important. And that is all that is important in a
pre-clear.
In the pre-release (patient working toward release only) the task is to discharge emotion
and as many early engrams as will present themselves easily. The reduction of locks may be
included in pre-release; but only when they lead to basic-basic should locks be touched in a
preclear.
There are three levels of healing. The first is getting the job done efficiently. Below that
is making the patient comfortable. Below that is sympathy. In short, if you can do nothing for a
man with a broken back, you can make him comfortable. If you can’t even make him
comfortable, you can sympathize with him.
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The second and third echelons above are entirely unwarranted in dianetics. The job can
be done efficiently. Making the patient comfortable is a waste of time. Giving him sympathy
may snarl up the entire case, for his worst engrams will be sympathy engrams and sympathy
may restimulate them out of place. The auditor who indulges in “hand-patting,” no matter how
much it seems to be indicated, is wasting time and slowing down the case. Undue roughness is
not indicated. A friendly, cheerful, optimistic attitude will take care of everything. A pre-clear
sometimes needs a grin. But he has already had more “hand-patting” than the analyzer has been
able to compute. His chronic psycho-somatic illness contains sympathy in its engram.
The next thing the auditor should know and live is the AUDITOR’S CODE. This may
sound like something from “When Knighthood Was in Flower” or the “Thirteen Rituals for
Heavenly Bliss and Nirvana,” but unless it is employed by the auditor on his patients, the
auditor will have some heavy slogging. This code is not for the comfort of the pre-clear; it is
exclusively for the protection of the auditor. The AUDITOR’S CODE should never be
violated. Practice in dianetics has demonstrated that violation of the AUDITOR’S CODE alone
can interrupt cases.
The auditor should be courteous in his treatment of all pre-clears.
The auditor should be kind, not giving way to any indulgence of cruelty toward pre-clears,
nor surrendering to any desire to punish.
The auditor should be quiet during therapy, not given to talk beyond the absolute
essentials of dianetics during an actual session.
The auditor should be trustworthy, keeping his word when given, keeping his
appointments in schedules and his commitments to work and never giving forth any
commitment of any kind which he has any slightest reason to believe he cannot keep.
The auditor should be courageous, never giving ground or violating the fundamentals
of therapy because a pre-clear thinks he should. The auditor should be patient in his working,
never becoming restless or annoyed by the pre-clear, no matter what the pre-clear is doing or
saying.
The auditor should be thorough, never permitting his plan of work to be swayed or a
charge to be avoided.
The auditor should be persistent, never giving up until he has achieved results.
The auditor should be uncommunicative, never giving the patient any information
whatsoever about his case, operates more or less automatically on this code. Dianetics is a
parallel to thought, since it follows the natural laws of thought. What works in dianetics works
as well in life.
Various conditions ensue when any of the above are violated. All violations slow
therapy and cause the auditor more work. All violations come back to the detriment of the
auditor.
For instance, in the last, it is not part of the auditor’s work to inform the pre-clear of
anything. As soon as he starts doing so, the pre-clear promptly hooks the auditor into the
circuit as the source of information and so avoids engrams.
The auditor will see in progress the most violent and disturbing human emotions. He
may be moved to sympathy, but if he is, he has overlooked something and hindered therapy:
whenever an emotion shows, it is an emotion which will shortly be history. Whatever
gyrations the pre-clear may go through, however much he may move or wrestle around, the
auditor must keep firmly in mind that every moan or gyration is one step closer to the goal. For
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why be frightened or waste sympathy about something which, when it has been recounted a
few times will leave a pre-clear happier?
If the auditor becomes frightened and pulls that error of all errors when a pre-clear
begins to shake, “Come up to present time!” he can be sure that the pre-clear will have a couple
of bad days and that the next time the auditor wants to enter that engram it will be blocked.
If an auditor assumes the state of mind that he can sit and whistle while Rome burns
before him and be prepared to grin about it, then he will do an optimum job. The things at
which he gazes, no matter how they look, no matter how they sound, are solid gains. It’s the
quiet, orderly patient who is making few gains. This does not mean that the auditor is trying for
nothing but violence, but it does mean that when he gets it he can be cheerful and content that
one more engram has lost its charge.
The task of auditing is rather much a shepherd’s task, herding the little sheep, the
engrams, into the pen for slaughter. The pre-clear isn’t under the auditor’s orders but the pre-clear,
if the case runs well, will do whatever the auditor wants with these engrams because the
analytical mind and the dynamics of the pre-clear want that job done. The mind knows how the
mind operates.
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CHAPTER IV
Diagnosis
One of the most important contributions of dianetics is the resolution of the problem of
diagnosis in the field of aberration. Hitherto there have been almost unlimited classifications;
further there has been no optimum standard. As one researches in the field of psychiatric texts,
he finds wide disagreement in classification and continual complaint that classification is very
complex and lacking in usefulness. Without an optimum goal of conduct or mental state and
without knowledge of the cause of aberration, catalogues of descriptions alone were possible
and these were so involved and contradictory that it was nearly impossible to sharply assign to
a psychotic or neurotic any classification which will lead to an understanding of his case.**
The main disability in this classification system was that the classification did not lead to a cure,
for there was no standard treatment and there was no optimum state to indicate when treatment
was at end; and as there was no cure for aberration or psycho-somatic illness, there could be no
classification which would indicate the direction which was to be taken or what could
uniformly be expected of a case.
This is no criticism of past efforts surely, but it is a source of relief to know that the
classification of aberration is unnecessary along such complicated lines as have been used and
that the cataloguing of psycho-somatic ills, while necessary to the physician, is unimportant to
the auditor. In the evolution of the science of dianetics there were several stages of
classification until it finally became clear that the label on a pathological condition should only
be whatever the auditor had to overcome to achieve cure. This system, as now evolved through
practice, makes it possible for the auditor to “diagnose” without any more knowledge than is
contained in this chapter and his own future experience.
The number of aberrations possible is the number of combinations of words possible in
a language as contained in engrams. In other words, if a psychotic thinks he is God, he has an
engram which says he is God. If he is worried about poison in his hash, he has an engram
which tells him he may get poison in his hash. If he is certain he may be “fired” from his job
any moment even though he is competent and well-liked, he has an engram which tells him he
is about to be “fired.” If he thinks he is ugly, he has an engram about being ugly. If he is afraid
of snakes or cats, he has engrams which tell him to fear snakes and cats. If he is sure he has to
buy everything he sees, despite his income, he has an engram which tells him to buy
everything he sees. And in view of the fact that anyone not released or cleared has upwards of
two or three hundred engrams and as these engrams contain a most remarkable assortment of
language and as he may choose one of five ways of handling any one of these engrams, the
problem of aberration is of no importance to the auditor except where it slows therapy.
Most aberrated people talk in a large measure out of their engrams. Whatever the
chronic patter of the individual may be, his rage patter, his apathy patter, his general attitude
toward life, this patter is contained in engrams wherever it departs even in the slightest degree
from complete rationality. The man who “cannot be sure,” who “does not know” and who is
skeptical of everything, is talking out of engrams. The man who is certain “it cannot be true”
that “it isn’t possible,” that “Authority must be contacted” is talking out of engrams. The
woman who is so certain she needs a divorce or that her husband is going to murder her some
night is talking out of either her own or his engrams. The man who comes in and says he has a
bad pain in his stomach that feels “just like a #12 gauge copper wire going straight through me”
has quite possibly had a #12 gauge copper wire through him in an attempted abortion or talk of
such a thing while he was in pain. The man who says it “has to be cut out” is talking straight
out of an engram either from some operation of his own or his mother’s or from an attempted
abortion. The man who “has to get rid of it” is again possibly talking out of an attempted
abortion engram. The man who “can’t get rid of it” may be talking from the same source but
from another valence. People, in short, especially when talking about dianetics and engrams,
give forth with engram talk in steady streams. They have no awareness, ordinarily, that the
things they are saying are minor dramatizations of their engrams and suppose that they have
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concluded these things themselves or think these things: the supposition and explanation is only
justified thought -- the analyzer performing its duty in guaranteeing that the organism is right no
matter how foolishly it is acting.
The auditor can be assured, particularly when he is talking about dianetics, that he is
going to hear in return a lot of engram content; for discussion of the reactive mind generally
takes place in language which it itself holds.
Recall that the reactive mind can think only on this equation -- A = A = A, when the
three A’s may be respectively a horse, a swear-word and the verb “to spit.” Spitting is the same
as horses is the same as God. The reactive mind is a very zealous Simple Simon, carefully
stepping in each pie. Thus when a man is told he has to delete the content of the reactive bank,
he may say that if he did, he is sure he would lose all his ambition. Be assured -- and how
easily this proves up on therapy and how red-eared some pre-clears become -- that he has an
engram which may run something like this:
(Blow or bump, prenatal)
FATHER: Damn it, Agnes, you’ve got to get rid of that God-Damned baby.
If you don’t, we’ll starve to death. I can’t afford it.
MOTHER: Oh, no, no, no, I can’t get rid of it, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t! Honest I will take care
of it. I’ll work and slave and support it.
Please don’t make me get rid of it. If I did I’d just die. I’d lose my mind! I wouldn’t have
anything to hope for. I’d lose all my interest in life. I’d lose my ambition. Please let me keep
it!
What a common one that engram is: and how sincerely and “rationally” and earnestly an
aberree can be in supporting his conclusion that he has just “thought up” the “computation” that
if he “gets rid of it,” he’ll lose his mind and ambition, maybe even die!
As this work is written, most of the engrams that will be found in adults come from the
first quarter of the 20th century. This was the period of “Aha, Jack Dalton, at last I have you in
my possession!” It was the period of “Blood and Sand” and Theda Bara. It was the period of
bootleg whiskey and woman suffrage. It covered the days of “flaming youth” and the “The
Yanks are Coming,” and bits of such color will be demanding action in the engram banks.
Dianetic auditors have picked up whole passages of the Great Play “The Drunkard” out of
prenatal engrams, not as a piece of funny “corn” but as Mama’s sincere and passionate effort to
reform Papa. Super-drama, Mellerdrammer. And not only that but also tragedy. The hangover
of the Gay Nineties, when the “business girl” had just begun to be “free” and Carrie Nation
was saving the world at the expense of bartenders will be common fare in engrams found in
today’s adults.
Yesterday’s cliches and absurdities become, tragically enough, today’s engramic
commands. One very, very morose young man, for instance, was found to have as the central
motif of his reactive mind Hamlet’s historic vacillations about whether “to be or not to be, that
is the question.” Mama (who was what these colloquially-minded auditors call a “loop”) had
gotten it by contagion from an actor-father whose failure to be a Barrymore had driven him to
drink and wife beating; and our young man would sit for hours in a morose apathy wondering
about life. To classify his psychosis required nothing more than “apathetic young fellow.”
Most of engram content is merely cliches and commonplaces and emotional crash drives
by Mama or Papa. But the auditor will have his moments. And when he suddenly learns about
them, the pre-clear will have his laughs.
119.120
In other words, aberration can be any combination of words contained in an engram.
Thus, to classity by aberration is not only utterly impossible but completely unnecessary. After
an auditor has run one case, he will be far more able to appreciate this.
As for psycho-somatic ills, as classified in an earlier chapter, these depend also upon
accidental or intentional word combinations and all the variety of injury and unbalanced fluid
and growth possible. It is very well to call an obscure pain “tendonitis” but more probably and
more accurately, it is a fall or injury before birth. Asthma comes fairly constantly from birth,
as do conjunctivitis and sinusitis, but when these can occur in birth, there is generally prenatal
background. Thus it can be said that wherever a man or woman aches is of minor importance to
the auditor beyond using the patient’s chronic illness to locate the chain of sympathy engrams,
and all the auditor needs to know of that illness is that some area of the body hurts the patient.
That, for the auditor, is enough for psycho-somatic diagnosis.
It happens that the extent of aberration and the extent of psycho-somatic illness are not
the regulating factors which establish how long a case may take. A patient may be a screaming
lunatic and yet require only a hundred hours to clear. Another may be a “well-balanced” and
moderately successful person and yet take five hundred hours to clear. Therefore, in the light of
the fact that the extent of aberration and illness has only a minor influence on what the auditor is
interested in -- therapy -- classification by these is so much wasted time.
Oh, there are such things as a man being too sick from heart trouble to be worked very
hard and such things as a patient worrying so continuously as a manifestation of his usual life
that the auditor finds his work difficult, but these are rarities and again have little bearing on the
classification of a case.
The rule in diagnosis is that whatever the individual offers the auditor as a detrimental
reaction to therapy is engramic and will prove so in the process. Whatever impedes the auditor
in his work is identical to whatever is impeding the patient in his thinking and living. Think of
it this way: the auditor is an analytical mind (his own) confronted with a reactive mind (the pre-clear’s).
Therapy is a process of thinking. Whatever troubles the patient will also trouble the
auditor; whatever troubles the auditor has also troubled the patient’s analytical mind.
The patient is not a whole analytical mind: the auditor will find himself occasionally
with a patient who does nothing but swear at him and yet when the appointment time arrives,
there that patient is, anxious to continue therapy; or the auditor may find a patient who tells him
how useless the entire procedure is and how she hates to be worked upon and yet if he were to
tell her, “All right, we’ll stop work,” she would go into a prompt decline.
The analytical mind of the patient wants to do the same thing the auditor is trying to do,
fight down into the reactive bank; therefore, the auditor, when he encounters opposition,
adverse theory about dianetics, personal criticism, etc., is not listening to analytical data but
reactive engrams and he should calmly proceed, secure in that knowledge, for the patient’s
dynamics, all that can be brought to bear, will help him so long as the auditor is an ally against
the pre-clear’s reactive mind, rather than a critic or attacker of the pre-clear’s analytical mind.
This is an example:
(In reverie -- pre-natal basic area)
PRE-CLEAR: (Believing he means dianetics) I don’t know. I don’t know. I just can’t
remember. It won’t work. I know it won’t work.
AUDITOR: (repeater technique, described later) Go over that. Say, “It won’t work.”
PRE-CLEAR: “It won’t work. It won’t work. It won’t work... etc. etc.” Ouch, my stomach
hurts! “It won’t work. It won’t work. It won’t work ...” (Laughter of relief.) That’s my
mother. Talking to herself.
120.121
AUDITOR: All right, let’s pick up the entire engram. Begin at the beginning.
PRE-CLEAR: (Quoting recall with somatics [pains]) “I don’t know how to do it. I just can’t
remember what Becky told me. I just can’t remember it. Oh, I am so discouraged. It won’t
work this way. It just won’t work. I wish I knew what Becky told me but I can’t remember.
Oh I wish...” Hey, what’s she got in here? Why, God damn her, that’s beginning to burn! It’s
a douche. Say! Let me out of here! Bring me up to present time! That really burns!
AUDITOR: Go back to the beginning and go over it again. Pick up whatever additional data
you can contact.
PRE-CLEAR: Repeats engram, finding all the old phrases and some new ones plus some
sounds. Recounts four more times, “re-experiencing” everything. Begins to yawn, almost falls
asleep (“unconsciousness” coming off), revives and repeats engram twice more. Then begins
to chuckle over it. Somatic is gone. Suddenly engram is “gone” (refiled and he cannot discover
it again. He is much pleased.)
AUDITOR: Go to the next earliest moment of pain or discomfort.
PRE-CLEAR: Uh. Mmmmm. I can’t get in there. Say, I can’t get in there! I mean it. I wonder
where...
AUDITOR: Go over the line, “Can’t get in there.”
PRE-CLEAR: “Can’t get in there. Can’t...” My legs feel funny. There’s a sharp pain. Say,
what the hell is she doing? Why damn her! Boy, I’d like to get my hands on her just once. Just
once!
AUDITOR: Begin at the beginning and recount it.
PRE-CLEAR: (Recounts engram several times, yawns off “unconsciousness,” chuckles when
he can’t find the engram any more. Feels better.) Oh, well, I guess she had her troubles.
AUDITOR: (Carefully refraining from agreeing that Mama had her troubles, since that
would make him an ally of Mama) Go to the next moment of pain or discomfort.
PRE-CLEAR: (Uncomfortable) I can’t. I’m not moving on the time track. I’m stuck. Oh, all
right. “I’m stuck, I’m stuck.” No. “It’s stuck. It’s stuck that time.” No. “I stuck it that time.”
Why damn her! That’s my coronary trouble! That’s it! That’s the sharp pain I get!
AUDITOR: Begin at the beginning of the engram and recount, etc.
Each time, it can be seen in this example, that the patient in reverie encountered
analytically the engram in near proximity, the engram command impinged itself upon the patient
himself, who gave it forth as an analytical opinion to the auditor. A pre-clear in reverie is close
up against the source material of his aberrations. An aberree wide awake may be giving forth
highly complex opinions which he will battle to the death to defend as his own but which are,
in reality, only his aberrations impinging against his analytical mind. Patients will go right on
declaring that they know the auditor is dangerous, that he shouldn’t ever have started them in
therapy, etc., and still keep working well and efficiently. That’s one of the reasons why the
auditor’s code is so important: the patient is just as eager to relieve himself of his engrams as
could be wished, but the engrams give the appearance of being a long way from anxious to be
relieved.
It will also be seen in the above example that the auditor is not making any positive
suggestion. If the phrase is not engramic, the patient will very rapidly tell him so in no
uncertain terms and although it still may be, the auditor has no great influence over the pre-clear
in reverie beyond helping him to attack engrams. If the pre-clear contradicted any of the above,
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it means that the engram containing the words suggested is not ready to be relieved and another
paraphrase is in order.
Diagnosis, then, is something which takes care of itself on the aberration and psycho-somatic
plane. The auditor could have guessed -- and kept it to himself -- that a series of
attempted abortions were coming up in the above example before he entered the area. He might
have guessed that the indecisiveness of the patient was from his mother. The auditor, however,
does not communicate his guesses. This would be suggestion and might be seized upon by the
patient. It is up to the pre-clear to find out. The auditor, for instance, could not have known
where on the time track the pre-clear’s “coronary pain” was nor the nature of the injury.
Chasing up and down looking for a specific pain would be just so much wasted time. All such
things will surrender in the course of therapy. The only interest in them is whether or not the
aberrations and illnesses go to return no more. At the end of therapy they will be gone. At the
beginning they are only complication.
Diagnosis of aberration and psycho-somatic illness, then, is not an essential part of
dianetic diagnosis.
What we are interested in is the mechanical operation of the mind. That is the sphere of
diagnosis. What are the working mechanics of the analytical mind?
1. Perception. Sight, hearing, tactile and pain, etc.
2. Recall. Visio-color, tone-sonic, tactile, etc.
3. Imagination. Visio-color, tone-sonic, tactile, etc.
These are the mechanical processes. Diagnosis deals primarily with these factors and
with these factors can establish the length of time a case should take, how difficult the case will
be, etc. And we need only a few of these.
This further simplifies into a code:
1. Perception, over or under optimum.
(a) Sight
(b) Sound
2. Recall: Under
(a) Sonic
(b) Visio
3. Imagination: Over
(a) Sonic
(b) Visio
In other words, when we examine a patient before we make him a pre-clear (by starting
him into therapy) we are interested in three things only: too much or too little perception, too
little recall, too much imagination.
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In Perception we mean how well or how poorly he can hear, see and feel.
In Recall, we want to know if he can recall by sonic (hearing), visio (seeing) and
somatic (feeling).
In Imagination we want to know if he (recalls) sonics, visions or somatics too much.
Let us make this extremely clear: it is very simple, it is not complex, and it requires no
great examination. But it is important and establishes the length of time in therapy.
There is nothing wrong with an active imagination so long as the person knows he is
imagining. The kind of imagination we are interested in is that used for unknowing “dub-in”
and in that kind only. An active imagination which the patient knows to be imagination is an
extremely valuable asset to him. An imagination which substitutes itself for recall is very trying
in therapy.
“Hysterical” blindness and deafness or extended sight or hearing are useful in
diagnosis. The first, “hysterical” blindness, means the patient is afraid to see; “hysterical”
deafness means he is afraid to hear. These will require considerable therapy. Likewise,
extended sight and extended hearing, while not as bad as blindness and deafness, are an index
of how frightened the patient really is and is often a straight index of the prenatal content in
terms of violence.
If the patient is afraid to see with his eyes or hear with his ears in present time, be
assured there is much in his background to make him afraid, for these actual perceptions do not
“turn-off” easily.
If the patient jumps at sounds and is startled by sights or is very disturbed by these
things, his perceptions can be said to be extended, which means the reactive bank has a great
deal in it labeled “death.”
The recalls in which we are interested in diagnosis are those which are less than
optimum only. When they are “over optimum” they are actually imagination “dubbed in” for
recall. Recall (under) and imagination (over) are actually, then, one group, but for simplicity
and clarity we keep them apart.
If the patient cannot “hear” sounds or voices in past incidents he does not have sonic. If
he does not “see” scenes of past experiences in motion color pictures, he does not have visio.
If the patient hears voices which have not existed or sees scenes which have not existed
and yet supposes that these voices really spoke and these scenes were real, we have “over
imagination.” In dianetics imaginary sound recall would be hyper-sonic, sight recall -- hyper-visio
(hyper= over).
Let us take specific examples of each one of these three classes and demonstrate how
they become fundamental in therapy and how their presence or absence can make a case
difficult.
A patient with a mild case of “hysterical” deafness is one who has difficulty in hearing.
The deafness can be organic but if organic it will not vary from time to time.
This patient has something he is afraid to hear. He plays the radio very loudly, makes
people repeat continually and misses pieces of the conversation. Do not go to an institution to
find this degree of “hysterical” deafness. Men and women are “hysterically” deaf without any
conscious knowledge of it. Their “hearing just isn’t so good.” In dianetics this is being called
hypo-hearing (hypo = under).
123.124
The patient who is always losing something when it lies in fair view before him, who
misses signposts, theater bills and people who are in plain sight is “hysterically” blind to some
degree. He is afraid he will see something. In dianetics this is being called, since the word
“hysterical” is a very inadequate and overly dramatic one, hypo-sight.
Then there is the case of over-perception. This is not necessarily imagination, but it can
go to the length of seeing and hearing things which are not there at all, which happens to be a
common insanity. We are interested in a less dramatic grade in standard operation.
A girl, for instance, who sees something or thinks she sees something but knows she
doesn’t and is very startled, who jumps in fright when anyone silently comes into a room and
can be so startled rather habitually, is suffering from extended sight. She is afraid she will
encounter something, but instead of being blind to it she is too alive to it. This is hyper-sight.
A person who is much alarmed by noises, by sounds in general, by certain voices, who
gets a headache or gets angry when the people around are “noisy” or the door slams or the
dishes rattle, is a victim of extended hearing. She hears sounds far louder than they actually
are. This is hyper-hearing.
The actual quality of the seeing and hearing does not need to be good. The actual organs
of sight and sound can be in poor condition. The only fact of importance is the “nervousness”
about reception.
This disposes of the two perceptions in which we are interested in dianetics. As the
auditor talks to people around him and gets their reactions to sights and sounds, he will find
wide variety in quality of response.
Recall is the most directly important to therapy, for it is not a symptom, it is an actual
tool of work. There are many ways to use recall. The clear has vivid and accurate recall for
every one of the senses. Few aberrees have. The auditor is not interested in other senses than
sight and sound because the others will be cared for in the usual course of therapy. But if he
has a patient who has no sonic, watch out. And if he has a patient with neither sonic nor visio,
beware! This is the multi-valent personality, the schizophrenic, the paranoid of psychiatry with
symptoms not acute enough to be so classified in normal life. This does not mean, emphatically
does not mean, that people without sight and sound recall are insane, but it does mean an above
average case and it means a case which will take some time. It does not mean the case is
“incurable” for nothing can be further from the truth: but such cases sometimes take five
hundred hours. It simply means that such a case isn’t any stroll through the park: there is
drammer back there in that reactive mind, drammer which says, “Don’t see! Don’t hear!” Some
of the engrams in this case demand reduced or no recall. The organs of sight and sound may be
highly extended in their reception. This does not mean that anything need be wrong with the
way this person perceives sound or light waves and records them. But it does mean that after
he has recorded them, he cannot easily get them back out of the standard bank because the
reactive engram bank has set up circuits (occlusion demon circuits) to keep him from finding
out about his past. There are, of course, greater or lesser degrees of recall.
The test is simple. Tell the patient wide awake to go back to the time he was entering the
room. Ask him what was being said. If he can “hear” it wide awake, he has sonic recall. The
auditor knows very well what was said, for if he means to use this test, he utters a certain set of
words and notes the actual sounds present. Therefore, if the patient falls into the following
category, the “dub-in,” the auditor will be apprised of that.
The sight recall test is equally simple. Show the patient a book with an illustration.
After a time interval, ask him to “go back” while he is wide awake and look at that book “in his
mind” and see if he can see it. If he can’t, this is hypo-visio.
More tests similar to this will clearly establish whether or not our patient is recall blind
and deaf or whether he falls into the next group:
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The over-active imagination which enthusiastically “dubs-in” sight and sound for the
patient without knowledge is something which is definitely a hindrance to fast therapy. There
are many demon circuits which snarl up thinking, but these particular “dub-in” demons mean
that the operator is going to get a most awful cargo of what the auditors colloquially call
“garbage.” There is, as they further use some of the doubtlessly disgraceful terminology
which, despite anything one can do, keeps rising up in this field, something at work in the
brain which is a “lie factory.”
The patient asked to recount the conversation as he entered the door by “hearing it”
again may confidently start in to give forth all manner of speech which was entirely paraphrase
or utterly fictitious. Asked to tell about the picture and page he is shown, he will “see” vividly a
lot more than was there or something entirely different. If he is doubtful about it, that is a
healthy sign.
If he is certain, beware, for it is a demon circuit “dubbing in” without his analytical
knowledge and the auditor will have to listen to more incidents which never happened than he
could begin to catalogue and will have to sort out and pick his way through this “garbage”
continually to get his pre-clear to a point where the data is reliable. (And it isn’t a matter of
grading “garbage” by its improbability -- truth is always stranger than fiction; it is a matter of
trying to reduce engrams which are not present or by-pass engrams which are present and so
on in a tangled hash.)
The optimum pre-clear would be one who had average response to noises and sights,
who had accurate sonic and visio and who could imagine and know that he was imagining, in
color-visio and tone-sonic. This person, understand clearly, may have aberrations which make
him climb every chimney in town, drink every drop in every bar every night (or try it anyway),
beat his wife, drown his children and suppose himself to be a jub-jub bird. In the psycho-somatic
line he may have arthritis, gall-bladder trouble, dermatitis, migraine headaches and flat
feet. Or he may have that much more horrible aberration -- pride in being average and
“adjusted.” He is still a relatively easy case to clear.
In the case which has sonic and visio shut-off without “dub-in” we are dealing with
engrams which have shut down some of the primary working mechanisms of the mind. The
auditor will have to slog through hours and hours and hours of trying to contact engrams when
the patient cannot hear them or see them. A case which merely has a shut-down sonic recall still
means that the auditor is going to do a lot more work than on an average case. This case is
very, very far from impossible to resolve. That is not the idea here, to frighten off any attempt
on such a case. But this case will only be resolved after a great deal of persistent effort. Such a
person may be apparently very successful. He may be enormously intelligent. He may have
few or no psycho-somatic ills. Yet he will prove to have a crammed engram bank, any part of
which may come into restimulation at any time and swamp him. Usually, however, this type of
case is quite worried and anxious about many things, and such worry and anxiety may put a
little more time on the worksheet.
In the case of the “dub-in” who doesn’t know it, where circuits are giving him back
altered recall, we have a case which may very likely prove to be very long and require artful
treatment. For there is a “lie factory” somewhere in that engram bank. This case may be the
soul of truthfulness in his everyday life. But when he starts tackling his engrams, they have
content which makes him give out material which is not there.
Sharply and clearly, then, without further reservation or condition, this is dianetic
diagnosis: The aberration is the engram content; the psycho-somatic illness is the former injury.
The perceptions of sight and sound, under-optimum recall, over-optimum imagination regulate
the length of the case.
If the auditor wants to be fancy, he can list the general tone scale position of the
individual mentally and physically. The woman who is dull and apathetic is, of course, around
Tone 0.5, in the Zone Zero part of the dynamic scale earlier in the book. If the man is angry or
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hostile, the auditor can mark him down as a 1.5 or somewhere generally in the Zone One range
of the survival scale. These markings would apply to the probable average tone of the aggregate
engrams in the reactive mind. This is interesting because it means that a Zone Zero person is far
more likely to be ill and is a slightly harder case than a Zone One person: And, as therapy raises
tone to Zone Four, the 1.5 is closer to the goal.
It is difficult to estimate time in therapy. As mentioned before, it has several variables
such as auditor skill, restimulative elements in the patient’s environment and sheer volume of
engrams.
The auditor is advised, in his first case, to seek out some member of the family or a
friend who is as close as possible to the optimum pre-clear, which is to say, a person with visio
and sonic recall and average perceptions. In clearing this one case he will learn at first hand
much of what can be expected in the engram banks of any mind; and he will see clearly how
engrams behave. If the auditor himself falls into one of the harder brackets and if he means to
work with somebody in one of these brackets, that poses no great difficulty, either case can be
released in a hundredth the time of any former mental healing technique and they can be
cleared, if any skill at all is used, in five hundred hours of work per case. But if two cases are
particularly difficult, before they work on each other each would be wise to find and clear a
nearly optimum pre-clear. That way each will be a competent operator when the rougher cases
are approached.
Thus, diagnosis. The other perceptions, recalls and imaginations are interesting but not
vital in measuring case time. I.Q., unless it falls down into the feeble-minded level, is no great
factor. And even then the I.Q. of any patient goes up like a skyrocket with clearing and rises all
the while during the work.
There are organic insanities. Iatrogenic psychoses (caused by doctors) are equivocal in
dianetics, for a part of the machinery may have been wrecked. Nevertheless, with many
organic psychoses a case can be improved by dianetics even if an optimum cannot be reached.
And so all an auditor can do is try. Insanities caused by missing parts of the nervous system
have not been extensively investigated by auditors at this time: the reviving of corpses is not the
end of dianetics: the bringing about an optimum mind in the normal or merely neurotic person
has had the main emphasis. Dianetics can be otherwise used, is being and will be. But with so
many potentially valuable people who can be made highly valuable to themselves and society,
emphasis has been placed on inorganic aberrations and organic psycho-somatic illnesses.
Cases which have been subjected to pre-frontal lobotomy (which saws a section out of
the analytical mind), the topectomy (which removes pieces of brain somewhat as an apple corer
cores apples), the trans-orbital leukotomy which, while the patient is being electrically shocked,
thrusts an ordinary dime store ice-pick into each eye and reaches up to rip the analyzer apart),
and electric shock “therapy” which sears the brain with 110 volts, as well as insulin shock and
other treatments, are considered by dianetics to be equivocal. There are ordinary organic
insanities such as paresis, but most of these, even so, can be benefited by dianetics.
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CHAPTER V
Returning, the File Clerk, and the Time Track
There is a method of “thinking” which Man did not know he had.
If you would like an illustration of this, ask a small child if she would like to go sleigh
riding in memory. She will try to remember the last time she rode her sleigh. She will frown
and pucker her brows perhaps. Now tell her to go back to the last time she was sleigh riding.
Coaxed she will suddenly come forth with a complete experience and, unless she is badly
aberrated, will be able to tell you about the snow getting down her collar and so forth. She is
right back there sleigh riding, swimming or whatever you choose.
Man, when and if he thought about this at all, must have mistaken it for imagination.
But it is not imagination. Anyone, unless he is very severely aberrated indeed, can be “sent
back” wide awake to an experience of the past. In initial tests one should use experiences not
long gone and experiences which are pleasant.
This is not memory in the way one “remembers something.” It is returning.
Remembering is a far more complicated process than returning. Just why people go around
seeking to remember some specific or complex datum when they can return is something of a
mystery when one considers lost articles, things read, conversations had and so forth.
Remembering, of course, has a very definite role and is an automatic process which provides
“I” with conclusions and data in a never-ending stream. But when one wishes a very precise,
specific bit of information or when one seeks a past pleasure to contemplate it, returning is
more to the point.
The hypnotist, with much mumbo-jumbo and hand passes et al., has something which
he calls “regression.” This is a very complicated business which requires being hypnotized.
True enough, regression has research value since, by hypnosis, it by-passes occlusions which
are not otherwise easy to get around. And regression served dianetics well when the author was
checking his data on memory banks. But it evidently had occurred to none that regression is an
artificial use of a natural process.
Undoubtedly some people use returning for some of their mental work, and these
people probably think that “everybody else” does likewise, which is far from true. But even
those people who return naturally seldom understand that this is a distinct process, much
different from remembering.
People also relive without being hypnotized or drugged; this is a rarer thing. If a person
sits in contemplation ot some past glory for a while he will begin to relive instead of simply
return.
In dianetics we have had much to do with “spectrums.” The spectrum of gradations is a
much better mechanism for philosophy than Aristotle’s pendulum which swung from one
extreme to the other. We have the spectrum of the dynamics. We call them four dynamics,
through which the command: SURVIVE! is expressed, and the four are actually a great number
of gradations from the cells of “I” through “I,” through family and children, through club and
city and state, through nation and race and hemisphere and finally all Mankind. That is a
spectrum: gradations of something which are really the same thing but which have wider and
wider scope or range.
In much the same way as the spectrum of SURVIVE! we have a spectrum of memory
at work. First there is memory in its most precise, present time sense. Then there is memory of
the past. Then there is more memory of the past. And so we move into a part of the spectrum
which has been overlooked: part of the “I” returns into the past, then a greater part of “I”
returns into the past (at which point we have return) and finally, at the extreme all of “I” is back
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in the past. First there is remembering. This is the furthest from exact data (except in a clear).
Then there is returning in which part of the “I” is actually in the past and records appear to be
perceptions he is actually experiencing. Then there is reliving where a man is so thoroughly in
the past for the moment that, while he was recalling an infant experience, if startled he would
react just as he would have when a baby.
There is a lot of aberrated notion in this present society about the evils of living in the
past. These stem partially from an unwillingness of aberrated people to face and understand
yesterday.
One of the prime sources of “bad memory” is Mother. Often enough Mother has been
sufficiently panic-stricken at the thought of Junior’s recalling just what she did to Junior that a
Mankind-wide aberration seems to have sprung up. The standard attempted abortion case
nearly always has an infanthood and childhood full of Mama assuring him that he cannot
remember anything when he was a baby. She doesn’t want him to recall how handy she was, if
unsuccessful, in her efforts with various instruments. Possibly prenatal memory itself would
be just ordinary memory and in full recall to the whole race if this guilty conscience in Mother
had not been rolling along lo! these millennia. In the normal course of work the auditor will
have his hands full of Mama screaming objections about her grown son’s or daughter’s
entering into therapy because of what they might find out: Mama has been known, by auditors,
to go into a complete nervous collapse at the thought of her child’s recalling prenatal incidents.
Not all of this, by the way, is based on attempted abortion. Mama often has had a couple of
more men than Papa that Papa never knew about; and Mama would very often rather condemn
her child to illness or insanity or merely unhappiness than let a child pursue the course of the
pre-clear even though Mother avowedly has no recollection whatever of anything bad ever
happening to the child. Under therapy herself, she usually volunteers the truth.
Here is the source of why good memory is discouraged in a society and infant and
prenatal memory overlooked, to say nothing of the ability to return and relive.
The index system of the standard bank is a wonderful thing to behold. Everything is
there, filed by subject, filed by time and filed by conclusions. All perceptions are present.
With the time file system we have what is called in dianetics a time track. Going back
along this track with part of “I” is returning. It is definitely present for both conscious and
“unconscious” data. The time track is of vast and interesting concern to the auditor.
The mind is a well-built computer and it has various services. Auditors, backing off
from Latin and complexity, call the source of one of these services, the file clerk. This is not a
very dignified name and it is certainly anthropomorphic. There is no small man or woman in
there with a green eye-shade. But the action which takes place is a close approximation to what
would happen if such an entity did dwell within the mind.
The file clerk is the bank monitor. “He” monitors for both the reactive engram bank and
the standard banks. When he is asked for a datum by the auditor or “I,” he will hand out a
datum to the auditor via “I.” He is a trifle moronic when he handles the reactive engram bank, a
contagion from the reactive mind, and he will at times hand out puns and crazy dreams when he
should be delivering serious data.
The file clerk, if the auditor asks the pre-clear for the last time he saw a movie, will
hand out the movie, the date it was seen, the age and physical being of the person, all
perceptics, the plot of the movie, the weather -- in short, he hands out everything that was
present and connected with the movie.
In ordinary living the file clerk feeds memory to “I” at a rapid rate. A good memory gets
its data in split seconds. If the file clerk has to shove the memory around various reactive
occlusions, it may take minutes or days for the data to arrive.
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If we had a big computing machine of the most modern design, it would have a
“memory bank” of punched cards or some such thing and it would have to have a selector and
feeder device to thrust out the data the machine wants. The brain has one of these -- it could not
operate without it. This is the bank monitor -- the file clerk.
Keep in mind these two parts of the mind: the time track and the file clerk and keep in
memory this mechanism of returning. These are the three things we use, with the reactive and
standard banks, in the dianetic reverie.
The file clerk is a very obliging fellow. If he has been having trouble getting to the “I”
around the reactive occlusions and circuits in general, he is particularly obliging. He cooperates
with the auditor.
The monitor system could be considered on the basis of attention units where a man
could be supposed to have a thousand. Thus a thousand possible attention units would be
available to a clear’s “I.” In the aberree, probably fifty are available to “I,” five or six hundred
absorbed in the reactive engrams, and the remainder variously used besides composing this
mechanism we call the bank monitor, the file clerk.
It seems as if the file clerk in an aberree would rather work with the auditor than with
the aberree. That may appear an astonishing fact, but it is a scientific fact. The file clerk works
best, then, when he is selecting data out of a pre-clear’s banks to present to the auditor. This is
an aspect of the law affinity. “I’s” file clerk and the auditor are a team: and they work very
often in close harmony without enough consent from the pre-clear’s analyzer to notice.
The return is most easily effected, in the aberree, by the auditor’s addressing the file
clerk, not the patient. This can actually be done with the patient wide awake. The auditor asks
him for information, tells him to go back to it. “I” is suddenly in possession of the whole file.
Something inside the mind, then, works in close harmony with the auditor and works better for
the auditor than it does for the person in whose mind it is. That is the file clerk.
The object of the auditor is to take what the file clerk hands forth and to keep the file
clerk from getting swamped by reactive data. Once the data has been given out by the file clerk,
it is the business of the auditor to see that the pre-clear goes over it enough times to take the
charge out of it. The mechanism of doing this is extremely simple. In order to help matters and
keep the pre-clear from being distracted, the auditor goes through a routine with every session
which disposes the patient to let the file clerk work.
The patient sits in a comfortable chair, with arms, or lies on a couch in a quite room
where perceptic distractions are minimal. The auditor tells him to look at the ceiling. The
auditor says: “When I count from one to seven your eyes will close.” The auditor then counts
from one to seven and keeps counting quietly and pleasantly until the patient closes his eyes. A
tremble of the lashes will be noticed in optimum reverie.
This is the entire routine. Consider it more a signal that proceedings are to begin and a
means of concentrating the patient on his own concerns and the auditor than anything else. This
is not hypnotism. It is vastly different. In the first place the patient knows everything which is
going on around him. He is not “asleep,” and can bring himself out of it any time he likes. He
is free to move about, but, because it distracts the patient, the auditor does not usually permit
him to smoke.
The auditor makes very sure that the patient is not hypnotized by telling him, before he
begins to count, “You will know everything which goes on. You will be able to remember
everything that happens. You can exercise your own control. If you do not like what is
happening, you can instantly pull out of it. Now, one, two, three, four,” etc.
To make doubly sure, for we want no hypnotism, even by accident, the auditor installs
a canceller. This is an extremely important step and should not be omitted even when you may
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be entirely certain that he is in no way influenced by your words. The auditor may inadvertently
use restimulative language which will key-in an engram: he may, when he is especially new in
dianetics, use such a thing as a holder or a denyer, telling the pre-clear to “stay there” when he
is returned on the track or telling him, worst of all things, to “forget it,” one of a class of
phrases of the forgetter mechanism which is most severe in its aberrative effect, denying the
data entirely to the analyzer. To prevent such things from happening, the canceller is vital. It is
a contract with the patient that whatever the auditor says will not become literally interpreted by
the patient or used by him in any way. It is installed immediately after the condition of reverie is
established. A canceller is worded more or less as follows: “In the future, when I utter the
word Cancelled, everything which I have said to you while you are in a therapy session will be
cancelled and will have no force with you. Any suggestion I have made to you will be without
force when I say the word Cancelled. Do you understand?”
The word cancelled is then said to the patient immediately before he is permitted to open
his eyes at the end of the session. It is not further amplified. The single word is used.
The canceller is vital. It prevents accidental positive suggestion. The patient may be
suggestible or even in a permanent light hypnotic trance (many people go through life in such a
trance). An engram is actually a hypnotic suggestion. It could be said that the purpose of
therapy is to awaken a person in every period of his life when he has been forced into
“unconsciousness.” Dianetics wakes people up. It is not hypnotism, which puts people to
sleep. Dianetic therapy wakes them up. Hypnotism puts them to sleep. Can you ask for a
wider difference in polarity? Dianetic therapy removes engrams. Hypnotism installs engrams.
Further, dianetics is a science, an organized body of knowledge -- hypnotism is a tool and an
art and is such a wild variable that Man has suspected it as a dangerous thing for centuries and
centuries, use it though he did.
The auditor will inevitably get cases into his hands which will drop into a hypnotic
sleep for all he can do to prevent it. Such cases have engrams which make them do this, just as
others have engrams which make them stay awake. The auditor then mentions neither “sleep”
nor “wake.” He takes his cases wherever they drop into their own inversion level and works
them from there. Patients will plead to be drugged or put into a trance. Let them plead! The
reverie has a clear at its end -- drugs and hypnotism have dependency on the auditor and many
other undesirable aspects. A case takes longer in amnesia trance than in reverie. The gains in
reverie are certain. The patient gets more and more well. When amnesia trance or hypnotism
are used instead of reverie, no matter how easily the data seems to come up, the usual run of
cases so treated experience little relief until the case is nearly completed, when the patient so
long uncomfortable gets suddenly well. Hypnotism carries with it transference, enormous
operator responsibility, and other impedimenta with which dianetics, in long practice, has done
without. Hypnotism was used for research, then abandoned.
Hence, install the canceller every time. Never neglect to install it in every session. The
patient may be trancing, which is something we don’t want, but something which we cannot
always avoid, and which we cannot always detect. Just install the canceller at the beginning of
the session, then before you bring the patient to present time, use the canceller word.
This is a rehearsal, then, of the entire routine:
Auditor: Look at the ceiling. When I count from one to seven your eyes will close. You
will remain aware of everything which goes on. You will be able to remember everything that
happens here. You can pull yourself out of anything which you get into if you don’t like it. All
right (slowly, soothingly): One, two, three, four, five, six, seven*. One, two, three, four,
five, six, seven. One, two, three (patient’s eyes close and eyelids flicker), four, five, six,
seven. (Auditor pauses; installs canceller.) All right, let us go back to your fifth birthday...
(work continues until the auditor has worked the patient enough for the period)... Come to
present time. Are you in present time? (Yes.) (Use canceller word.) When I count from five to
one and snap my fingers you will feel alert. Five, four, three, two, one. (Snap.)
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As it can be seen in this example, when work for the day is concluded, the pre-clear,
who may have been returned into his past for two hours, must be brought back to present time
and startled with a finger snap to restore his awareness of his age and condition. Sometimes he
is unable easily to come back to present, for which there is quick remedy, which we will cover
later, so the auditor must always assure himself that the patient feels he actually is in present
time.
This is the reverie. This is all one needs to know about its actual mechanics. Experience
will show him a great deal. But these are the basic processes:
1. Assure patient he will know everything that happens.
2. Count until he closes his eyes.
3. Install canceller.
4. Return him to a period in the past.
5. Work with file clerk to get data.
6. Reduce all engrams contacted so that no charge remains.
7. Bring patient to present time.
8. Be sure he is in present time.
9. Give him canceller word.
10. Restore full awareness of his surroundings.
The patient’s time track, in the lowest level of attention units, is always in excellent
condition. It can be depended upon to reach any date and hour of his life and all the data in it.
In the higher levels of awareness, this time track may appear to be in very foul condition. The
reactive mind engram circuits stand between these lower levels -- right up against the banks --
and the higher levels which contain “I.” The lower levels contain only a shadow of the force of
“I” and appear to be another “I” in a case of multi-valent personality.
You can draw this on a piece of scratch paper and it would be helpful if you would do
so. Draw a tall rectangle (the standard banks) to the left of the page. Draw half a dozen circles
up against the right side of this rectangle for a representation of the file clerk -- the bank
monitor units. Now draw, about the center of the sheet, a large rectangle. Black it in. This is
the area of the reactive engram circuits. It is not the reactive bank. It is the circuit pattern from
the reactive engram bank, which borrows from the analyzer to make demons, vocal thinking,
etc. Now, to the right of the page, draw a white rectangle. This is the portion of the analyzer
which is “consciousness” and “I.”
The whole task of therapy is to get that black rectangle, the reactive engram bank
circuits, deleted so that from the standard bank to the left of the sheet to the analyzer portion to
the right of the sheet is all analyzer. It can’t be done with a knife as some people have
supposed, evaluating the situation from their own engrams, for that black area you have drawn
is all analyzer rendered useless by engrams and when therapy is done, it will all be available for
thinking. This increases I.Q. to an enormous extent.
Now suppose that the bottom of your picture is conception and the top is present time.
The vertical route up and down, then, is the time track. In this graph it can be supposed that
present time just keeps adding up higher and higher, further and further from conception in the
form of new construction (an analogy). For “I” to get data from the standard banks to the left,
“I” would have to work through this black rectangle, the reactive mind circuits. To a large
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extent “I” manages to get data from around this black area. But to a much larger extent it
doesn’t.
Now suppose that we draw a vertical line at the right of the picture. This line is
“awareness.” Consider that it can be moved, still vertical, to the left. As the line passes toward
the left, we get deeper and deeper “trance.” As the line moves into the reactive mind area, it
becomes hypnotic trance. Now as it moves even further left and into the circles we are calling
“file clerk,” it becomes the amnesia trance of hypnotism. Thus, anywhere we place this line we
establish a “depth of trance.” We want to work over to the right of the reactive bank, nearest the
awake level, so that we can keep “I” in contact with his surroundings and keep unwanted data
from coming through which will make the patient chronically uncomfortable. If the patient
instantly slides from the right all the way to the left so that the attention units, the circles, of the
file clerk itself are present, and does so the instant you count from one to seven, he is a
hypnotic subject. He may not be aware, when he wakens, of what has taken place, for “I” was
out of contact. Work him there, for he will have full sonic, etc., but be very, very careful to
work very early in his prenatal area. He might not be able to recall what has taken place and a
late engram which, if tapped, will not reduce, may have its full force opened up on “I” when
the patient regains possession of himself. Further, you might give him positive suggestion by
accident. Work by preference with trance depth well to the right of the reactive bank.
The characteristics of the units we label “file clerk” are similar in desires to those of the
basic individual when he is cleared. Thus, in any patient, the basic personality can be reached
for here is a sample of it. But the auditor should be content to know it is there; as the clearing
goes forward, he will see more and more of it. The individual is himself, his personality does
not alter, it simply becomes what he wanted it to be all the time at his optimum moments.
The units up against the standard banks can be considered the file clerk. But the file
clerk has more than just the standard bank which he can tap. He also has the entire engram
bank from which he can pull forth data.
The time track may have several aspects to the preclear. There is actually no track there
except time and time is invisible: but the awareness, the “I,” can return along it. The track is
always there, stretched out. But ideas of it continually occur and recur in the same patient. It
may get all bunched up. It may be very long. It may be that he cannot get on it at all (here’s the
schizophrenic -- he is off his time track). But it is there. It is the filing system by time and “I”
can be returned back along time by the simple request that he do so. If he does not, he is stuck
in the present or an engram, which is easy to resolve. And so forth.
Now let us consider the engram bank. It was drawn as a black rectangle in the above
sketch. Let us alter that a trifle and draw all this again, with the rectangles represented as
triangles with all their points downwards and together but all else as before -- the standard
banks, the analyzer (consciousness), and “I.” This is a working model now, an analogy, of
what the auditor is trying to contact. It is as if the engram bank itself existed in that black
triangle. Actually it doesn’t, only its circuits, but all we need to visualize is that it does.
Therefore, there is a thin point at the bottom. “I” and the file clerk can get together here. This is
the bottom of the time track. This is immediately after conception. A little higher up, let’s say
two-and-one-half months after conception, it is a little harder for “I” and the file clerk to achieve
contact. There is more reactive circuit between them. At seven months after conception it is
more difficult. And at twenty years of age it has approached impossibility in most cases without
dianetic technique.
Hence, the auditor will find it expedient to work in the prenatal area and as early in that
as possible. If he can clear the time from conception to birth, including birth, his task is nine-tenths
complete. To clear the entire reactive bank is his goal.
The reactive bank is like a pyramid which is fairly well armored everywhere but just
under the point, and which becomes unarmored when the point is contacted. This is taking the
reactive bank in an exposed sector. The effort is to get into the basic area, contact early
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engrams, erase the basic-basic engram by recountings and then progress upwards, erasing
engrams. These engrams apparently vanish. Actually it takes a hard search to discove once they
are really gone. They exist as memory in the standard bank, but that memory is so unimportant,
having been integrated now as experience, that it cannot aberrate. Nothing in the standard bank
can aberrate. Only the contents of the reactive bank can aberrate -- moments of
“unconsciousness” and what was recorded within them -- and locks. The auditor, in his work,
considers an engram erased when it vanishes, when the pre-clear can no longer contact any part
of it, but only after the pre-clear has thoroughly re-experienced it, complete with somatics.*
This inverted pyramid, in its upper reaches, is affect. In the lower reaches, it is the
primary cause of aberration. The cement that holds this inverted pyramid together is physical
pain and painful emotion. All the physical pain ever recorded by the organism and all the
painful emotion are parts of this inverted pyramid.
The auditor first discharges the painful emotion from later life as it was displayed in
“conscious moments.” He runs these periods as true engrams until the pre-clear is no longer
affected by them. Then he tries to contact basic-basic, that first engram. He reduces all engrams
he contacts en route to that primary goal. In every session he tries to reach basic-basic until he
is certain he has it.
Basic-basic is the bottom point. Once it has been gained, an erasure is begun during
which engram after engram is “re-experienced” with all somatics until it is gone. Before basic-basic
had been reached, the auditor may have had to run engrams twenty times before they
reduced. Later he may have found they reduced in five runs. Then he contacts and erases basic-basic.
If the patient has sonic by this time -- or if he has had it all along -- the engrams start
erasing with one or two recountings.
The file clerk is smart. The auditor who does not credit the ability of these attention
units will involve the case beyond necessity and will lengthen it. The file clerk may hand things
out by phrases, by somatics, by time. Whatever he hands out ordinarily will reduce on
recountings. By working with, not trying to command, the file clerk, the auditor will find his
case steadily improving until it is released or fully cleared. The only time the auditor disregards
this is when he uses the repeater system, which will be described.
We have “I” in a reverie; we return him to a period in his life along his time track; the
file clerk gives incidents forth which the pre-clear re-experiences; the auditor makes the pre-clear
recount the engram until it is relieved or has “vanished”* (all engrams will eventually
“vanish” after basic-basic is erased); anything new the file clerk offers, even during the
recounting, is addressed by the auditor to make the pre-clear re-experience it. That is the total
sum of activity in dianetics. There are, as accessories, the repeater technique and a few short-cuts.
This is therapy. Amplification is needed, of course, and will be found in the ensuing
pages to give the auditor all the data he needs. But this is the entire outline of dianetic therapy.
* The words “vanished” or “erased,” when applied to an engram which has been treated mean
that the engram has disappeared from the engram bank. It cannot be found afterwards except by
search of the standard memory.
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CHAPTER VI
The Laws of Returning
The engram has the aspect of -- and is not -- a live entity which protects itself in various
ways. Any and all phrases in it can be considered commands. These commands react on the
analytical mind in such a way as to cause the analytical mind to behave erratically.
Dianetic therapy is parallel to the methods of thought and thinking itself. Anything
which reacts against dianetics and the auditor can uniformly and without exception be found to
react in just that way on the patient’s analytical mind. Conversely, the patient’s problems of
thinking in his usual activities are the auditor’s problems in therapy.
The bulk of these “commands” the engrams contain are not computable in any way,
since they are contradictory or demand unreasonable acts. It is the impossibility of computing
them and reconciling them to thought and existence which makes the patient aberrated. Let us
take an engram which comes from one of Mother’s bowel movements. She is straining, which
causes compression, which brings about “unconsciousness” in the unborn child. Then, if she
habitually talks to herself (a monologist) as an enormous number of aberrated women do, she
may say, “Oh, this is hell. I am all jammed up inside. I feel so stuffy I can’t think. This is too
terrible to be borne.”
This may be in the basic area. The dream mechanism of the mind (which thinks in puns
mostly, symbologists to the contrary) may bring forth a dream about hell-fire as the engram is
approached. The pre-clear may be sure that he is going to descend into fire if he goes on his
time track toward this engram. Further, he may think his time track is all jammed up. This will
mean, perhaps, that the incidents are all in one place on it. So much for “This is hell,” and “all
jammed up inside.” Now let us take a look at what happens with “I’m so stuffy, I can’t think.”
The pre-clear sniffles because he thinks this means a cold in his nose. And as for “This is too
terrible to be borne,” he is filled with an emotion of terror at the thought of touching the
engram, for this command says it is too painful to bear. Additionally, engrams being literal in
their action, he may think that he was too terrible to be born.
The emotional reaction to hell, from some other place on the track -- as contained in
some other engram -- may say that “going to hell” is loud sobbing. Hence he does not “want”
to recount this engram. Further, he is terrified of it because it is “too terrible to be borne.” That
Mother was only discussing with her ambivalent self the necessity of laxatives is never entered
into the computation. For the reactive mind does not reason, it thinks in identities, seeking to
command the analytical mind.
There is only as much data as is in the engram and the analytical reaction to this
unthinking thing is utterly literal.
Let us look at another. This is a coitus experience. It has, as its somatic, varying
pressure. It is not painful and, by the way, no matter how painful these engrams may be in
present time when restimulated, no matter how forceful, when they are actually contacted, their
reexperienced pain is very mild, no matter what it was when received. So this is a shaking up
of the unborn child, that is all. But it says, “Oh, darling, I’m afraid you’ll come in me. I’ll just
die if you come in me. Oh please don’t come in me!”
What does the analytical mind do with this? Does it think about coitus? Does it worry
about pregnancy? No, emphatically not. The engram that would make one think about coitus
would say, “Think about coitus!” and the engram that contained a worry about pregnancy
would say, “I am worried about pregnancy.” The pain is not severe in this coitus experience
but it specifically states that the engram is not to be entered. “Do not come in me!” He would
die if he did, wouldn’t he? It says so right there. And the patient finds himself wandering
around the track until the auditor uses repeater technique (as will be covered).
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How about another type of engram? Let us suppose that our poor patient has been
unlucky enough to get a Junior tagged on him. Let us suppose his name is Ralph and his
father’s name is Ralph. (Be careful of these Junior cases, they are unusually complex
sometimes.) Mother (see the Kinsey report, if you’ve any doubts) is having a quiet affair on the
side with Jim. This coitus somatic is no more painful than being gently sat upon, but the patient
has a terrible time with it. Mother: “Oh, honey, you are so wonderful. I wish Ralph were more
like you but he isn’t. He just doesn’t seem to be able to excite a girl at all.” Lover: “Oh, Ralph
isn’t so bad. I like him.” Mother: “You don’t know his pride. If Ralph found out about this, it
would kill him. He would just die, I know.” Lover: “Don’t worry, Ralph’ll never hear.”
This little gem of an engram is more common than one would suppose before he begins
to get an embryo-eye view of Mother. This won’t compute in the analyzer as data. Therefore it
is a worry. (A worry is contradictory engram commands which cannot be computed.) Ralph,
Junior, finds that he is very shy sexually. That is the aberrative pattern. Approaching it in
therapy we find we have a sympathy computation with the lover. After all, he said Ralph
wasn’t so bad, that he liked Ralph. Well, the only Ralph is, of course, to the reactive mind,
Junior. This keeps our patient from approaching this engram because he thinks he will lose a
friend if he touches it.
Further, on the aberrative side, Junior has always worried about people’s pride. As we
contact this in therapy, he shies violently from it. After all, if he found out about it it would
“kill him dead right where he lies.” And there is another thing here, a sonic shut-off. It says
right there that Ralph will never hear. This is survival stuff. That is what the cells believe.
Therefore Ralph never hears in recall. There will be more sonic shut-offs; Mother is
promiscuous and that generally means blockage on the second dynamic. Blockage on the
second dynamic often means she dislikes children. In short, this would be an attempted
abortion case which stabbed Junior full of enough holes to supply a cheese factory for some
time.
Junior, now a man, may have extended hearing because he is frightened in general of
“life.” But his sonic recall is zero. This engram, then, would have to be sorted out through the
demon circuits as “impressions” which come to the mind. The auditor, taking what the patient
says about this, may very soon guess its content and explode it by repeater technique.
Now take the case of the mother who, a soul of propriety if a little on the whiny side,
discovers she is pregnant and goes to the doctor. Mother: “I think I’m pregnant. I’m afraid I
am.” Doctor punches her around for a while, knocking the unborn child, who is our pre-clear
thirty years later, into an “unconscious” state. Doctor: “I don’t think so.” Mother: “I’m really
afraid I am. I’m sure I’m caught. I just know it.” Doctor (more punching): “Well, it’s hard to
tell this early.”
It says right there that this man patient of ours is pregnant. If we look, we’ll see he has
a paunch. That’s good survival, that is. And in therapy we find he is afraid he exists: I am
afraid I am. And suddenly he isn’t moving on the time track. Why? He’s caught. That doesn’t
mean he’s pregnant, that means he is caught. Further, he won’t be able to recount it. Why?
Because it is hard to tell this early. Consequently he doesn’t speak about it. We free him on the
track with repeater technique.
Oh, this language of ours which says everything it doesn’t mean! Put into the hands of
the moronic reactive mind, what havoc it wreaks! Literal interpretation of everything! Part of
the aberrative pattern of the person who had the above engram was great cautiousness about
advancing any opinion. After all, it was hard to tell, this early.
Now let us take an engram from a girl patient whose father was badly aberrated. He
strikes Mother because he is afraid Mother is pregnant and Father is blocked on Dynamics One,
Two, Three and Four. Father: “Get out! Get out! I know you haven’t been true to me! You
were no virgin when I married you. I should have killed you long ago! Now you’re pregnant.
Get out!”
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The girl, some five weeks after conception, is knocked “unconscious” by the blow to
Mother’s abdomen. She has a severe engram here because it has painful emotional value which
she will never be able to dramatize satisfactorily. The aberrative pattern here demonstrates itself
in hysterics whenever a man might accuse her of not being true. She was a virgin when she
was married twenty-one years after this engram was received, but she was sure she was not.
She has had a “childhood delusion” that her father was likely to kill her. And she is always
afraid of being pregnant because it says now she is pregnant, which means always, since time
is a march of “nows.” In therapy we try to get near this engram. We return the patient to basic
area and suddenly find her talking about something which happened when she was five years
of age. We return her again and now she is talking about something which happened when she
was ten years of age. The auditor, observing any such reaction as this, knows he is handling a
bouncer. It says, “Get out!” and the patient gets out. The auditor recognizes what is wrong,
uses repeater technique, and reduces or erases the engram.
Always and invariably, the analytical mind reacts to these engrams as though
commanded. It performs on the track as these engrams state. And it computes about the case or
about life as these engrams dictate. Healthy things to have around, engrams! Real, good
survival! Survival good enough to lay any man in his grave.
The auditor is not much worried by the phrases which assist therapy. An engram
received from Father beating Mother which says: “Take that! Take it, I tell you. You’ve got to
take it!” means that our patient has possibly had tendencies as a kleptomaniac. (Such things are
the whole source of the impulses of a thief, the test being that when an auditor erases all such
engrams in a patient, the patient no longer steals.) The auditor will find it eagerly recounted
because its content offers it to the analytical mind.
The whole species of engrams which say, “Come back here! Now stay here!” as
Fathers are so fond of saying, account for a snap back to an engram when therapy is entered.
The patient goes straight back to it the moment it is exposed. When recounted the command is
no longer effective. But while that engram existed, unentered, it was fully capable of sending
people to an institution to lie in a foetal position. Anyone left in institutions who has not been
given shocks or pre-frontal lobotomy and who suffers from this type of insanity can be
released from such an engram and restored to present time simply by use of repeater technique.
It sometimes takes only half an hour.
Traveling on the track, then, and wandering through the computations the analyzer is
compelled by these engrams to attempt is something like playing a child’s game which has a
number of squares and along which one is supposed to move a “man.” A game could actually
be composed on the basis of this time track and engram commands. It would be similar to
parchesi. Move so many squares, land on one which says, “Get out!” which means one would
go back to present time or toward it. Move so many squares and then lose a move because this
square on which we now land says, “Stay here!” and the “man” would stay until the auditor let
him out by technique (but because this is struck by therapy, it would have no power to hold
long). Then move so many squares to one which said, “Go to sleep,” at which the “man”
would have to go to sleep. Move so many squares until one was hit which said, “Nobody must
find out,” and so there would be no square. Move so many until one was reached which said,
“I’m afraid,” at which the “man” would be afraid. Move again to a square which said, “I must
go away,” so the “man” would go away. Move once more to a square which says, “I’m not
here,” and the square would be missing. And so forth and so forth.
The classes of commands which particularly trouble the auditor are only a few. Because
the mind actually does some part of its thinking, especially when remembering, by return, even
when the individual is not returning, all these commands also impede the thought processes of
the mind. In therapy they are particularly irksome and are the constant target of attention of the
auditor.
136.137
First is the patient-ejector species of command. These are colloquially called
“bouncers.” They include such things as “Get out!” “Don’t ever come back,” “I’ve got to stay
away,” etc. etc., including any combination of words which literally mean ejection.
Second is the patient-holder species of command. These include such things as “Stay
here,” “Sit right there and think about it,” “Come back and sit down,” “I can’t go,” “I mustn’t
leave,” etc.
Third is the engram-denyer species of command which, literally translated, means that
the engram doesn’t exist: “I’m not here,” “This is getting nowhere,” “I must not talk about it,”
“I can’t remember,” etc.
Fourth is the engram-grouper species of command which, literally translated, means
that all incidents are in one place on the time track: “I’m jammed up,” “Everything happens at
once,” “Everything comes in on me at once,” “I’ll get even with you,” etc.
Fifth is the patient-misdirector which sends the pre-clear in the wrong direction, makes
him go earlier when he should be going later, go later when he should go earlier, etc. “You
can’t go back at this point,” “You’re turned around,” etc.
The bouncer sends the pre-clear soaring back toward present time. The holder keeps
him right where he is. The denyer makes him feel that there is no incident present. The fourth,
the grouper, foreshortens his time track so that there is no time track. The misdirector reverses
the necessary direction of travel.
Contacting any engram causes the pre-clear to react “analytically.” Just as in the case of
an engram being restimulated, the commands are impinged upon his analyzer, and although the
analyzer may firmly believe it has just computed the reaction all of its own accord, it is actually
speaking straight out of the content of an engram or engrams.
This is the method of repeater technique.
As he goes back along the track contacting engrams, the pre-clear runs into areas of
“unconsciousness” which are occluded by “unconsciousness” or emotion. In most early
engrams the pre-clear can be expected to yawn and yawn. It is not the command “to sleep”
which is responsible for this: the “unconsciousness” is releasing (boiling off, the auditors call
it). A pre-clear may, for a space of two hours, fumble around, drop off into
“unconsciousness,” appear doped, start to go to sleep, without any such command being
present.
Part of the engram bundle of data is the analyzer shut-off. When he is returned and an
engram is contacted, the pre-clear then experiences an analyzer attenuation, which means he is
much less able to think in the area.
Boiling-off “unconsciousness” is a process very necessary to therapy, for this
“unconsciousness” could be restimulated in the everyday life of the individual and, when
restimulated, make his wits shut off just a little or a very great deal, slowing down his thought
processes.
The aspect of “unconsciousness,” then, reduces the pre-clear’s awareness whenever it
is contacted. He has dreams, he mumbles foolish things, he flounders. His analyzer is
penetrating the veil which kept him from the engram. But it is also highly susceptible, when in
this state, to an engram command.
When urged by the auditor to go through the engram and recount it (although the
auditor knows it may take minutes for this “unconsciousness” to boil off enough to let the
patient through) the pre-clear may complain that “I can’t go back at this point.” The auditor
promptly takes note of this. It is an engram command coming through. He does not apprise the
137.138
patient of this knowledge; the patient usually doesn’t know what he’s saying. If the patient
then continues to have trouble, the auditor tells him, “Say, ‘I can’t go back at this point.’” The
patient then repeats this, the auditor making him go over it and over it. Suddenly the somatic
turns on and the engram is contacted.
In interviewing a patient, the auditor notes carefully without appearing to do so, what
phrases the patient chooses and repeats about his ills or about dianetics. After he has placed the
patient in reverie, if he discovers the patient, for instance, insists he “can’t go any place,” the
auditor makes him repeat the phrase.
Repetition of such a phrase, over and over, sucks the patient back down the track and
into contact with an engram which contains it. It may happen that this engram will not release --
having too many before it -- but it will not release only in case it has that same phrase in an
earlier engram. So the repeater technique is continued with the auditor making the patient go
earlier and earlier fur it. If all goes on schedule the patient will very often let out a chuckle or a
laugh of relief. The phrase has been sprung. The engram has not been erased, but that much of
it will not thereafter influence therapy.
Anything the patient does about engrams and any words he uses to describe the action
are contained, usually, in those engrams. Repeater technique takes the charge off the phrases so
that the engrams can be approached.
This technique, of course, can very occasionally land the patient in trouble, but the kind
of trouble into which one can get in dianetics is not very severe. The engram, restimulated in
everyday life, can be and is violent. Murders, rapes and arsons, attempted abortions,
backwardness in school, -- any aberrated aspect of life -- stems from these engrams. But the act
of approaching them in dianetic therapy goes on another channel, a channel closer to the source
of the engram. Ordinarily, acting on an unsuspecting individual, the engram has enormous
motor and speech power, ties up great numbers of circuits in the mind which should be used
for rationality, and generally effects havoc: its contacts are “soldered-in” and cannot be thrown
out by the analyzer. In therapy the patient is headed toward the engram: that act alone begins to
disconnect some of its “permanent leads.” A patient can be gotten into an engram which, unless
approached on the therapy route, might have made him curl up like a foetus and get shipped off
to the nearest institution. On the therapy route, which is a return down the time track, the most
powerful holder has its force limited: a patient can get into a holder which in normal life might
be a psychosis: his only manifestation, perhaps, is that when he is told to “Come up to present
time,” he simply opens his eyes without actually traversing the interval up the track to present
time. He does not suspect he is in a holder until the auditor, watchful for such a manifestation,
feeds him repeater technique.
AUDITOR: Are you in present time?
PRE-CLEAR: Sure.
AUDITOR: How do you feel?
PRE-CLEAR: Oh, I’ve got a slight headache.
AUDITOR: Close your eyes. Now say: “Stay here.”
PRE-CLEAR: All right. Stay here. Stay here. Stay here. (Several times)
AUDITOR: Are you moving?
PRE-CLEAR: No.
AUDITOR: Say “I’m caught. I’m caught.”
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PRE-CLEAR: I’m caught. (Several times)
AUDITOR: Are you moving on the track?
PRE-CLEAR: Nope.
AUDITOR: Say, “I’m trapped.”
PRE-CLEAR: I’m trapped. I -- Ouch, my head!
AUDITOR: Keep going over it.
PRE-CLEAR: I’m trapped. I’m trapped. I’m trapped, Ouch! That’s worse! (His somatic is
getting stronger as he approaches the engram holding him on the other side of the
“unconsciousness” veil)
AUDITOR: Keep going over it.
PRE-CLEAR: I’m trapped -- “Oh, God, I’m trapped. I’ll never get out of this place. I’ll never
get out. I’m trapped!”
AUDITOR: Contact it closely. Make sure there is nothing more in it. (A trick to keep the pre-clear
from replaying what he himself has just said and keep running the engram)
PRE-CLEAR: My head hurts! Let me come up to present time!
AUDITOR: Go through it again. (If the pre-clear comes up with this much charge, he’ll be
unhappy and the incident may be hard to enter next time)
PRE-CLEAR: “Oh, God, I’m trapped. I’m afraid I’m trapped (new word showed up). I’ll
never get out of this place as long as I live. I’m trapped. I’ll never get out. I’m trapped.”
(aside) She’s crying. “Oh, why did I ever have to marry such a man!”
AUDITOR: How’s your head?
PRE-CLEAR: Hurts less. Say, that’s a dirty trick. She’s pounding herself on the stomach.
That’s mean! Why, confound her!
AUDITOR: Re-experience it. again. Let’s make sure there isn’t more in it. (Same mechanism
to keep the pre-clear from replaying what he said before rather than what he now gets from the
engram. If he replays rather than re-experiences, the engram won’t lift)
PRE-CLEAR: (Does so, getting some new words and several sounds including the thud of the
blows on her abdomen and an auto horn (bulb type) in the street outside) Don’t tell me I have to
run this thing again.
AUDITOR: Recount it, please.
PRE-CLEAR: Well, so this dame tries to bust my head in and get rid of me. And so I jumped
out and beat hell out of her.
AUDITOR: Please re-experience the engram.
PRE-CLEAR: (Starts to do so, suddenly finds out that like a piece of string with a loop in it,
this engram has straightened out and contains more data where the loops were). “I’ve got to
think of something to tell Harry. He’ll jump all over me.” ( This was the source of his joking --
“jumped out, etc.”)
AUDITOR: Please go over it again. There may be more in it.
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PRE-CLEAR: (Does so, old parts of it reduce, two new sounds appear, her footsteps and
running water. Then he is happy laughs at it. This engram is released because it may not have
entirely vanished. Such an engram is in this shape only when it is contacted prior to basic-basic.)
This is both repeater technique and an engram talked into recession. This engram may
appear again with a very faint additional charge after basic-basic is contacted, but it has lost all
power to aberrate or give out a psycho-somatic headache or other illness. Yet this engram, not
contacted by therapy, was quite enough to make this patient, when a boy, scream with terror
every time he found he could not get out of some closed space (claustrophobia).
The repeater technique is the one particular phase of dianetics which requires cleverness
from the auditor. Given persistency and patience, any auditor can succeed in the other phases
of the science with minimal intelligence. In the repeater technique he must learn how to think --
for therapy purposes -- like an engram. And he will have to observe how the subject is
conducting himself along the time track. And he will have to observe the type of reaction the
subject has and draw from this the conclusion as to what sort of command is troubling the
subject when the subject himself either does not cooperate or does not know.
This is not to say that the repeater technique is hard: it is not. But the ability of the
auditor to use it is the principal reason why a case takes longer with one auditor than another. It
is a definite ability. It is playing the game mentioned earlier with cleverness. Where is the pre-clear
stuck and with what command? Why has the pre-clear suddenly stopped cooperating?
Where is the emotional charge which is holding up the case? With the repeater technique the
auditor can resolve all these problems and a clever auditor resolves them much faster than an
unclever one.
How does one think like an engram? Ronald Ross, discovering that insects carried
germs, considered it necessary to think like a mosquito. Here is a similar menace, the engram.
One has to learn to think, for therapy purposes, like an engram.
The auditor could not and does not have to be able to look into a patient’s eyes and
guess why the patient won’t eat anything but cauliflower on Wednesdays. That is an aberration
and the auditor does not have to guess at either aberrations or psycho-somatic illness sources;
they all come out in time and he will learn much about them as he goes. But the auditor must be
able to keep his patient straightened out on the track, moving earlier into the basic area, moving
upwards from there for a reduction. The current answer to this is the repeater technique.
Understand that a whole new art of practice, or many arts of practice, could be evolved for
dianetics: one would be unhappy with his fellow man if such evolution and betterment did not
take place. Just now the best that has come forward -- and the criterion of best is that it works
uniformly in all cases -- is the repeater technique. The auditor must be able to use it if he
expects anything like results from a case at this time. When the auditor -- or some auditor -- has
run a few cases and knows the nature of this beast, the engram, he may -- and better had --
come forward with improved techniques of his own. The real drawback which repeater
technique has is that it requires the auditor to be clever.
Being clever does not mean talking a lot. In dianetics, when one is auditing, that is
being very unclever. Indeed auditors, when they begin to work cases, almost invariably so love
the sound of their own voices and the feel of their skill that the poor pre-clear hardly gets a
chance to get a word in reactive-wise -- and it is the pre-clear who is to be cleared, who has the
only accurate information, who can make the only evaluations.
Being clever in the sense of the repeater technique is being able to pick out, from the
subject’s conversation or action, just what the engrams contain which will prevent his reaching
them, progressing through them and so forth. The repeater technique is addressed only to
action, not to aberration.
140.141
Here is a case, for instance, which was so “sealed-in” that thirty hours of almost
continual repeater technique were necessary to break the walls between the analytical mind and
the engrams. It is important to know that an engram would not be an engram if the pre-clear
could contact it easily. Any engram which can be easily contacted and has no emotional charge
is about as aberrative as a glass of soda water.
A young girl, with sonic recall, but with extended hearing and such a complete
imbalance of the endocrine system that she had become an old woman at twenty-two, was
worked for seventy-five hours before she contacted anything in the basic area. This is almost
incredible but it happened. In a patient with sonic shut-off and off his time track, seventy-five
hours of work would just about get the wheels greased. But this girl, having sonic recall,
should have been well on the road to being clear and she had yet to touch basic-basic.
By repeater technique and repeater alone the case was finally resolved. It contained
practically no holders or bouncers. It simply appeared that the whole prenatal area was a blank.
Now it happens that an engram, being not a memory with reason in it, is just a set of
waves or some other type of recording which impinges itself on the analytical mind and the
somatic mind and runs the voice and muscles and other parts of the body. The analytical mind,
to justify what it finds going forward, and cut down by the engram in dramatization, may be
interjecting data to make this action seem reasonable -- to justity it. But this does not make an
engram sentient. When an engram is first approached in therapy it appears to be absent entirely.
It may be that three sessions will be required to “develop” this engram. As many are worked,
this does not mean three blank sessions, but it means that the “I,” in returning, must pass over
an engram a few times for the engram to “develop.” This is important to know. Just as you ask
the mind for a datum one week and don’t find it (in an aberree) and ask it again the next week
and find it, so with engrams. A cardinal principle in therapy is that if you keep asking for it,
you will eventually get the engram. Returning over and over the prenatal area will, of itself
alone, eventually develop the engrams in it so that the analytical mind can attack them and
reduce them. This is slow freight. The repeater technique -- although the engram is still in need
of development by several sessions -- speeds the process immensely.
In the case of this young girl it probably would have taken another fifty or sixty hours
of work to contact the engrams unless a technique like repeater had been used.
Repeater technique resolved it when the auditor noted that she kept saying, “I’m sure
there’s a good reason why I feel bad up in my childhood. After all, my brother raped me when
I was five. I’m sure it’s up in my childhood, much later. My mother was terribly jealous of me.
I’m sure it’s later.”
This young lady, as might be imagined, had studied some school of mental healing in
college which thought sex or eating vitamins caused aberrations of the mind and she had often
held forth on the fact that while she was not averse to what she called “analysis” she did think it
dull to expect a foetus to hear anything. She would go into the area before birth and declare she
was quite comfortable. But birth was not in sight. That is important. The basic engram or
engrams in the basic area -- around the embryo period -- cannot vanish and will not vanish
short of therapy, and when birth cannot even be contacted by so much as one somatic, it is
certain that something lies before it. If birth were the first engram, everybody could be cleared
in five hours. Birth can even be in sight and there may still remain half a hundred severe
prenatal experiences. In her case, nothing was in sight. Her educational pattern had slowed the
case: she was always trying to sit in present time and “remember” with a memory so full of
occlusions that she couldn’t have recalled her mother’s right name. (She had acquired this from
being in the hands of mental practitioners for ten years who had asked her to do nothing but
“remember.”) As has been said, she was quite comfortable before birth, sensed the amniotic
fluid and was certain that life in the womb was a joyous life for all. The incongruity that she
could experience the sensations of this amniotic fluid and floating comfort and warmth and a
continued belief that there was no prenatal memory escaped her utterly. The auditor made no
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slightest effort to convince her. Knowing his business, he merely kept sending her back and
forth, trying this mechanism or that.
She finally wanted to know if there had to be prenatal experience and was told that what
was there was there, that if there was no prenatal memory then she wouldn’t recall any but that
if there was, she might. This is a good, equivocal attitude for an auditor. Dianetics, after all, as
one auditor put it, “just shows the yard goods” and makes no sales effort at all.
The auditor had been using repeater technique on varieties of phrases. She was moving
on the track so there must be a denyer present. And he had utterly run out of ideas when he
realized, suddenly, that she was very handy with that phrase, “much later.”
AUDITOR: Say “Much later” and return into the prenatal area.
GIRL: “Much later. Much later,” etc. (very bored and uncooperative).
AUDITOR: Continue please. (Never say “Go ahead” for that means to do just that. Say
“Continue” when you want them to keep on progressing along an engram or repeating and
“Return over it” when re-running an engram already run once.)
GIRL: “Much later. Much...” I have a somatic in my face! It feels like I am being pushed.
(This was good news for the auditor knew she had a mid-prenatal pain shut-off which
prevented later somatics from appearing.)
AUDITOR: Contact it more closely and continue to repeat.
GIRL: “Much later. Much later.” It’s getting stronger. (Naturally. On repeater technique, the
somatic gets stronger until the phrase appears, exactly right. On a non-sonic case it impinges
itself indirectly on “I”; in a sonic, the sound comes through as sound.)
AUDITOR: Continue.
GIRL: “Much...” I hear a voice! There. That’s it. Why, that’s my father’s voice!
AUDITOR: Listen to the words and repeat them, please.
GIRL: He’s talking to my mother. Say, this face pressure is uncomfortable. It keeps going up
and down on me. It hurts!
AUDITOR: Repeat his words please.
GIRL: He’s saying: “Oh honey, I won’t come in you now. It’s better to wait until much later
to have one.” And there’s my mother’s voice. Say, this pressure is hurting me. No, it’s eased
up considerably. Funny, the minute I contacted his voice, it got less.
AUDITOR: What is your mother saying, please, if you hear her?
GIRL: She’s saying: “I don’t want you in there at all then!” She’s mad! Say, the somatic
stopped. (Coitus had ended at this point.)
AUDITOR: Please return to the start of this and recount.
GIRL: (Regains the beginning, somatic returns) I wonder what they’re doing? (then a pause) I
hear a squishing sound! (then a pause and embarrassment) Oh!
AUDITOR: Recount the engram please.
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GIRL: There’s a sort of a faint rhythm at first and then it gets faster. I can hear breathing. Now
it’s beginning to bear down harder but a lot less than it did the first time. Then it eases up and I
hear my father’s voice: “Oh, honey I won’t come in you now. It’s better to wait until much
later to have one. I’m not too sure I like children that well. Besides, my job ...” And my
mother must shove at him because there’s a sharper somatic here. “I don’t want you in there at
all then. You cold fish!”
AUDITOR: Return to the beginning and recount it again, please.
GIRL: (Recounts it several times, somatic finally vanishes. She feels quite cheerful about it but
doesn’t think to mention that she doubted prenatals existed.)
This is repeater technique at work. This particular case had had about two hundred
phrases thrown at her for repeater technique without finding one of them that would fit. In the
first place, there were only a few lower engrams which the file clerk was willing to give out
and the auditor was guessing at the whole gamut of deniers. A later incident might have
contained -- and did but no somatic appeared -- numbers of the phrases he used. But the file
clerk was willing to settle for this one for it was early and could be erased.
The file clerk rarely hands out something in a badly occluded case which cannot be
reduced to recession. And an auditor never leaves an engram so offered until he has made every
effort with many recountings to reduce it. The file clerk, in this case, by the bye, would have
let down the auditor by putting forth such an engram as birth, which would not have lifted and
which would have caused a lot of lost work and given the patient a headache for a few days.
The auditor would have let the file clerk down if he had not reduced the engram offered by
making the girl go over it several times until the somatic was gone and the voice faded out.
The reason this engram stayed hidden was because its content said so. Actually it was a
coitus. As an engram it seemed to say that the incidents would be found later on in life.
Further, as an engram, it said that it was not to be entered.
Repeater technique will sometimes embroil a patient in trouble of a minor sort by getting
him “sucked into” incidents which will not lift. This is not common but the file clerk
occasionally hands out a late incident, rather than an early one. However, this is not an error on
the part of the file clerk. Remember, he has these engrams filed by subject, somatic and time,
and the auditor can use any one of these. When the file clerk responds and hands out a somatic
on a repeater phrase the auditor has gleaned from the pre-clear’s chatter or has guessed himself
and yet that somatic will not lift or no voice appears with it (in a sonic case, or merely won’t lift
with a non-sonic), the file clerk had to unstack a pile of material. Therefore, the auditor,
realizing this, finding that a voice does not appear or that the somatic will not lift, has the pre-clear
repeat the same phrase and tells him to go earlier and earlier. Another somatic may turn up
in a different place in the body. The file clerk has gotten an even earlier one loose, now that a
small amount of trouble has been taken from what he could first get. Now this earlier one is
addressed similarly. It may get mediumly strong as a somatic, the pre-clear repeating the phrase
all the while, and still no voice may appear. The auditor then sends the pre-clear earlier. The file
clerk again has managed to get out an even earlier one, now that something has been taken from
the second. This time again, an even earlier somatic turns on, probably down around the basic
area in a case which has not previously contacted this area, and this time a voice can be heard.
The engram reduces. The file clerk, in short, was willing to risk trouble in order to get several
somatics unstacked and let the auditor get a basic incident.
There are variations on this sort of thing. As the filing system is by subject, somatic and
time, the auditor can use other things than phrases. He can send a pre-clear to the “highest
intensity of a somatic,” and often results may be obtained, though this is not as reliable as by
subject nor as foolproof. The pre-clear, incidentally, does not mind going to any “highest
intensity” of somatic because somatics are about a thousandth part as strong as the original
agony, though they are quite strong enough. In present time with the pre-clear not in therapy,
the intensity of one of these somatics can be a drastic affair as witness the migraine headache.
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Taking the migraine, a pre-clear can be returned to the very moment of its reception when one
would think its intensity would be the highest and yet find a mild, dull ache such as one would
get with a hangover. This is part of the principle that any entrance of a case is better than a case
not entered at all. For by return with standard reverie technique the source is approached, and if
the source is contacted at all, the power of the engram to aberrate has become reduced in
strength no matter how many mistakes the auditor makes.
Returning to “maximum intensity” of a somatic, then, is nothing very painful. Actual
maximum intensity is when the pre-clear is awake before the contact with the incident is made.
But in returning to “maximum intensity” the incident may often be contacted and reduced. If
“maximum intensity” however, contains in its engram the phrases, “I can’t stand it!” “It’s
killing me,” or “I’m terrified,” then expect our pre-clear to respond to it in some such way. If
he does not respond, then he has an emotional shut-off, which is another problem which will
be taken up later.
Similarly, the auditor can handle his pre-clear in time. There exists a very accurate
clock in the mind. The file clerk is very well acquainted with this clock and wherever possible
will comply. The auditor who wants the patient to go “six minutes before this phrase is uttered”
will generally find that his pre-clear is now six minutes before it, even though the incident is
prenatal. The auditor can bring his pre-clear forward, then, minute by minute as he desires. He
can take a pre-clear straight through an incident by announcing, “It is one minute later, it is two
minutes later. Three minutes have gone by,” and so forth. The auditor does not have to wait for
those minutes to elapse; he just announces them. He can make a pre-clear go through time at
five minute intervals or hour intervals or day intervals, and unless there is engramic material
which holds him or otherwise affects the operation, the auditor can move the pre-clear on the
time track at will. It would be very nice if the auditor could send the pre-clear to conception and
then tell him it is one hour later, two hours later and so forth to pick up the first engram.
However, there are more factors involved than time, and the plan, though pretty, is not
feasible. The time shift is generally used when the auditor is trying to get the pre-clear ahead of
an incident to make sure that he really has a beginning. By returning the pre-clear by five or ten
minute intervals, the auditor may sometimes discover that he is running backwards into a very
long and complicated incident and that the headache he has been seeking to alleviate on the pre-clear
was received, actually, hours before the period in which he thought it had initially been
received. In such a case there is a second engram appended to an earlier engram and the auditor
cannot lift the second one until he has the first one.
Actually time shift is of limited use. The auditor who tries to go chasing backwards
through time will find that he will have on his hands an artificially restimulated case and that the
work is much impeded. Repeater technique works best and is most easily handled by the file
clerk. The auditor uses a time shift to get the pre-clear as close to basic area (early prenatal) as
possible and then generally, if the file clerk doesn’t simply go to work handing out engrams
which can be washed, one after the other, the auditor uses repeater technique. Time shift and
“running down a somatic” have some limited use. Some experimentation will show about how
much use they have.
The laws of regression are these:
(1) A returned patient reacts more, theoretically, to those commands which are earlier than
he is on the time track and less to those commands which are later than his point in
time.
(2) A pre-clear reacts to those engramic commands which are: (a) in chronic restimulation,
or (b) to which he is nearest on the time track. Thus, if an engram says, “I’m afraid,”
he is. If it says, “I’d rather die than face this,” he would. If the command to which he is
near says, “I’m sleepy,” he will be. If it says, “Forget it,” he will. Commands in
chronic restimulation give a false color to the personality: “I can never be sure of
anything,” “I don’t know,” “I can’t hear anything” are all possibly in chronic
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restimulation. If the file clerk won’t give them up, then keep working the case anyway
around these. They will give up after a while.
(3) The action of the pre-clear on the time track and the condition of the track are regulated
exclusively by engramic commands classifiable as bouncers, holders, denyers and
groupers and misdirectors. (These conditions, it is repeated, are quite variable, as
variable as language: “I don’t know whether I am coming or going,” for instance in an
engram makes it very confusing. “I can’t go back at this point” makes the pre-clear keep
progressing later and later.)
(4) The engramic command manifests itself either in the awake speech of the pre-clear after
a session of therapy or is inadvertently announced as a supposedly “analytical” thought
when he nears the vicinity of the command.
(5) The engram is not a sentient, rationalized memory but a collection of unanalyzed
perceptions, and it will develop into contact simply by the process of returning through
it, to it, over it or asking for it.
(6) The file clerk will give the auditor whatever can be extracted from the engram bank. The
auditor must aid the file clerk by reducing in charge or severity everything the file clerk
offers. This is done by making the patient recount it. (Otherwise the file clerk gets so
much material piled around that, with this in restimulation, he can no longer get at the
files. The auditor who bucks the file clerk is not rare. The file clerk who will buck an
auditor except by withholding data which will not reduce has yet to be found.)
The techniques available to the auditor are as follows:
1. Returning, in which the pre-clear is sent as early as possible on his track before therapy
itself is engaged upon.
2. Repeater technique, by which the file clerk is asked for data on certain subjects,
particularly those affecting the return and travel on the time track, and which aid the
ability of the pre-clear to contact engrams.
3. Time shift, by which a pre-clear can be moved short or long distances on the track by
specific announcement of the amount of time forward the pre-clear is to go or time
backwards, or return or progression through intervals of time. (It is also useful to find
out if the pre-clear is moving or which direction he is moving on the time track in order
to discover the action some engram may be having upon him.)
4. Somatic location, by which the moment of reception of the somatic is located, in an
effort to discover whether it is received in this engram or to find an engram containing
it.
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CHAPTER VII
Emotion and the Life Force
One of the largest roles in therapy is played by Emotion. In the second book we
covered this subject and divided it tentatively as a theory only into three divisions: (a) the
emotions contained in the command of engrams whereby physical pain became confused with
emotions; (b) the emotions contained as endocrine reactions subject to the analytical mind of the
clear and the analytical mind and reactive mind of the aberree; and (c) the emotions contained in
engrams which bound up free units of Life force.
Further work and research on emotion will undoubtedly bring about an even closer
understanding of it. But we have a workable knowledge of emotion now. We can use what we
know and produce results with it. When we know more, we shall be able to produce much
better results but just now we can produce the release and the clear. If we treat emotion as
bound up life force and if we follow these general precepts to release it, we shall obtain a very
large gain in any pre-clear; indeed, we shall produce our largest single gains by so releasing
emotion.
In an engineering science like dianetics, we can work on a push-button basis. We know
that throwing a switch will stop a motor, that closing it again will start it and that no matter how
many times we open or close that switch our motor will stop or start. We are using here a force
which is still as mysterious to us as electricity was to James Clerk Maxwell. Much earlier
Benjamin Franklin had observed that electricity existed and had done some interesting things
with it: but he had not used it much and he could not control it. A philosopher like Bergson
selected out a thing he called elan vital, a life force. Man is alive, there must be a force or flow
of something which keeps him alive; when Man is dead there is no force or flow. This is life
force in the Benjamin Franklin stage. As he considered electricity, so did Bergson consider life
force. Now we are up, in dianetics, to the James Clerk Maxwell stage, or very nearly. We
know that certain equations can be made about life force and we can use those equations. And
we can theorize that “life force” and what has been called a certain kind of “emotion” are either
similar or the same thing. We may have the wrong theory, but so might James Clerk Maxwell.
Indeed, Maxwell’s theories may still be wrong: at least we have electric lights. In dianetics we
are pretty certain that the majority of tenets are parallels of natural law: these are the big
computations. We are not certain that we have emotion properly bracketed, but then we shall
not be sure until we have actually taken a dead man and pumped him up with life force again.
Short of this extreme, we are on solid ground with emotion as life force.
We can, for instance, take a girl, examine something of her background with, let us
say, an electro-encephalograph (an instrument for measuring nervous impulses and reactions)
and then proceed on the basis of the information so obtained to do one or two things. The first
is inhuman and would not be done, ot course, but she could be made sick or insane merely by
using this data, so obtained. (If the data is obtained in therapy, it is obtained by actual contact
with engrams and an engram contacted in reverie has lost its power to aberrate: dianetic therapy
thus makes such an eventuality utterly impossible.) The second and far more important fact to
us is that she can be made to recover, with this same data, all the force, interest, persistence and
tenacity to life and all the physical and mental well-being possible. If it could not be made to
work both ways, we would not have the answer, at least in workable form. (Some fiction
writer, by the way, if tempted to horrorize on the first fact, must please recall that the data was
obtained with apparatus which would have staggered Doctor Frankenstein for intricacy and
skill in use and that dianetic therapy contacts the data at source: the apparatus is necessary to
keep from touching the source for the instant the source is touched by therapy its power
vanishes like yesterday’s headlines: so let’s have no “Gaslight” plays about dianetics, please:
they’d be technically inaccurate.)
This is not as simple as electricity in that the switch cannot be turned off and on. So far
as dianetics is concerned, it can only be turned on. We have a rheostat, then, which will not
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drop back but which, when pressed forward, releases more and more dynamic force into the
individual and gives him more and more control over its use.
Man is intended to be a self-determined organism. That is to say that as long as he can
make evaluations of his data without artificial compulsions or repressions (held down 7’s in an
adding machine) he can operate to maximum efficiency. When man becomes exteriorly-determined,
which is to say compelled to do or repressed from doing without his own rational
consent, he becomes a push-button animal. This push-button factor is so sharply defined that
an auditor, in therapy, who discovers a key phrase in an engram (and does not release it) can
use that phrase for a little while to make a patient cough or laugh or stop coughing or stop
laughing at the auditor’s will. In the case of the auditor, because he got the data at source --
contacted the engram itself, which robbed it of some power, the push-button will not last very
long, certainly less than two or three hundred pushes. The whole pain-drive effort at handling
human beings and most of the data accumulated in the past by various schools has been,
unwittingly, this push-button material. If the engram is not touched at source it is good for
endless use, its power never diminishing. Touched at source, however, the original recording
has been reached and so it loses its power. The “handling of human beings” and what people
have been calling, roughly, “psychology” have been actually push-button handling of a
person’s aberrational phrases and sounds. Children discover them in their parents and use them
with a vengeance. The clerk discovers that his boss can’t stand a full waste basket and so
always has one full. The bosun on a ship finds out one of his sailors cringes every time he
hears the phrase, “fancy-pants” and so uses the word to intimidate the man. This is push-button
warfare amongst aberrees. Wives may find that certain words make the husband wince or make
him angry or make him refrain from doing something and so they use these “push-buttons.”
And husbands find their wives’ push-buttons and keep them from buying clothes or using the
car. This defensive and offensive dueling amongst aberrees is occasioned by push-button
reacting against push-buttons.
Whole populaces are handled by their push-button responses. Advertising learns about
push-buttons and uses them in such things as “body-odor” or constipation. And in the
entertainment field and the song-writing field push-buttons are pushed in whole racks and
batteries to produce aberrated responses. Pornography appeals to people who have
pornographic push-buttons. Corn-and-games government appeals to people who have “care for
me” push-buttons and others. It might be said that there is no necessity to appeal to reason
when there are so many push-buttons around.
These same push-buttons, because they are 7’s held down by pain and emotion (false
data forced into the computer by engrams -- and every society has its own special patterns of
engrams), also happen to drive people insane, make them ill and generally raise havoc. The
only push-button the clear has is whatever his own computer, evaluating on his experience
which itself has been evaluated by the computer, tells him is survival conduct along his four
dynamics. And so, being no marionette in the hands of careless or designing people, he
remains well and sane.
It is not true, however, that a clear is not emotional, that his reason is cold, and that he
is a self-conscious puppet to his own computations. His computer works so rapidly and on so
many levels with so many of his computations going on simultaneously but out of the sight of
“I” (though “I” can examine any one of them he chooses) that his inversion or acute awareness
of self is minimal. Inversion is the condition of the aberree whose poor computer is wrestling
with heavy imponderables and held down 7’s in his engrams such as “I must do it. I just have
to do it. But no, I’d better change my mind.”
The computational difference between the clear and the aberree is very wide. But there
is a much grander difference: life force. The dynamics have, evidently, so much potential force.
This force manifests itself as tenacity to life, persistence in endeavor, vigor of thought and act
and ability to experience pleasure. The dynamics in a man’s cells may be no stronger than those
in a cat’s cells. But the dynamics in the whole man are easily greater than those in any other
animal. Assign this as one will, the man is basically more alive in that he has a more volatile
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response. By more alive is meant that his sentient-emotional urge to live is greater than those
found in other life forms. If this were not true, he would not now command the other
kingdoms. Regardless of what a shark or a beaver does when threatened with final extinction,
the shark and the beaver get short shrift when they encounter the dynamics of Man: the shark
gets worn as leather or eaten as vitamins and the beaver decks a lady’s back.
The fundamental aspect of this is seen in a single reaction. Animals are content to
survive in their environments and seek to adjust themselves to those environments. That very
dangerous animal -- or god -- Man has a slightly different idea. Ancient schools were fond of
telling the poor demented aberree that he must face reality. This was optimum conduct: facing
reality. Only it isn’t Man’s optimum conduct. Just as these schools made the fundamental error
of supposing that the aberree was unwilling to face his environment when he was actually,
because of engrams, unable to face it, they supposed that the mere facing of reality would lead
to sanity. Perhaps it does, but it does not lead to a victory of Man over the elements and other
forms. Man has something more: some people call it creative imagination, some call it this or
some call it that: but whatever it is called, it adds up to the interesting fact that Man is not
content merely to “face reality” as most other life forms are. Man makes reality face him.
Propaganda about “the necessity of facing reality,” like propaganda to the effect that a man
could be driven mad by a “childhood delusion” (whatever that is) does not face the reality that
where the beaver down his ages of evolution built mud dams and keeps on building mud dams
Man graduates in half a century from a stone and wood dam to make a mill wheel pond to
structures like Grand Coulee Dam, and changes the whole and entire aspect of a respectable
portion of Nature’s real estate from a desert to productive soil, from a flow of water to
lightning bolts. It may not be as poetic as Rousseau desired, it may not be as pretty as some
“nature lover” would desire, but it’s a new reality. Two thousand years ago the Chinese built a
wall which would have been visible from the Moon had anybody been up there to look; three
thousand years ago he had North Africa green and fertile; ten thousand years ago he was
engaged upon some other project; but always he has been shaping things up pretty well to suit
Man.
There’s an extra quality at work or perhaps just more of it, so much more of it that it
looks like a new thing entirely.
Now all this is not any great digression from therapy; it is stated here as an aspect of life
force. Where the individual finds himself “possessed of less and less life force,” he is losing
some of the free units somewhere.
And the free units of this life force, in a society or an individual, are the extra surge that
is needed to tame North Africa, divide an atom, or reach the stars.
The mechanical theory here -- and recall it is but theory and dianetics can stand without
it -- is that there are so many units of force per individual. These units may be held in common
by a group and may build to higher and higher numbers as “enthusiasm” increases; but for our
purposes, we can consider that Man, as an individual or a society -- both are organisms -- has a
ready number to hand for use in any given hour or day. He may manufacture these life units as
required and he may simply have a given supply: that is beside the point.
What is to the point is that he can be considered, at any hour or day, as just so much
alive. Consider this as his dynamic potential as we can see on our descriptic earlier.
What happens, then, to this dynamic potential in the aberree? He has a large quantity of
engrams in his bank. We know that these engrams can sleep for his entire life without being
“keyed-in,” and we know that any or all of them can be keyed-in and thereafter wait for
restimulators in the environment to set them into action. We know that his necessity level can
suddenly rise and surmount all these keyed-in engrams, and we know that a high survival
activity can bring him such a chance of pleasure that the engrams can stay unrestimulated,
though keyed-in. And we can suppose that these engrams, from one period of life to another,
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can actually key-out again and stay out because of some vast change of environment or survival
chances.
The usual case, however, is that a few engrams stay keyed-in continually and are
restimulated rather chronically by the environment of the individual, and that if he changes
environment the old may key out but eventually new ones will key-in.
Most aberrees are in a state of chronic restimulation which, on the average, starts the
spiral dwindling down rather rapidly.
As this pertains to life force, the mechanical action of an engram on being keyed-in, is
to capture so many of these units of life force. Sudden and sweeping restimulation of the
engram permits it to capture a great many more units of life force. In the average case, every
restimulation captures a greater residue of life force and holds it. When enthusiasm or impetus
aligns the purpose of the individual toward a true survival goal (as opposed to a pseudo-goal in
the engrams) he recaptures some of these units. But the spiral is dwindling: he cannot capture
back, except in very unusual circumstances, as many as he has lost into the engram bank.
Thus it can be said, for purposes of this theory of life force action, that more and more
life force units out of an individual’s supply are captured and held in the engram bank. Here
they are perverted in use to counterfeit themselves as dynamic (as in the manic and the high
euphoria case) and force action upon the somatic and analytical mind. In this engram bank, the
life force units are not available as free feeling or for free action but are used against the
individual from within.
An observation here tends to demonstrate this action: the more restimulated an aberree
is, the less free feeling he may possess. If caught in a manic (highly complimentary pro-survival
engram), his life force is channeling straight through the engram and his behavior, no
matter how enthusiastic or euphoric, is actually very aberrated: if he has this much life force to
be so channeled, then he can be shown to have even more life force, sentiently directed, when
clear. (This has been done.)
We have demonstrated the parasitic quality of the “demon circuits” which use pieces of
the analytical mind and its processes. This parasitic quality is common to engrams in other
ways. If a man has, arbitrarily, a thousand units of life force, he has an ability to channel them,
when clear, into highly zestful existence: in a manic state, with a pro-survival engram in full
restimulation, the life force is directed through an aberrated command and gives him, let us say,
five hundred units of pseudo-dynamic thrust.
In other words, the power is out of the same battery: such an engram has at best less
power than the whole organism, cleared, would have. (This aspect of the manic or super-personality
neurotic has misled some of the old schools of mental healing into the thoroughly
aberrated and poorly observed belief that insanities alone were responsible for Man’s ability to
survive, a concept which can be disproven in the laboratory simply by clearing one of these
manics or any other aberree.)
The engram uses the same current but perverts it just as it uses the same analytical mind
but usurps it. Not only does the engram have no life of its own, but it is wasteful as are so
many parasites, of the life force of the host. It is thoroughly inefficient. If a comparable device
were fitted into an electronic circuit it would merely lead off and make “unalterable” some of the
functions of the equipment which should be left variable and would, in addition, consume,
simply by lengthened leads and bad condensers and tubes, power supply vital to the machine.
In the human mind, the engram assumes its most forceful “assist” aspect in the manic,
channeling and commanding the organism into some activity of wild violence and monomanic
concentration.
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The “super-salesman,” the violently buoyant “glad-hander,” the fanatical and apparently
unkillable religious zealot are classifiable as manics. The abundance of “power” in these
people, even when it is as grim as Torquemada’s or as destructive as Genghis Khan’s, is an
object of admiration in many quarters. The manic, as will be later covered, is a “pro-survival,”
“assist” command in an engram which yet fixes the individual on some certain course. But an
engram is capable only of as much “power” as is present in the host, just as it is capable of
tying up only as much analyzer as is present.
Let us take a forceful manic who is displaying and functioning on 500 arbitrary units of
life force. Let us assume that the entire being is possessed of 1000 arbitrary units of life force.
Suppose we have here an Alexander. The dynamics of the average person are unassisted by
manics in most cases but are dispersed as a stream of electrons might be dispersed by a block
before them.
Here are scattered activity, scattered thoughts, uncomputable problems, lack of
alignment. In such a person, with 1000 units present, 950 of those units could be so captured
in the engram banks and yet so thoroughly counteractive that the person displays a functioning
capacity of only 50 units. In the case of Alexander, it could be assumed, the manic must have
been an alignment in a general direction of his own basic purposes. His basic purpose is a
strong regulator: the manic happens to align with it: a person of great ability and personal
prowess becomes possessed of 500 units via a manic engram, believes he is a god and goes out
and conquers the known world. He was educated to believe he was a god, his manic engram
said he was a god and had a holder in it.
Alexander conquered the world and died at 33. He could hold in his manic only so long
as it could be obeyed: when it could no longer be obeyed, it changed his valence, became no
more a manic and drove him, with pain, into dispersed activities. The engram, received from
his mother, Olympia, can almost be read even at this late date. It must have said he would be a
joyous god who would conquer all the world and must keep on conquering, that he must
always strive to rise higher and higher. It was probably a ritual chant of some sort from his
mother, who was a high priestess of Lesbos and who must have received some injury just
before the ritual. She hated her husband, Phillip. A son who would conquer all was the
answer. Alexander may well have had fifty or a hundred such “assist” engrams, the violent
praying of a woman aberrated enough to murder. Thus he could be assumed to have conquered
until he could no longer stretch a line of supply for conquering, at which time he, of course,
would no longer be able to obey the engram and its force of pain would turn on him. The
engrams dictated attack to conquer, and they enforced the command with pain: once conquering
could not longer be accomplished, the pain attacked Alexander. He realized one day he was
dying: within the week he was dead: and at the height of his power. Such, on a very large
scale, is a manic phrase in an engram at work.
Now let us suppose that Alexander, with only education to turn him against his father,
with only prayers to ask him to conquer the world, not engrams, had been cleared. Answer:
given a sufficient and rational reason, he would most certainly have been able to conquer the
world and at eighty might well have been alive to enjoy it.
How can we assume this?
The manic with 500 units of directed purpose has been cleared. He now has 1000 units
of sentiently directed purpose. He is exactly twice as forceful as he was when he was in a
forceful manic and his basic purpose may be similar but now can be realized and will not turn
on him the moment he has reached a goal or failed.
This is clinical, the theory behind life force. It was formulated in an effort to explain
observed phenomena.
The theory may be wrong, the observed data is not. But the theory must be somewhere
close to right because with it could be predicted considerable phenomena which had not been
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known to exist before: in other words, it is a profitable theory. It followed after dianetics was
well formulated, for a strange fact, vital to the therapist, turned up: the pre-clear advanced in
therapy in exact ratio to the amount of emotional charge released from his reactive bank.
The purpose and persistency of the aberree was hindered in ratio to the amount of
emotional charge within his engram bank. His recovery of survival potential increased in ratio
to the amount of energy freed from the engram bank.
His health increased in ratio to the amount of energy feed from the engram bank.
The engrams which contained the greatest discharge were those which centered around
loss of imagined survival factors.
Hence, this theory of life force was formulated. Any manic cleared seemed to
demonstrate far more actual power and energy than before he was cleared. And any “normal”
cleared increased in accessible life force units to compare with any manic cleared.
Undoubtedly further work and observation will refine this theory. At the present
moment, however, it serves. It is one of those “scientific theories” thrown in to explain an
operation or a long series of observations. In this case it happens to be squarely aligned with
the basic tenets of dianetics, for it predicts data which can then be found and does not throw out
former data predicted by the basic mathematics and philosophy of dianetics.
Here we are speaking, actually, not of this slippery term, emotion, but, we believe, life
force. This life force is considerably enhanced by success and pleasure in general and is,
according to this theory, augmented in terms of arbitrary units, by pleasure. In other words,
pleasure is a thing which recharges the batteries or permits them to be recharged and in a clear,
far from leading to softness, leads to renewed activity since indolence is engramic.
Pleasure is a vitally important factor: creative and constructive endeavor, the
overcoming of not unknowable obstacles toward some goal, the contemplation of past goals
reached all combine to recharge life force. The person, for instance, who has been an enormous
success and then loses that success and so becomes ill is following no rational cycle but an
engramic command cycle. In a way he has disobeyed an engramic command and having
disobeyed, suffers pain. The “child wonder” who early “burns out” is actually, via therapy,
about as burned out as a banked furnace. Any “child wonder” is a forced affair: think of the
dreams mama must have poured through his engrams. She’s hurt: “Oh, I’ll never forgive
myself! If I have ruined my child, I will never forgive myself. My child, that’s to be the
world’s greatest violinist!” or “Oh, you brute! You have struck me! You have injured our child.
I’ll show you. I’ll make him the greatest child pianist in all Brooklyn! He’s to be a beautiful
child, a wonder child! And you’ve struck him, you brute. Oh, I am going to sit right here until
you go away!” (Actual engrams.) The last computes that the way to get even with papa is to be
the greatest pianist in all Brooklyn. The child is a great success -- musical ear, practice and
great “purpose.” He gets this engram restimulated constantly by his mother. But then, one day
he loses a contest, he knows suddenly he is no longer a child, that he has failed. His purpose
wavers. He gets headaches (papa’s blow) and is at last “neurotic” and “burned out.” Cleared he
went back to being a pianist, not as an “adjusted” person but one of the best paid concert
pianists in Hollywood. Music aligned with basic purpose.
Again, in another manic example, a patient who had been some time in therapy -- not
the first to do this by far -- raved that he had been “turned-on” by dianetics. He was walking
about a foot off the earth, chest punched out and so forth. His glasses suddenly would not fit
him, his eyes were too good. He was a beaming, powerful case of euphoria.
Artificial restimulation had touched a manic engram, had brought it into key for the first
time in his life. He felt wonderful. The auditor knew that he was due for a complete come
down within thirty-six hours to three days (the usual time) because an artificial restimulation,
by therapy, had tapped the engram. It happened that his grandmother had told her daughter that
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she must not abort the child because someday it might become a “fine upstanding man or
beautiful woman.” He was upstanding all right: it almost strained his back muscles. Another
glance at the engram in therapy and the manic phase was gone.
This manic, then, as in the case of the boy wonder, can be assumed to have gathered up
available life force and suddenly channeled it along basic purpose lines, making a high level of
concentration of life force. In the case of the pianist his cleared force was well above the manic
force. In the other case, currently in process, a level has been reached which is approaching the
former level and will surpass it by far.
In the same way an enthusiasm for a project will channel life force along some purpose
line and necessity will suddenly rob back from engrams enough power to carry an individual
far, although he has no active manics whatever.
Now we come to the heart of this matter: the pro-survival engram. It is pseudo-survival
like all engramic “assist,” a mirage which dissolves and leaves burning sands.
Formerly we spoke mainly of contra-survival engrams. These lie across the dynamics
of the individual and his basic purpose.
The contra-survival engram is, to the dynamics, like a log jam which dams a necessary
river. The dynamic is blocked in some degree. Any blockage to any one of the four dynamics
(or any section of that spectrum) causes a dispersal of the flow. It does not make less dynamic,
particularly, but it does misdirect it in the same order that the river, blocked in its natural flow,
might become five streams going in various directions or flood a fertile pasture it should merely
have watered.
The pro-survival engram alleges to assist (but does not actually assist) the dynamic on
its way. It pretends it is the dynamic. In the analogy of the river, the pro-survival engram
would be a canal which took the river’s force and sent it off in some unintended direction. The
pro-survival engram is not a manic; it can and does contain at times manic phrases.
A contra-survival engram says, “He’s worthless, damn him, let’s kill him.”
The pro-survival engram says: “I am saving him.” If it added: “He is a darling and a
very wonder with the ladies,” it would then be a pro-survival with a manic.
In terms of the descriptic which defines the survival dynamic and the suppressor earlier
in this book, the contra-survival engram would be part of the suppressor (an aberrated part) and
the pro-survival engram would be part of the dynamic thrust (an aberrated part).
Neither one of these things is actually a sentient and computable portion of survival
dynamic or suppressor.
The engram (delirium from illness, perhaps) which says, “I will stay with you, darling,
so long as you are sick” is an apparent but wholly shadow-stuff part of the survival dynamic.
But the reactive mind has no sense of time when restimulated and this engram, keyed-in and
constantly restimulated by some concept in it such as an odor or a person’s voice who may or
may not be the original person, demands that the person who has it be ill just as he was ill
when it was said. This way, according to our moron, the reactive mind, lies survival: “I had
some one taking care of me when I was ill. I need some one to take care of me. I must be ill.”
Here is the basic pattern of all sympathy engrams. Here is the basic pattern of the engram
which will contain the chronic psycho-somatic illness in any patient. The variety is, of course,
very large but all insist that the individual who has them be ill in order to survive.
The suppressor-type engram, always contra-survival, can be cut into restimulation in
exactly the same way as the pro-survival engram. An engram is an engram and all the
mechanics are the same. The fact that the analytical mind cannot time the engram can make any
engram seem omnipresent. Time can “heal” the experiences of the analytical mind, perhaps, but
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not the reactive mind which has no time, a fact which makes time not the Great Healer but the
Great Charlatan. There may be no actuality at all in this suppressor data. It is false data. Such
engrams let an individual, for instance, see a butterfly and then tell him it is dangerous: he then
comes to detest spring because that is the time he sees butterflies. This engram may say:
“You’re all against me. You’re against everything I do,” which was actually Mama making a
stand against her husband and mother-in-law. It contains a concept, a recording of the sound of
a sewing machine as well. The individual possessing this engram hears a sewing machine (if
this engram has at some time been keyed-in) at a moment when he is weary and dull and,
looking toward the machine (he never identifies the actual sound:these engrams protect
themselves), sees his wife. She is the associative restimulator, something his analytical mind,
told to scent danger, picks up as the cause. So he searches around and finds something he is
angry about (something almost “rational”) and begins to tell her she is against him. Or it can be
an engram of such low emotional tone that it is an apathy, and so he sits down and weeps and
moans that she is against him. If, during “unconsciousness” at birth, the doctor said he’d have
to spank him, the individual possessing this engram howls and gets headaches when he is
spanked and when grown spanks his children as the strongest suppressor he can think of.
There is a difference, then, between the pro- and contra-engrams, particularly the real
sympathy pro-engram and the contra-engram. And it is a difference, even if we have been long
on the road in this chapter, which is of vital interest to the auditor.
All the real reluctance he will see in pre-clears during therapy will come from these
sympathy pro-survival engrams. These add up into some very weird computations. They tell
the patient that he had better not “get rid of it” and so the patient struggles to retain his engrams.
Such an engram is very common. A typical case is Mama pushing off Papa, who insists he
cannot afford a child: the struggle injures the child and in the “unconsciousness” he receives, of
course, an engram: Mama is refusing to get rid of it. Mama is on baby’s side, therefore baby
had better do exactly as Mama says and “not get rid of it.” This aligns with purpose, the
deepest purpose, to survive. If he gets rid of his engrams, he will die because getting rid of it
means death, for Mama said she would die if she got rid of it. Further, on up through life,
Mama may have the nasty habit of telling him when he is ill that she will “take care of her baby
and protect hIm from his father,” and this makes a new force in the old computation.
Thus we come to the ally computation. This will be the chief and number one struggle
of the auditor, the thing which will most elusively resist him, the thing which lies down close
to the core of a person.
The ally computation is severe enough that an auditor once said that a man is not
victimized by his enemies, he is murdered by his friends. Engramically speaking, that is quite
true.
The only aberration and psycho-somatic ill the patient will continually hold to is a pro-survival
engram which is part of an ally computation. That could be written fifty times here
without being stressed enough. It is most important, it is the first thing which the auditor is
going to buck when he enters a case, the first thing he must discharge if he wishes therapy to
go swiftly. He may have to touch and reduce many contra-survival engrams, for the come
swiftly enough when called, before he can even get an idea of what the ally computation is. But
when he gets an ally computation he had better run it out and discharge all its emotion or the
case will hang fire.
The ally computation is the reactive mind level moronism that survival depends on
Grandma or Aunt Sue or some serving maid thirty years dead. The attendants of the individual
when he was ill, the people who begged his pregnant mother to stop trying to abort him, or fed
him or otherwise tried to keep him from being hurt: these are the allies.
The reactive mind operates wholly on two-valued logic. Things are life or they are
death, they are right or they are wrong, just as the engram wording states. And the personnel of
engrams are friends or enemies. The friends, the allies, mean Life! The enemies mean Death!
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There is no middle ground. Any restimulator or associated restimulator for the pro-survival
engram means Life: and any restimulator or associated restimulator for a contra-survival
engram means Death!
The auditor, of course, may be a really restimulative person (one who is a pseudo-father,
a pseudo-lover of mother before birth, etc.) but he is always an associative restimulator,
the person who may take away these terribly, horribly vital things, the pro-survival engrams.
The contra-survival engrams outbalance this factor and, of course, the analytical mind of the
pre-clear is always all for the auditor and the therapy.
The trouble comes when the analytical mind is shut down by restimulation and the
auditor is seeking the ally computation. Then the pre-clear’s reactive mind dodges and avoids.
The ally computation, however, is simple to trace. And it is very vital to trace it, for this
computation may contain the bulk of all the emotional discharge of the case. Freeing the
complete ally computation wholly before basic-basic is reached is wholly impossible. But as
much life force as possible must be restored to the pre-clear to make the case work well.
For the ally computation, above all things, encysts the life force of the individual. Here
is caught and held the free feeling, the very heartbeat of life itself. A pre-clear is only placed in
apathy by ally computations. The body can be almost dead in the presence of antagonism and
still rally and fight. But it cannot fight its friends. The law of affinity has been aberrated into an
entrance into the reactive engram bank. And that law, even when twisted with the murky
shadows of unreason in the reactive mind, still works. It is a good law. It is too good when the
auditor is trying to find and reduce engrams which are making the pre-clear ache with arthritis
or bleed internally with stomach ulcers.
Why can’t he “get rid of” his arthritis? Mama said, when she gracefully fell over a pig,
“Oh, I can’t get up! Oh, my poor, poor baby. Oh, my baby! I wonder if I hurt my poor, poor
baby. Oh, I hope my baby is still alive! Please God let him live. Please God let me keep my
baby. Please!”
Only the God to which she prayed was the Reactive Mind, which makes one of its idiot
computations on the basis of everything is equal to everything. A holder, a prayer for life, a
thoroughly bruised baby’s spine, Mama’s sympathy, a pig grunt, a prayer to God, all these
things are equal to the reactive mind and so we have a fine case of arthritis, particularly since
our patient sought “survival” by marrying a girl with a voice just like Mama’s sounded when he
was in the womb. Ask him to get rid of his arthritis? The reactive mind says “NO!” Arthritis is
a baby is a pig grunt is a prayer to God is wife’s sympathy is being poor is Mama’s voice and
all these things are desirable.
He’s kept himself poor and he’s kept his arthritis and he married a wife who would
make a harlot blush and this is pro-survival: wonderful stuff, survival, when the reactive mind
computes it! And in the case of the ulcers, here was baby poked full of holes (Mama is having a
terrible time trying to abort him so she can pretend a miscarriage, and she uses assorted
household instruments thrust into the cervix to do it) and some of the holes are through and
through his baby’s abdomen and stomach: he will live because he is surrounded by protein and
has a food supply and because the sac is like one of these puncture-proof inner tubes that seals
up every hole. (Nature has been smart about attempted abortion for a long, long time.)
It so happens that Mama in this case was not a monologist, although most of Mama’s
activity on this line is a dramatization and has conversation with it; but it also so happens that
Grandma lives next door and she comes over unexpectedly, shortly after the latest effort to
make baby meet oblivion.
Grandma may have been an attempted abortionist in her day but now she is old and
highly moral and besides, this baby is not giving her any morning sickness: she therefore finds
much to censure when she sees a bloody orangewood stick in the bathroom. Baby is still
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“unconscious.” Grandma berates Mama: “Any daughter of mine who would do such a horrible
thing should be punished by the vengeance of God (the principle of, don’t do as I do, do as I
say, for who gave Mama this dramatization in the first place?) and driven through the streets.
Your baby has a perfect right to live: if you don’t think you can take care of him, I certainly
will. Now you go right on through with your pregnancy, Eloisia, and when that baby is born,
if you don’t want him, you bring him to me! The idea of trying to hurt that poor thing!” And
so, when our bleeding ulcer case gets born, there is Grandma and there is security and safety.
Grandma is here the ally (and she can become an ally in a thousand different ways, any of them
based on the principle that she talks sympathetically to baby when he is out like a flounder, and
fights Mama in his favor when he is “unconscious”), and when he grows to boyhood he can be
found placing a large dependency on Grandma, much to the parental wonder (for they never
did anything to little Roger, not they). And Roger will, when Grandma is dead, develop
bleeding ulcers to get her back.
Whoever is a friend is to be clasped to the bosom with bonds of steel, says this great
genius, the reactive mind, even though it kills the organism.
The ally computation is a little more than the mere idiot calculation that anyone who is a
friend can be kept a friend only by approximating the conditions wherein the friendship was
realized. It is a computation on the basis that one can only be safe in the vicinity of certain
people and that one can only be in the vicinity of certain people by being sick or crazy or poor
and generally disabled.
Show an auditor a child who was easily frightened by punishment, who was not at ease
around home and who had allies who seemed more important to him than the parents
(grandparents, aunts, boarders, doctors, nurses, etc.) and who was sickly, and the auditor can
usually spring into view an attempted abortion background because, more often than not, it is
there. Show an auditor a child who showed enormous attachment for one parent and detestation
for the other and the auditor can bring out a background wherein one person wanted to get rid
of or hurt the child and the other parent did not.
The ally computation, then, is important. And it is also very secret. Trying to get the
real allies in a case is often a great struggle. It may be that a patient had eight or ten of these
allies in some cases and tried desperately to hold to them, and when he could not, searched and
found mates and friends who were approximations of his allies. A wife, around whom A is
continually ill but whom he will not leave under any circumstances, is usually a pseudo-ally,
which is to say she approximates some mannerism of the actual ally, has a similar voice or even
a similar first name. B, who will not leave a job and yet who is working far below his ability
level in life, may be there because his boss is a pseudo-ally; further, he may be working at this
job because an ally had a similar station in life and he is being the ally.
Anything which can so far corrupt a person’s life is naturally going to be difficult to
some degree in therapy, for when he is asked to get rid of his ally computation, it is as likely
that he will give any clue to it as it is that he would have spit in his ally’s face.
These pro-survival engrams containing the ally computation can be described as those
which contain personnel who defended the patient’s existence in moments when the patient
conceived that his existence was under attack. This need not be an actual, rational defense: it
may only be that the content of the engram seems to indictate it; but it can safely be assumed
that the worst ally computations are those when the life of the patient was defended against
attackers by the ally. Most ally computations have their genesis in the prenatal area.
The ally computation is sought as the first action in any case and new ally computations
are sought throughout a case.
These sympathy pro-survival engrams, which make up the ally computations, vary only
in intensity from the standard pro-survival engram. A standard pro-survival engram is bad only
because someone has expressed friendship for the patient or another person when he was
“unconscious”: it is difficult to discover and clear even when it actually has been entirely
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misread -- which is to say that the pro-survival content was intended for another person than
the patient but is only misconstrued by the patient. If the patient is “unconscious” and
somebody says “he is a good guy,” actually meaning another person entirely, the egocentric
reactive mind takes the phrase to have been meant for oneself.
In the sympathy pro-survival engram (the ally computation is composed only of these)
there is an actual defense of the person from danger by some ally: this can vary from a dramatic
scene wherein somebody has been bent on killing the patient and the ally has arrived, like the
cavalry, in the nick of time, to the incident wherein the patient was simply saved (or assumed
he was being saved) from destruction such as drowning, being run over, etc. And the
sympathy pro-survival engram is only as good as its content in words, for it does not
rationalize the action. Engrams have been discovered where the patient was actually being
murdered but the content was such that he was convinced he was being saved: such a case
would include what auditors call a “mutual AA” -- a father and mother together attempting an
abortion, AA meaning “attempted abortion” -- wherein Mama was in utter agreement and
disposed herself for the operation but became frightened and began to scream about “her
precious baby” in an effort to save herself from being injured: patients with this sort of
sympathy pro-survival engram can get pretty confused about mother.
The insidious aspects of the sympathy pro-survival engrams are several. (1) They are
aligned with the fundamental dynamic of survival in the most literal sense and are therefore
aligned with the purpose of the individual; (2) they are like cysts round which contra-survival
engrams serve as the outer shell; (3) they most sharply affect the health of the individual and are
always the basic factor beneath the psycho-somatic illness which the individual displays; (4)
they cause the reactive mind (but not the analytical mind) to resist therapy; and (5) they are the
largest drain upon the life force units.
In (3) above, the pro-survival sympathy engram does more than just carry forward the
injury which becomes the psycho-somatic illness. Any engram is a bundle of data which
includes not only all perceptics and speech present but also metering for emotion and state of
physical being. The last, the state of physical being, would be serious enough. This
metering says that structure was so and such at the moment this sympathy pro-survival engram
was received: in the case of an embryo engram, then, the reactive mind, in forcing the engram
back into action, may also force the structural pattern back upon the body: this occasionally
results in retarded development, embryo-like skin, embryo-type back curvature, and so forth.
The glands themselves, being physical organs, are also sometimes so suppressed in the reactive
mind’s effort to approximate all conditions. The underdeveloped gonads, the sub-level thyroid,
the wasted limb, all these things often come from sympathy pro-survival engrams. This is so
observably the case that when an individual is being cleared, growth process begins to bring
the body up to genetic blueprint even before the case is completed: the change which takes place
in the physical being of the patient is sometimes so remarkable and so marked that it is far more
startling than the mere disappearance of a catalogue of psycho-somatic ills such as coronary,
ulcers, arthritis, allergies, and so on.
It would be supposed that anything powerful enough to twist the physical blueprint and
keep the body from developing or make it keep on growing where it should have stopped
would resist any therapy. This is true only in a most limited sense. Once one is aware of what
suppresses a case, one can go about vanquishing the suppressors because a pro-survival
engram, unlike a contra-survival engram, has an Achilles heel.
The most workable answer now known to dianetics lies in the principle of life force
units and a technique for throwing them back into circulation. The pro-survival engram collects
and holds such units, according to this theory, and collapses when its power to hold units is
broken.
Entering a case, then, where one has a chronic psycho-somatic illness (and what case
doesn’t have, even though it is as slight as an occasional fit of sneezing or hiccoughs), the
auditor first scouts it, going through a returning routine to find out how early he can get for
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material, how the state of the sonic recall is, how occluded is the youth of the person, and so
forth. When he has made this survey, he begins to make his computation on the case: first, was
the child happy with both father and mother, and if not, where was the child happiest (there
will be where the allies live). Was either parent an unreasonably powerful factor in shaping the
thinking powers of the child: here again may be an ally, even if a poor one. Did the patient have
grandparents or other relatives; how did he feel toward them? All this data will be more or less
occluded and warped by demon circuits and is about as reliable as the data this patient will
inevitably try to get from “loopy” parents or relatives, who not only do not know what
happened to him but might be most anxious not to have anything discovered.
What really did happen? Don’t let patients ask relatives or parents anything if you can
help it, for these are restimulators in the extreme and never have any data you can use; the
patient is just trying to use them as by-pass circuits to avoid the pain of recalling things himself.
When the case is finished he will no longer want to hound these people and if you want a check
for research reasons, get one of the relatives and put him through therapy.
The auditor now has some slight idea of who the allies may be. And here comes the
Achilles heel of the ally computation:
Any ally computation may have included the loss of the ally. And the loss of the ally
may be the trigger which will start chain fission. For what we are going to try to do is blow off
or discharge as many life force units as possible from the reactive engram bank and weaken it.
Every charge we get from the bank will reinforce the ability of the patient to carry on in
existence and will aid his analytical mind to get into the engram bank. Hence, discharging these
frozen units is a vital and important part of therapy and the condition of the case will improve in
direct ratio to the number of these units so discharged.
Consider these life units as free life energy: an engram capturing them can set itself up,
for all intent, as a life force. It is then an entity and only then. The demon circuits, the valence
walls (which compartment the analyzer, so to speak, and bring about multi-valence), the force
and power of the engram itself are all dependent, according to theory and as observed in
practice, upon usurped life units.
To free these units is the primary task of therapy: to relieve pain from the engrams is the
secondary task; to make the patient comfortable during therapy does not even rank, though
there is no need he should be uncomfortable. The dual character of therapy, then, is actually
two sections of the same thing: relieving engrams. There is this dual nature in engrams,
however, that they have painful emotion (where that means usurped life force) and physical
pain (where that means pain of injury, illness, etc.).
To get as early as possible as fast as possible and find basic-basic is the direction and
intent of therapy in its first stages: to accomplish this (when it cannot be done immediately
merely by returning and finding basic-basic which can and always should be tried) one relieves
the case and robs the engram bank by releasing life units (painful emotion captured them) from
the ally computations.
In brief, the entire intent and act of therapy is to find the earliest engram and erase it and
then proceed to erase all other engrams as engrams so they can no longer be discovered (they
refile in the standard bank but it takes a genius to find them there and a search of hours and
hours: hence, to the auditor they can be said to have “erased” for they are no longer engrams
and are now experience). The first, last and only job of the auditor is to find the earliest
engrams available and erase them. That cannot be said too often or too strongly.
The various ways to accomplish this are the techniques and arts of therapy. Anything
which brings about this erasure of engrams in place and their refiling as experience is useful
and legitimate whatever it includes. An engineer intends to remove a mountain which is in the
way of a river: his intent and all his effort is directed toward moving that mountain; the ways
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and means employed by him to move that mountain, by steam shovel, hydraulic rams or
dynamite are the art and techniques applied to do the job.
There are three degrees of knowledge in our task: (1) In dianetics we know the goal: we
know the results which come about when that goal is attained; (2) We know the character of the
obstructions between us and the goal but of the exact character of the obstruction we can never
learn too much; (3) The art and technique of removing the obstruction between us and the goal
are legitimate only by the test of whether or not they remove the obstruction.
The method of attack on the problem can always be improved by learning more about
the character of the factors in the problem, and by learning new arts and techniques which can
be applied to the problem, and by studying to improve our skill in practicing existing arts and
techniques. The currently existing art and technique is not to be considered optimum merely
because it does the job. The time and ease of work could be shortened by new techniques or
advancing skills for old techniques.
All this is interjected so that dianetics, unlike Aristotelian logic and natural history, will
be recognized as an advancing, changing science. It is interjected at this place because no
auditor should just sit back with this routine and never try to improve the routine.
Very well: this is the routine: it works but it can never be made to work too quickly or
too well:
(1) Place the patient in reverie and scout into the prenatal area to see if engrams are available
for lifting without further work. If they are there and can be found, take the charge out
of them and erase them if possible. Do not try to erase anything as remote from basic-basic
as birth unless the file clerk insists on presenting birth. In other words, get the
subject into the prenatal area and look for the earliest engrams. Do not ask for specific
instances, particularly for something like birth, just take whatever is presented. If you
can’t get back early, take step two.
(2) Scout the patient’s life, while he is in reverie (do this in any event sooner or later if the
case slows down but only if it slows down to a point where early engrams are either not
reducing or are without any emotion). Establish in this scout whomever may have been
depended upon by the patient and be suspicious always that he has not told you the
really important allies, but do not tell him you are suspicious.
(3) Find out when the patient lost any ally through death or departure. Approach this
moment and one way or another, by getting earlier material and this incident or getting
just this incident, discharge the sorrow of loss out of the incidents. Treat any incident in
which the ally departs or the patient is separated from the ally as an engram and erase it
accordingly or run it until it has no “charge” of sorrow on it. If the “charge” holds,
suspect an early moment of sorrow about this ally and find that and treat it as an
engram.
(4) First, last and always, the job is to get basic-basic and then ever afterwards the
currently existing earliest moment of pain or sorrow, and to erase every incident as it is
advanced by the file clerk or found by repeater technique.
(5) Any incident that hangs fire always has a similar incident earlier, and the patient should
be taken earlier for the prior incident when an engram will not “reduce” on recounting.
(6) At any time the engrams start to become emotionless in tone, even though they reduce,
suspect another ally computation and, early or late in the patient’s life, get it and reduce
it at least until the emotional discharge is gone. Do not get everything in a case
restimulated by changing from an unreduced incident to something which looks more
fruitful, but reduce everything in view before you go looking for a new sorrow charge.
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(7) It is better to reduce an emotionless early engram than it is to upset the case by
hounding him for an ally computation when a cunning search fails to reveal none in
sight. Erasing early emotionless engrams will eventually bring a new ally computation
into sight if you occasionally look for it.
(8) Consider that any hold-up on a case, any unwillingness to cooperate, stems from ally
computation.
(9) Treat all demon circuits as things held in place by life force units absorbed into the bank
and address the problem of demon circuits by releasing charges of sorrow.
(10) Consider that loss by death or departure of an ally is identical with a death of some part
of the patient and that the reduction of a death or departure of an ally will restore that
much life back to the patient. And remember that great sorrow charges are not always
death or departure but merely may be a sudden reversal of stand by the ally.
Always keep in mind that that person who most nearly identifies himself with the
person of the patient, such as a sympathetic mother or father or grandparent or relative or
friend, is considered by the reactive mind to be a part of the person himself and that anything
happening to this sympathetic character can be considered to have happened to the patient. In
such a case, where an ally has been found to have died of cancer, you may occasionally find
the patient to have a sore or scaly place where he supposed the ally’s cancer to have been.
The reactive mind thinks in identities only. The sympathetic pro-survival engram
identifies the patient with another individual. The death or loss (by departure or denial) of the
other individual is therefore a reactive mind conviction that the patient has suffered some
portion of death.
Emotional charges may be contained in any engram: the emotion communicates, in the
same tone level, from the personnel around the “unconscious” person into his reactive mind.
Anger goes into an engram as anger, apathy as apathy, shame as shame. Whatever people have
felt emotionally around an “unconscious” person should be found in the engram which resulted
from the incident. When the emotional tone of personnel in an engram is obviously angry or
apathetic from the word content and yet the patient, recounting, does not feel it, there is
something somewhere which has a valence wall between the patient and the emotional tone,
and that valence wall is nearly always broken down by the discovery of an engram with a
sorrow charge sometime earlier or later in a patient’s life.
The only legitimate reason for entering later portions of a person’s life before the
prenatal area has been well exhausted is search for sorrow discharges occasioned by the death,
loss or denial by an ally. And by “denial,” we mean that the ally turned into an active enemy
(real or imaginary) of the patient. The counterpart of the ally, the pseudo-ally, is a person
whom the reactive mind has confused with the real ally. The death, loss or denial by a pseudo-ally
can contain a sorrow charge.
According to theory, the only thing which can lock up life units is this emotion of loss.
If some method existed of doing nothing but freeing all life units, the physical pain could be
neglected.
A release is brought about, one way or another, by freeing as many life units as
possible from periods of loss with minimal address to actual engrams.
The loss of an ally or pseudo-ally need contain no other physical pain or
“unconsciousness” than the loss itself occasions. This is serious enough. It makes an engram.
Any person who is suddenly discovered to be occluded in a patient’s life can, with
some reliability, be considered an ally or pseudo-ally. If, either while remembering or
returning, large sections of a patient’s association with another person are missing, that person
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can be called an occluded person. It is a better guarantee of ally status if the occlusion
surrounds the death of the person or a departure from or a denial by that person. It is possible
for occlusion to take place, also, for punishment reasons; which is to say, the occluded person
may also be an arch enemy: in such a case, however, any memory present will concern the
death or defeat or illness of the occluded person. Occlusion of a person’s funeral in the memory
of a patient would theoretically label that person an ally or pseudo-ally. Recollection of the
funeral of a person but occlusion of pleasant association might tend to mean that the person was
an enemy. Such rules are tentative. But it is certain that any occlusion means that a person had a
vast and unrevealed significance in a patient’s life which should be explained.
It may be remarked at this point that the recovery of the patient will depend in large
measure on the life units freed from his reactive bank. This is a discharge of sorrow and may
be quite violent. The usual practice is to “forget” such things and the “sooner forgotten, the
sooner healed.” Unfortunately this does not work: it would be a happy thing if it did. Anything
forgotten is a festering sore when it has despair connected with it. The auditor will find that
every time he locates that arch denyer, “forget it,” he will get the engram it suppressed; when
he can’t locate the engram and yet has found a somatic, a “forget it” or “don’t think about it” or
“can’t remember it” or “don’t remember it” or some other denyer will be sitting there in the
context of the engram. Forgetting is such unhealthy business that when a thing has been “put
out of mind,” it has been put straight into the reactive engram bank and in there it can absorb
life units.
This “loopy” computation, that forgetting things makes them bearable, is incredible in
view of the fact that the hypnotist, for instance, gets results with a positive suggestion when he
puts one of these denyers on the end of it. That has been known now for a great many eons: it
was one of the first things the author was taught when he studied Asiatic practices; from India it
long ago filtered to Greece and Rome and it has come to us via Anton Mesmer: it is a
fundamental principle in several mystic arts: its mechanics were known even to the Sioux
medicine man. Yet people at large, hitherto unguided about it, and perhaps because they lacked
any real remedy, believed that the thing to do with sorrow was to “forget it.”
Even Hippocrates remarks that the whole of an operation is not finished until the patient
has recounted the incident to all of his friends in turn, and while this is inadequate therapy, it
has been, like the Confessional, a part of popular knowledge for lo, these many ages: yet
people persist in suppressing sorrow.
The auditor will many times in his activity be begged by a patient “not to talk to me
about so-and-so’s death.” If he is foolish enough to heed this tearful plea when the patient is in
reverie, then the auditor is actively blocking a release. That is the first incident he should get!
Perhaps it would be bad, without dianetic technique, to approach such things; but with
our art it is easy not only to enter the actual moment of the incident but to then recount it until
the tears and wailings are but echoes in the case book. Treating that loss like an engram,
recounting it until it is no longer painful emotionally, is to give back to the patient vitality he has
not had since the incident took place. And if the incident does not ease on a dozen recountings,
slide back down its sorrow track, just as you would with any other engram, and find earlier
and earlier moments. A patient starting to discharge sorrow at the age of fifty may find himself,
two hours later, down in the basic area recounting the primary moment of sorrow, at the
moment when the lost ally first became an ally. If the auditor can get the whole chain on any
one ally, exhausting sorrow from it from later to earlier, taking all the sorrow he can get from
every incident and stripping the entire series of engrams of their charge, he may, in a few hours
work, rid the case of enough emotional charge to then begin an orderly erasure.
Please observe this difference: the Achilles heel of the ally computation can be
considered late on the chain of incidents which concern that ally, which is to say that we have a
funnel here, upright in time, which can be entered late and followed early: the Achilles heel of
the contra-survival engram chain is in the earliest incidents, exactly the reverse of the
emotionally painful engrams.
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To regain out of the engram bank life units so that enough free emotion is available to
release or clear a case, start with late ally or pseudo ally losses and work back earlier.
To release the physical pain of the individual from the engram bank, start early (as close
to conception as you can get) and work through to late. Physical pain in the contra-survival
chain can suppress painful emotion in the pro-survival chain.
Painful emotion in the pro-survival chain can suppress physical pain in the contra-survival
engrams.
If you were to draw a picture of the prenatal area of the reactive engram bank, it would
appear somewhat as follows: a long line drawn horizontally, representing time, would have
dark blots on it representing engrams; one end of the line would represent conception, the other
end birth: above this line would lie a dark area, like a heavy mist, extending from one end of
the line to the other and dropping down almost to it: above this dark mist would lie another
horizontal line, the apparent time track along which the patient returns. The first long line is the
actual time track; the mist is painful emotion; the uppermost dark line is what the patient
mistakes and uses for his time track.
The painful emotion is, of course, occasionally tapped in the prenatal area itself, and the
opportunity of dispersing it by so discovering prenatal emotional charges should never be
overlooked by the auditor: indeed, once much of the later life painful emotion is discharged, a
great deal of painful emotion can be found amongst the early engrams. The better part of this
mist, and the first part the auditor often contacts, is in late life: although it originates, as charge,
in late life, it can be said to lie on this prenatal area.
Moments of loss, the loss by death or departure of any of the patient’s allies, and the
loss of an ally because he turns against the patient, trap these emotional charges and intervene
them between the patient and actuality. Although the moment of loss was post-birth, in
infanthood, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, it was retroactive in suppressing early
engrams.
This aspect of painful emotion is a key-in of the early incidents by the moment of loss.
In other words, a moment of great loss suppresses the individual on the tone scale to a point
where he approximates the level of early engrams and these, keyed-in, hold the units of charge
thereafter.
Life units so seized are held and are the life of engrams. As in electricity, a positive
charge glances away from a positive charge: like charges repel each other. The analyzer,
operating, it can be said for analogy, on the same kind of charge as that contained in the
engram, glances away from the engram, which remains thereby unknown and intact.
As the individual returns into the area of the early engrams -- which are held keyed-in
by virtue of the seized charges from late incidents -- he can quite comfortably pass by
enormous quantities of aberrative material without even suspecting it is present. However,
when the late moments of painful emotion are released, the auditor can go immediately into the
early area and find engrams of physical pain which he had not hitherto been able to uncover.
Actually the late moments and the early moments are both engrams: the news or
observation of loss shuts down the analyzer and everything which then enters it is engramic
and is filed in the reactive mind. Because of sight and a memory of activity which is connected
to the present, all of which serves to keep an individual oriented, a person can often recall the
moment of loss, whereas he cannot recall prenatal material, for he lacked in that area any
connection with orienting factors which would impinge themselves on the analyzer. While the
prenatal infant definitely, especially in the late stages, has an analyzer, experience and memory
are not coordinated and the existence of engrams is not then suspected by the analytical mind.
This is not true of the later periods of life, particularly those after speech has been learned and
is being used. The fact of the matter is that this later-life ability to recall surrounding
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circumstances without feeling any extremity of pain also serves to hide here the existence of an
actual engram: a person feels that he knows all about such a moment of loss analytically:
actually he has no contact with the engram itself, which contains a moment of
“unconsciousness” of a lesser depth than that, for instance, of the anesthetic variety. Childhood
losses of allies, however, can be so entirely occluded that the allies themselves are not
remembered.
The auditor will find very late engrams easy to contact. And he will also discover
something else. The patient may not be, as he is returning to such a moment of loss, occupying
his own body. This “phenomenon” has been known for several thousand years and even the
latest mention of it merely said that it was “interesting” without making any further effort to
find out why a person, returned to an area in hypnotic regression, sometimes could be found
within himself (which is to say, seeing things as though he were himself) and sometimes saw
things there and himself included as part of the scenery (as though he had a detached view).
Because we have discovered that a natural function of the mind is to return in an awake state to
past incidents does not alter the fact that we encounter aspects hitherto known as mysterious
“phenomena” of drug dreams and hypnotism. We are not by any means practicing hypnotism;
so this means that hypnotism and dianetics use similar abilities of the mind -- it does not mean
that such abilities belong in the field of hypnotism. And one of the various aspects of the return
is that it occasionally -- or, in some patients, continually -- encounters areas where the patient is
“outside” his body. These exteriorized views of self have two explanations. One of them is
valence, whereby the patient has taken unto himself the identity of another person and sees the
scene through that other person’s eyes; the other is exteriorization, in which painful emotion is
present in such quantity that the patient cannot occupy himself. That painful emotion may stern
from past or future incidents to the moment when the patient is witnessing a scene to which he
has been dianetically returned. On several recountings of the scene, the patient will come nearer
and nearer to an occupation of his body until at last he sees the scene from within his body. At
times no emotional discharge (tears, etc.) takes place until the patient has gone over the incident
several times and until he is within his own body. It is as though, returned, he had to scout the
ground to find out if it was safe to occupy himself. If, after a few recountings, no discharge
such as tears takes place, then the emotion is suspended elsewhere, earlier or later but usually
much later. Exteriorization because of emotion is the same as exteriorization because of
physical pain to all intents and purposes of the auditor. When he encounters a case which, all
the way up and down the track, is continually exterior, he should address his skill to the release
of moments of painful emotion.
All patients seem to have the idea that time heals and that some incident of ten or twenty
years ago no longer has any effect upon them. Time is a Great Charlatan, not a great healer, as
has been remarked. Time by the processes of growth and decay alters, and environment
introduces new faces and activities and thus alters the restimulators: a moment of painful
emotion in the past has, like any other engram, its own restimulators and is, in addition,
holding keyed-in all the early engrams which relate to it so that their restimulators also work:
every restimulator has a set of restimulators which are associated to it by the analytical mind,
which cannot see the real restimulator. All this makes a complex pattern but complex in therapy
only if one does not know the source of aberration. If the auditor returns the patient to any
moment of painful emotion in the past and runs it as an engram, he will discover that all its
original charge is present and will discharge.
He will usually find the patient shying away from any thought of going into the actual
engram: the pre-clear may attempt to detail all manner of bric-a-brac, his own thoughts, the
reasons why it no longer is painful to him, and so forth. These thoughts and data before the
fact or after it are about as much use in running an engram as a dissertation about “childhood
illusions” was to the problem of removing aberrations from the human mind. The auditor who
will listen to these “reasons” and “I remembers” in lieu of running the engram itself will not get
his patient well and will waste valuable hours of therapy. An auditor who will do this belongs
to the hand-patting school of thought which believes sympathy has value. He does not belong
in an auditor’s chair. It is wasted time, wasted valuable time, to listen to anything the patient
thought or said or did or believed when the patient should be going into the engram and
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running it as an engram. Certainly there is a necessity to find out, from the patient’s talk, where
that engram is, but once it is located, all else is dross.
Take a moment when a child is notified of his parents’ deaths. The auditor learns that
the parents died when the child was two years of age. He can then deduce, without further
trouble or questions, that somebody must have told his patient about the death of the parents,
that there was a precise moment when the patient, then an infant, learned about that death.
Recounting the matter in present time -- without being returned, the patient is using all the
intervening years as buffers against the painful emotion. The auditor returns the patient,
without further preamble than the usual routine of putting the patient into reverie, to the moment
when the patient learned of the death of the parents. The patient may do a little fumbling to
orient himself in the past, but shortly he will have a contact with the instant somebody informed
him. Be assured, if that child loved his parents at all, that an engram exists here. The engram
starts at the first moment the child is informed, when the analyzer can be expected to have shut
down. The end of the engram is a moment, an hour, a day or even a week later when the
analyzer again turned on.
Between the first moment of analytical attenuation and a regain of analytical power is
the engram. The first minutes of it are the most severe. Running an hour of it (an hour of
incident, not of therapy) should be more than ample. Most auditors run only the first few
minutes several times to get a test of whether or not there is going to be any emotional
discharge. Run such a period of loss which must contain painful emotion exactly as you would
run a period of physical pain and “unconsciousness” with another source. For the period of
painful emotion is an “unconscious” period just as certainly as if the patient had been struck
with a club. If the emotion in this period can be contacted with four or five recountings (each
time starting at the beginning, making sure the patient is returned and in contact with all
perceptics of the incident, and running it for what it is, an engram) then the engram should be
recounted until the emotion in it is gone, until the patient is bored with it or even cheerful about
it. If, after four or five recountings the patient is still well exteriorized, still has not contacted
any emotion, then the charge is suspended elsewhere, either earlier or later, and tries should be
made in terms of other losses, no matter how many years from the unyielding incident, to get a
discharge.
After a discharge is blown off elsewhere the incident first addressed, as in the case of
the two-year-old who lost his parents, may discharge. It is certain that sooner or later such an
incident will discharge and it is also certain that the case will not make much progress in getting
any bulk of physically painful engrams until such a severe incident is well discharged.
Discharges are contacted, often, in very unlikely places. Somewhere they contact the
surface enough so that a touch by the returned patient will permit the units to free, permit
engrams to key-out and come into view on the time track in their proper places.
The engram bank becomes severely distorted by painful emotion and the areas of
painful emotion become severely distorted by physical pain elsewhere. The filing system of the
reactive mind is bad. The file clerk is able to recover and deliver to the auditor only so many
painful emotion engrams or physical pain engrams at a time.
They may be disordered in their positions on the track, which is to say, the auditor may
contact an early physically painful engram (always his most important job) then contact one in
mid-prenatal, then one post-birth, and thereafter no other engrams of the physical pain variety
seem to be present (engrams of the physical variety which contain knock-outs by accidents,
illnesses, surgery or injury). This does not mean that the case is stalemated or that the patient is
cleared. It more likely means that there are incidents of the other engram variety (painful
emotion, stemming from loss by death, departure or reversal of allies) which can now be
contacted.
The auditor then looks for and exhausts the emotional discharge from the loss engrams,
usually later in life.
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These, with the units freed back in circulation, allow earlier physical pain engrams to
appear and the auditor reduces each one of these he can contact. As soon as he can no longer
find physically painful engrams, he goes back to a search for painful emotion engrams and so
forth alternately as necessary. The mind, being a self-protecting mechanism, will sooner or
later block the patient from physical pain engrams if painful emotion engrams are ready; and it
will block him from painful emotion engrams as soon as physical pain engrams are ready.
Start late to get painful emotion and work back early.
Start early to get physical pain engrams and work toward late. And whenever any
engram is contacted, run it until it is no longer troublesome in any way to the patient or is
entirely gone (refiled, but gone for all the auditor and patient will be able to tell at the moment).
If an incident, after many recountings, shows no signs of lightening (somatic decreasing or
emotion either not expressed or not decreasing), only then should the auditor seek another
incident. In a painful emotion engram the charge is often later, in a physical pain engram the
suspension is invariably caused by the existence of the same phrase in an earlier physical pain
engram which can be contacted, and in such case the auditor should go back over the phrases
which brought him to the somatic until he finds a contact and a lift of the engram.
It should be extremely clear by this time that rationalization about action or conduct or
conditions does not advance therapy and is of no use beyond occasional aid in locating
engrams. It should be equally clear that no amount of explanation or hand-patting or evaluation
by the auditor is going to advance the erasure of the engrams themselves. It should be plain that
what a person thought at the time of the incident was not aberrative. It should be clear that
painful emotion puts the compartments and demon-circuits into the mind and that the physical
engrams hold the aberration and physical pain in the body.
This entire operation is mechanical. It has nothing to do with justified thought or shame
or reasons. It has only to do with exhausting the engram bank. When the bulk of painful
emotion is gone, the person is released; when the engram bank is exhausted of content, the
person is cleared.
The mind is like a fine piece of equipment: as itself and as a mechanism it is almost
impossible to destroy except by removing some of its parts: engrams do not remove parts of the
mind, they add unnecessary things to it. Envision a beautiful, stream-lined machine, operating
perfectly -- that would be the mind without the additions of pain and painful emotion. Now
envision this beautiful machine in the hands of a crew of moronic mechanics: they start to
work around it and do not know that what they do affects the machine at all. Now they see that
something is wrong with the machine and are all unwitting that they have placed various
assorted monkey-wrenches, hatpins, old cigar butts and yesterday’s garbage into it and around
it. Their first thought is to put something new on or in the machine to correct its operation and
they add arbitrary gadgets to it in order to patch up the machine’s operation. Some of these
gadgets appear to help the machine (sympathy engrams) and can be used, in the presence of the
remaining bric-a-brac, by the machine itself to help its stability. The morons interrupt the fuel
supply (painful emotional engrams) or, like the Japanese captain who beat the car with a switch
when it would not go, try to goad the machine (punishment drive) and so add more trouble. At
last this machine appears to be a hopeless wreck, being almost hidden beneath everything
added to it and thrust into it, and the moron mechanics shake their heads and say, “Let’s put
something else on it or it will stop!” They do and the machine appears to stop (goes insane).
In dianetics, a workmanlike job of clearing away the debris in and around the machine
is performed. It is not done by adding any more debris. The moron mechanics (the content of
the reactive mind) seem dismayed at this action, but the machine itself, suddenly aware that
something is being done for it which will actually bring it into good running operation again,
begins to help. The more debris which is cleared, the better it runs and the less force the moron
mechanics have. The course of improvement should be and is rapid. We can stop when the
machine is running at least as well as the “normal” machine (a release) or we can stop when we
have all the debris out of the machine (a clear). When we have effected a clear, we behold
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something which has never been beheld before because it never before existed in a debris-free
state: a perfect machine, stream-lined, powerful, shining, able to adjust and care for all its own
operations without further therapeutic assistance of any kind.
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CHAPTER VIII
Some Types of Engrams
Two examples of each kind of engram are given, so that the auditor can clearly
understand their differences:
CONTRA-SURVIVAL ENGRAM
This is any kind of engram which lies across the dynamics and has no alignment with
purpose: Fight between mother and father shortly after conception. Father strikes mother in
stomach. She screams (first percepts are pain, pressure, sound of blow and scream) and he
says, “God damn you, I hate you! You are no good. I’m going to kill you!” Mother says,
“Please don’t hit me again. Please don’t. I’m hurt. I’m hurt. I’m frantic with pain!” Father
says, “Lie there and rot, damn you! Good-bye!”
In this engram we have a severe aberrative situation, first, because it is early; second,
because its content says the person who has it is hurt and frantic; third, because it has a holder
and is therefore apt to become chronic (“Lie there”); fourth, because it can produce disease
(“and rot”); fifth, because it has religious connotation about God and being damned; sixth,
because it gives the individual a feeling other people are no good (“you” applies to other
people, ordinarily); seventh, because it has an emotional tone, by content, of hostility (“I hate
you”) and eighth, because the individual, post-birth, has to live with these restimulative
persons, his father and mother. It has other additional effects, giving, like all engrams, two
additional and unnecessary valences to the individual, one of which, the mother’s, is a coward
valence and the other, the father’s, a bully valence. The individual may dramatize this in several
ways: if he does not dramatize it, he feels the pain (as he would then be in his own valence)
whenever it is restimulated; if he dramatizes the mother, he will feel the pain she received,
which is a blow in the stomach (whereas his own was on his head and heart); if he dramatizes
the father, he will be in trouble with society, to say nothing of his own wife and children.
There is no winning with any engram of any kind but so long as a person has engrams, some
kinds, the sympathy engram particularly, serve to hold away antagonistic engrams.
The second contra-survival example is a morning sickness engram where the mother is
vomiting so violently that the compression on the child is severe and renders it “unconscious.”
The mother is vomiting and gasping and saying to herself between spasms, “Oh, why was I
ever born! I knew I shouldn’t have let him come in me. I knew it, I knew it. It was wrong but
he had to do it anyway. Ugh, how nasty. Sex is nasty. It’s horrible. I hate sex. I hate men. I
hate them. Oh, ugh, it won’t come up, it won’t come up. I am so sick at my stomach and it
won’t come up.”
In this engram we have something a woman might dramatize if she were pregnant but
which a man could never dramatize as pregnancy but only by being sick at his stomach. Much
morning sickness seems to be an aberration stemming from engrams: somewhere back in time
some mother may have vomited from food poisoning and started the whole thing -- perhaps in
the days when Man was still in trees. Now note that the mother is throwing up, that the content
of her stomach is being regurgitated: the engram, however, says that it won’t come up: when
this is dramatized with the individual in his own valence, he experiences pressure on him and
“unconsciousness” and thus such a dramatization is impossible; when this is dramatized it must
be dramatized as the mother but the action is not dramatized so much as the command and we
get a condition where the individual with such an engram, when he is sick, cannot vomit. The
command of the engram is more important than the action people take in it. On a reactive level
there is no rationality. If this were on a conscious level, where it would not be aberrative, of
course, the action could be mimicked and then would contain actual vomiting, the action on the
conscious level being more important than the word content.
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In therapy, when we encounter this engram, we may have difficulty entering it because
it says that “I shouldn’t have let him come in me,” which is a denyer. We also find, with the “It
won’t come up,” a holder. The engram will most certainly lift the moment these words and the
somatic lift, and these words could not interrupt the engram. If the engram does not lift, it is
because there is a previous engram with much the same content (the aberree has a pattern of
dramatization which he repeats over and over and over, giving people around him many
incidents which are more or less alike except in their point in time). This could be restimulated
in the environment (but not in therapy) to a point where it would cause madness, for “it” may
also refer to the child, who identifying himself with the word “it,” then cannot rise to present
time. In therapy the engram is somewhat drained of power just by being touched with the
returned analytical mind; further, the auditor discovers the patient is not moving on the track
and a scout of the situation soon discovers the holder, for the patient will sooner or later say he
“can’t come up” even if the auditor has not guessed it.
In the aberrative sphere, this engram would probably put a heavy block across the
second dynamic and we would find the person in whose reactive mind it was being frigid,
prudish and sharp with children (all of which go together in various combinations). Further,
we would find an apprehension that “he” was going to have to do something when he found
out it was wrong.
In the psycho-somatic sphere it might cause headaches during or because of coitus or a
tendency to nausea whenever coitus was performed. Any of the phrases of this engram, like
any other phrases in any other engram, would tend to give him both the somatic and the
aberration, providing, of course, the individual was in a state of low analytical power as found
in weariness or slight illness. Thus, this one is waiting until somebody says during a future
“unconsciousness” period, preferably in a voice like the mother’s would sound through the
walls of the abdomen and womb, “Ugh, how nasty!” or some other phrase to key it in.
“Nastier,” by the way, would not key it in: “ugly” despite a similar syllable to “Ugh” would
not key it in. The sound of vomiting itself probably would key it in.
PRO-SURVIVAL ENGRAM
This could be any engram which, by content only, not by any real aid to the individual
containing it, pretended to assist survival. Let us take a coitus engram: mother and father are
engaged in intercourse which, by pressure, is painful to the unborn child and which renders
him “unconscious” (common occurrence, like morning sickness, usually present in any engram
bank). Mother is saying, “Oh, I can’t live without it. It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful. Oh, how
nice. Oh, do it again!” and father is saying, “Come! Come! Oh, you’re so good. You’re so
wonderful! Ahhh!” Mother’s orgasm puts the finishing touch on the “unconsciousness” in the
child. Mother says, “It’s beautiful.” Father, finished now, says, “Get up,” meaning she should
take a douche (they do not know she is pregnant) and then begins to snore.
Obviously this is a valuable incident because one “cannot live without it.” Furthermore,
“it’s beautiful,” also, “it’s wonderful.” But it is also extremely painful.
It cannot be followed because it has first something which beckons part of the mind
back, “Come!” and then, later, tells it to “Get up.” Things that are “beautiful” and “wonderful”
can cause our patient, not in therapy, to have an orgasm when she looks at beautiful and
wonderful things, providing they have been so labeled.
Dramatization of this can be in either the father valence or the mother valence: to
dramatize it in the personal valence would mean physical pain. Thus, the individual holding
this, will be found, varied only by his other coitus engrams, to be, as father, disgusted after the
act and telling his partner to “Get up.” The emotion is contained in how the words, “Get up,”
were spoken: this is a telegraphed emotion out of voice tones, not word content: engrams
always contain both.
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In therapy, we find the reactive mind very chary of letting this one come to view
because, after all, one “cannot live without it.” There are whole classes of these favorable
evaluation phrases in engrams and wherever he comes upon one the auditor will find the pre-clear’s
reactive mind holding out on him. “I don’t want to lose you,” “Hold on to this,” “I can’t
let go of this, I’d fall,” and so forth. But this is, after all, just another engram and “pleasant” or
not is aberrative.
Masochistic and sadistic impulses often stem from coital engrams which contain those
specific things, so the auditor is not to infer that merely because this coitus is painful to the
child, it will make the child a masochist or a sadist. If masochism or sadism is present in the
patient it is caused by engrams which contain rapes, beating for sexual gratification, enjoyment
of pain, etc., and engrams which homonymically seem to state that sex and pain are alike such
as a “normal” coitus which says, “It hurts so good! Hurt me again, Bill. Hurt me again! Oh,
shove it in me, way up! Make it hurt so I can come.” Dramatized by a boy, this might very well
bring about sodomy because the engram is not an observed action but a series of commands,
literally taken.
Thus our pro-survival coitus engram, as the first example of one here, is relatively
innocent in a person’s aberrative pattern. But by an accident of words, it could be very different
in its aberrative effect.
The second pro-survival example concerns another prenatal engram. (One auditor
commented, while he was being cleared, that he “had thought of my life B.D. -- before
dianetics -- as a graph of years, in which the time from conception to birth occupied one-fiftieth
of the linear distance between conception and present time, but now think of the prenatal period
as occupying two-thirds of the distance between the beginning and now.” The prenatal area,
cleared, at last went back to being one-fiftieth.)
The mother, subject to high blood pressure, continually brought about a condition of
great pain in the unborn infant, particularly when she was agitated. (This is a prime source of
migraine headache.) Whatever it was which agitated her into high blood pressure at the moment
this engram was received was unknown -- and much of the “plot” of prenatal life may remain
unknown for the explanatory data may come before the pain and the engram and a complete
recording only happens after the instant of pain when some degree of “unconsciousness”
comes about. The mother, at the beginning of the engram, when pressure began to build up and
stiffen out the unborn child, was weeping. She was by herself. “Oh, how am I ever going to
get out of it. Everything looks so drab and colorless to me. Oh, why did I ever start it; I can’t
possibly go through with it. But I have to, I have to. I would be sick if I didn’t. Oh,
Lord, everything comes in on me at once. I am utterly trapped. But there, I will go through
with it, I’ll feel better. I’ll be brave and do it. I’ve got to be brave. I am brave. I am the bravest
person in the world. I have to be and I am.” The pressure receded.
Exactly what this was about will remain a mystery to the auditor who reduced it, the
patient who had it, the auditor and the reader: such is often the case with an engram. They are
conceived in misunderstanding and they aren’t to be understood, save mechanically, and only
deleted from the engram bank.
This is a particularly dangerous engram to have for it contains a manic in the words,
“bravest person in the world.” “I,” of course, is ordinarily used by the unborn child to be
himself, when the engram is at last able to affect an analyzer in which there is speech. Before
that moment, of course, there is just a recording without word meaning, although even before
the words are given meaning, the engram can be aberrative. This is further dangerous because
it says, “I’m trapped,” and because it says, “Everything comes in on me at once.” “Trapped” is
our enemy, the holder. But “everything comes in on me at once” is a grouper. Further, the
remainder of the content, as an engram, will not compute in the analyzer. It says one “must go
through with it,” but that one “cannot go through with it,” that one “would get sick if I didn’t
go through with it” but that “it is impossible.” Everything being equal to everything, as our
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moronic enemy, the reactive mind computes, this engram both repels and attracts therapy: it
brings about a condition of indecision in the analytical mind which is insufferable.
The individual holding this engram might find himself -- as it acted as aberration -- first
in the manic portion of being the bravest person in the world and then, regressed a trifle by a
slight change of restimulators such as his migraine headache getting bad, find himself utterly
undecided about any course of action and with the telegraphed emotion, contained in the tears,
of being very depressed. But this is pro-survival because it apparently dictates a way out of a
situation. As an additional factor, it brings, with its phrase about “everything being drab and
colorless” color blindness at least in recall so that the recalled images of the past are “seen” in
the mind as having no color. It can bring about, if added to by enough subsequent
dramatizations, actual perceptic color blindness. The whole engram is very likely, when
combined with other factors, to place the individual in an institution with all of his somatic
turned on (migraine) and, because of the grouper, all other pain he felt in his life turned on as
well. This grouper bunches the track of the engram bank all into one place and then puts the
individual squarely in that place.
In therapy, when this was contacted, a case which had been classified as “insane” came
into a release state of “normal.” The patient had been institutionalized, was in the foetal position
and had regressed physically. That she kept screaming these exact words and weeping had
been placed on her record as the manifestation of a childhood delusion. The case was opened
by repeater technique, using the words she kept screaming, after she had had her attention fixed
upon the auditor by loud, monotonous noise. There were some former incidents containing
these words which had to be reached before the incident in dramatization would ease.
However, engrams like this are commonly contacted in more or less “normal” people and are
relieved as routine. A very high degree of restimulation had been experienced by this patient
and several severe “loss” engrams had occurred which had kept earlier content keyed-in.
It might also be remarked in re all these “trapped,” “caught,” “can’t get out of it” cases
(which is to say where there are several holders and also a high quantity of painful emotion)
that certain foetal aspects are visible even when the case is “normal.” A shiny skin, a spinal
curvature, only partial development of the gonads, all are common and one or many such signs
may be present.
SYMPATHY ENGRAM
The first example is an illness suffered by a patient when he was a small boy. At two
years and a half he was taken ill with pneumonia. He had a considerable background of
attempted abortion and the usual engram cargo received from aberrated parents. He was
extremely worried about the quarrels and upsets od his own home; numbers of his engrams had
been keyed-in and amongst them was his pneumonia. His grandmother came and took him to
her home because, whenever he was ill, his mother would go away and leave him. The incident
was extremely occluded and was only reached after several late life painful emotion engrams
had been discharged and after almost a hundred prenatal physical pain engrams had been
released. The grandmother, when he was crying in delirium, mistook his activity as
demonstrating that he was “conscious,” which he was not, and she sought to reason with him.
She said, “Those people don’t really mean to be so bad to you, honey. I know they have good
hearts really. You just do what they say and believe what they tell you and you’ll be all right.
Now promise you’ll do that, won’t you, honey.” The child, in the last depths of reaction,
responded and promised her he would believe them and do what they said. “I love you very
much,” the grandmother continued, “and I will take care of you. Now don’t worry, honey.
Forget it now. Just get a little rest.”
The phrases contained in this engram, because they were on a trance level and because
they could be held in place by his fever and pain, produced a very profound effect on the child.
He had to believe whatever was said. This means literal belief and cost him, for one thing,
much of his sense of humor. Because he wanted to be all right, he had to believe what his
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parents said; the things they had said, prenatally, contained every kind of a bad datum possible
about who was the boss and how much fun it was to beat the mother and so forth. All this,
then, was made into “true data” which, because his sympathy engram said so, he had to
believe. No more horrible curse could ever be laid on anyone than those in sympathy engrams
which say “Believe what is said,” “Believe what is read,” “Believe people,” because that
engram means literally that the poor old analyzer will now never be able to evaluate its own data
unless, by utter rebellion, the individual negates against the whole world, which can
occasionally be done. Let this individual, however, as this one did, marry a woman who has
characteristics similar to his grandmother’s (a pseudo-grandmother) and he becomes prey to:
(a) the pain and illness, chronic, which he experienced in his grandmother sympathy engrams
(necessary to get and keep her sympathy); and (b) all his prenatals, since the pseudo-grandmother
throws him into his own valence: This makes him quarrel, which makes his wife
fight back, and suddenly this woman is not pseudo-grandmother but pseudo-mother. Exit
sanity.
In therapy, when we encounter this sympathy engram at last, it is discovered to have
been buried in two ways: (a) it was aligned with purpose; and (b) it had a forgetter mechanism
on it.
Because of (a) the self-protection of the mind permitted it to give up the engram only
when enough tension was taken off the case to permit the mind to get along without this
engram.
In (b) we have a device which is common in engrams. Whenever we try to run an
engram which has somatics enough even to make the pre-clear roll around on the couch but
which contains no word content, we suspect a forgetter mechanism. There are evidently people
in this world who think that the panacea for all mental discomfort is to forget: “Put it out of my
mind,” “If I remembered it I would go mad,” “Junior, you never remember a thing I tell you,”
“Nobody can remember anything,” “Can’t remember,” and just plain “I don’t know,” as well
as the master of the family of phrases, “Forget it!” all bar information from the analyzer. A
whole case, freshly opened, may keep answering everything with one of these denyers (there
are many other kinds of denyers, if you recall). Repeater technique will eventually begin to
release the phrase from various engrams and begin to show up incidents. To have a
grandmother who says, “Forget it” continually every time a child gets hurt is to be cursed
beyond Macbeth. A forgetter, used by an ally, all by itself and with practically no pain or
emotion present will submerge data which, in recall, would not be aberrative but which, so
buried -- by a forgetter -- makes things said just before it aberrative and literal.
Hence this engram remained utterly out of sight until the case was almost finished and
as soon as it was contacted, the already de-intensified reactive bank collapsed and the patient
was cleared.
The second example of the sympathy engram concerns a childhood experience of a
patient who, at the beginning of therapy, was a remarkably confused individual. Here is an
example of sympathy engram which is not uncommon. (It will not be primary in any ally
computation but because it is often repeated in the same case, becomes aberrative.) This
incident occurred when the child had been badly hurt in an accident. He had received a
fractured skull and concussion and was for many days in a coma. He had never learned that
such an incident happened to him although examination afterwards disclosed evidence of the
fracture and disclosed also that while he had known there was a ridge in his skull he had never
wondered about it for an instant. His father and mother were, at the time, on the verge of
divorce and, in the presence of the only partly conscious child, quarreled several times in these
few days, evidently upset by his accident and recriminative as to whose fault it was. The first
part of the series of engrams within this one large engram are unimportant as an example save
that they brought about a condition where the mother put herself forward as a defender of the
child who was not under attack by the father. The mother’s conversation aberratively indictated
that the father was attacking the child, and the words in an engram rather than the action are
important as aberrative factors. Finally the father left the house and home. The mother sat down
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by the boy’s trundle bed and, weeping, told him she would keep him from dying, that she
would “work and slave and wear her fingers to the bone” to keep him alive and “I am the only
reason you are alive. I have defended you against that beast and monster. If it were not for me,
you would have died long ago and I am going to care for you and protect you. So don’t pay
any attention to anything people tell you. I am a good mother. I have always been a good
mother. Don’t listen to them. Please, baby, stay here and get well, please!”
This remarkable piece of nonsense came, of course, straight out of her reactive mind.
She did not feel guilty about the way she was taking care of the baby, though she had done her
cyclic worst for this child since conception. (There is no such thing as guilt nor a guilt complex
that is not straight out of an engram that says, “I am guilty” or some such similar phrase.)
Here is ambivalence at work. By ambivalent is meant power on two sides. It had better
be called multivalence, for it is demonstrable that people have many valences, twenty or thirty
not being unusual for a “normal.” This mother, with her wild pleas and her mawkish
sentimentality, shifted around in valences like a whirling dervish. She was capable of being
viciously cruel, torturing her child with, as the Navy calls them, “capricious and unusual
punishments”: yet one of these valences which, unfortunately for the patient, only turned on
when he was ill, was one of savage protection for the child and assurances to him that she
loved him and would never leave him to starve, etc. She formed, in this child, because of her
own reactive pattern and her inabilities, close to a thousand engrams before he was ten. This
particular specimen given was fairly standard.
The aberrative aspect of this engram was a “conviction” that if one’s mother were not
around and if one were not on good terms with her, one would starve, die or suffer generally.
Also it meant, because of the time it was given, having a bad headache if one wanted to live.
The whole series of these engrams made a highly complex pattern of psycho-somatic ills
including sinusitis, a chronic rash, allergies and numerous other actual physical ills, despite the
fact that the patient had always tried to be as forthright in his physical being as possible and
was not in any way a hypochondriac.
In therapy the entire chain of fights in this area, much of the prenatal area and most late
life painful emotion engrams were relieved before this sympathy engram displayed itself.
As a note on the subject of sympathy engrams, these are in nowise exclusively found in
childhood: they exist prenatally and postnatally -- and sometimes late in life. Any persons who
defend the child against further abortion attempts become part of the sympathy engram chains
and, of course, they are allies whose loss is something to be dreaded. Late sympathy engrams
have been discovered at fifty years of age. One, discovered at thirty, consisted of a
nymphomaniac nurse who, during the period when the patient was still under ether and still in
pain, talked to him obscenely, played with his genitals and still managed, by the content of her
remarks, to plant a sympathy engram which produced a very serious psychic condition in the
patient. (It is in nowise true that many cases of sexual play exist while the patient is under
anesthetic or drugged but because this is a standard psychotic reaction of delusion is no reason
to rule that the incident cannot occasionally happen.)
The sympathy engram only has to sound like a sympathy engram to become one: there
is no evaluation of actual intent by the reactive mind.
PAINFUL EMOTION ENGRAM
Three of these are given to illustrate a type of each. They can happen at any period,
including prenatally, but are most easily tapped in more recent life, when they will then lead
back to early incidents of physical pain, sympathy engrams and the like. The first example is a
case of loss by death of an ally. A girl, at the age of eighteen, was given a painful emotion
engram by being told by her parents that her aunt was dead. The aunt was a prime ally. The
patient, treated at the age of thirty-one, recalled the death of her aunt but attributed her sorrow
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to other things such as a restimulation of what she called her own “death instinct” (which was,
in reality, engramic chatter by mother about wanting to die and get it all over with). Actually the
aunt had been a large factor in dissuading the mother from “getting rid of” the child and had
made the mother promise that she would not. The aunt had also tended the child, postnatally,
through illnesses and was, in fact, the only refuge for the girl when a termagant mother and a
religiously bigoted father would converge on her, for neither had wanted her and there had
been a number of efforts to terminate the pregnancy pre-term.
Her father communicated the information to the girl with a sonorous voice and
appropriately long face. “I want you to be very respectful at the funeral, Agatha.” (“What
funeral?”) “Your aunt just passed to the great beyond.” (“She’s dead?”) “Yes, death must come
to us all and we must all be prepared some day to meet the fate which waits for us at the end of
the road. For it is a long path, life, and God and flaming hell wait at its other end and someday
we all must die. Be sure you are very respectful at the funeral.” She had begun to pale at the
word “funeral,” she was to all purposes “unconscious” when she heard the first mention of
“death” and she remained “unconscious,” if moving about, for two whole days. The case had
been very slow until this engram was discovered and run. An enormous discharge of grief
took place, which had never before manifested itself. It was reduced to boredom in eight
recountings, at which the first moment of the aunt’s intervention in the abortion attempts was
automatically contacted and released.
Thereafter the case made progress in the prenatal area, prohibition against “getting rid of
it” having been removed and (according to theory, free units being available), the charge had
come off the prenatal area. There were five other allies in this case, the girl, with parents who
had been so wicked to her, having attached herself to anyone who would show her interest and
refuge. As lower physical pain came into view, more allies showed up and more painful
emotion engrams were discharged, permitting new physically painful engrams to display
themselves.
The next example is an engram from a patient who had all his life been reared and cared
for by “moneyed parents.” He had a very severe prenatal area which yet would not lift to view.
It was discovered at length that his nurses had been his only source of love and affection and
that his mother, being a woman who liked to unsettle the household as often as possible, would
discharge a nurse every time she found the child had grown fond of her, even though the
mother herself made it plain that she considered the child “nasty.” The engram: the boy sees his
nurse coming out of the house with her suitcase in her hand: he stops playing in the yard and
runs to her to “scare her”: she is quite angry from the scene she has just had -- an Irish girl --
and yet she smooths her face and kneels down beside him. “I am leaving, Buddy. I can’t stay
here any more. No, I can’t be your nurse now. But there, there, you’ll have another one.
Don’t cry. It’s not good for little boys to cry. Good-bye, Buddy. I love you.” And she goes off
out of sight.
He was stunned from the first instant she said she was leaving. The prohibition against
crying was from an ally: whatever an ally says must be good and must be believed because
allies are survival and one must survive: allies therefore must be believed. He had not cried
except on rare occasions of enormous sorrow in all the years thereafter. Eight of these
departures were touched without result but with this one, they all loosened and discharged, one
after the other.
Any departure of or from an ally contains an emotional charge which, if it will not
display itself, is elsewhere suppressed.
The third example of the painful emotion engram is the third type, loss of an ally by
reversal. A wife loved her husband very dearly. They had gotten along well together until his
parents came into the vicinity and began to malign his wife. He was furious with them for it
and quarreled with them. His wife was a pseudo-ally and unfortunately that ally had told the
child to believe his parents. (This is fairly chronic with allies -- if they would give the child
correct data when he is emotionally disturbed or ill, there would be less trouble. A remark such
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as, “Well, you’ll grow up some day and be able to care for yourself,” is much better than a hat
full of Emersonian platitudes.) This brought about a tragic reversal. The reactive mind,
restimulated at the sight of his wife (the husband was emotionally disturbed, very restimulated
already by his parents) threw in the data that one must believe one’s parents. This made his
wife no good, as per their aberrative chatter. He went into his father’s valence to escape this
imponderable situation and that valence beat women. He struck his wife repeatedly,
dramatizing one of his father’s engrams: “I hate you. You are no good. I should have listened
to them sooner. You’re no good.”
The wife was in therapy. This charge suppressed itself, not out of shame for her
husband’s actions but for the mechanical reason that the early area had to be relieved before this
one would discharge (smart file clerk). Her case had slowed down to a point where the board
looked entirely clear although somatics (which she attributed to natural causes) and aberrations
(which she said were reasonable reactions) still manifested themselves. Suddenly this incident
appeared when repeater technique was used on the auditor’s random guess: “I hate you,” for it
was known that she said this now and then to her husband. Three recountings discharged this
painful emotion despite its violence (it made her weep until she almost choked). Immediately
twelve prenatals, all fights between her mother and father (an ally, of which her husband was
the pseudo-ally) wherein the mother beat her abdomen and cursed the child, appeared and were
erased and the case progressed to clear.
Loss of dogs, dolls, money, position, even the threat of a loss, anything may bring
about a painful emotion engram so long as it is loss. It may be loss by death, loss by departure,
loss by reversal. Anything connected with the life of the patient and associated by him with his
own survival seems to be capable of locking up life units when lost. A condition of such
painful emotion is that it has early physically painful engrams upon which to append. The
physically painful engram is still the villain but it has an accomplice in the painful emotion
engram.
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CHAPTER IX
PART ONE
Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy
THE CASE ENTRANCE
Every case presents a new problem of entrance. No two human beings are exactly alike
and no two cases will follow the exact pattern. However, this presents no problem to dianetics
since the mechanics are always the same.
There are three case classifications: the sonic-recall, the non-sonic recall and the
imaginary recall (what auditors call a “dub-in” recall).
In the sonic recall case, the entrance is very easy. But in all cases the basic procedure is
the same. Put the patient in reverie (and don’t worry too much if he doesn’t go into a very deep
reverie because reverie only serves to fix his attention on himself and the auditor and you can at
least accomplish that). Install a canceller. Return him to childhood to pick up a pleasant incident
and then find a minor pain incident such as a slap in the face. Run him through this a few times
just to let him get the idea. If he doesn’t respond well, put him into yesterday and let him ride to
work and ask him about sounds and sights, then send him to childhood again.
The object of finding a minor incident such as a slapped face is to find out if the patient
has a pain shutoff. A pain shut-off is not particularly difficult in dianetics. You can get back
before the command which installed the anesthesia, but it is interesting to know about it
because you want to look for it early in the case. See then if the patient has an emotional shut-off.
This again is not particularly embarrassing but again is data you want to find eventually.
Test now to find out if the patient is within himself or if he is outside himself, watching
himself. If he is exteriorized, you are working a case which has considerable walled up
emotion in it which must be discharged.
Now make a try to basic-basic. You might surprise yourself and get it. And you might
work fifty hours for it, releasing the case the while. Get whatever the file clerk will give you in
the prenatal area and what you get, reduce.
Whether basic-basic is contacted or not, locate as many prenatals as will present
themselves without much coaxing and reduce each one.
If you find no prenatals, bring the patient up to present time but remind him to keep his
eyes closed. Now ask him a few questions about his family, his grandparents, his wife or, if
the pre-clear is a woman, her husband. Ask about any former husbands or wives. Ask about
children. And ask particularly about death. You are looking for a painful emotion engram, an
instant of loss which will discharge.
Finding out about one, even if it is just the death of a favorite dog, return the pre-clear
to it and run it from the first moment he hears the news of it and for the ensuing few minutes of
it. Then start it again. Reduce the moment as an engram. You want an emotional discharge.
Run it several times. If you don’t get a discharge, find some other moment of loss, some
failure, something, anything which will discharge: but do it all quietly as if with sympathy.
Lacking any success, start in repeater technique, never for a moment giving any intelligence
that you are anything but calmly concerned for his welfare (even if some of his gyrations worry
you). Try such phrases as “Poor little -- “ using his or her childhood name.
When the pre-clear has repeated this several times (the auditor at the same time stating
that somatic strip will return to any incident containing the phrase to assist the “suck down”),
he may find himself in a high tension incident which will discharge. If nothing discharges yet,
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keep calm (all this work will pay dividends in the next session or the next or next), keep
searching, keep observing. There is emotional charge here somewhere which will discharge.
Try other combinations of words such as those which would be said to a sick and worried
child, make the pre-clear repeat them.
If you have had no success as yet, make another test, without saying it is a test, to see if
the pre-clear is actually leaving present time. Don’t let him “try to remember” -- you want him
to return and that is another process, although it is just as natural to the brain. If he is stuck in
present time, start him on repeater technique again, suggesting bouncers: “Get out and never
come back!” “You can’t ever return!” etc., which would account for his being still in present
time. If he is not returning after some of this, start in with holder phrases: “I’m stuck!” “Don’t
move!” and so forth.
Stay calm, never appear anxious. If you get neither a discharge nor an engram with
repeater technique in this first session and if you get no motion on the track, read this manual
again and try your patient not later than three days after this first session. At that time some of
the data you have asked for may be available.
Ordinarily, however, you will receive either a prenatal or a discharge and if you get a
discharge, then ask the somatic strip to go back for the prenatal it was sitting on. Reduce
everything you can find. If birth turns up and seems to be in full recall, try to reduce that but do
so in the knowledge that it probably will not lift very far and in the knowledge that you had
better run it over and over and over to de-intensity it all you can.
Sometimes the pre-clear will go into a deeper reverie than you wish. But do not try to
wake him into a higher level. Work him where he is. But if he seems to be in something
approaching hypnotic trance, be very careful of your language. Never tell him, for instance, to
go back there and stay there until he finds something. That’s a holder. Don’t use holders and
bouncers and groupers et al. on anyone in dianetics. “Will you please return to the prenatal
area?” “Let’s see if the somatic strip can locate an early moment of pain or discomfort.” “Please
pick up the somatic at the beginning and roll the engram.” “What do you hear, please?”
“Continue” (when you want him to keep on going from the point of the engram where he is to
the later end of the engram). “Recount that again, please.”
There’s nothing to be nervous about. If you get nervous, then he’ll get nervous.
Sometimes you run into a pain shut-off. This has a tendency to put the pain into the
muscles and the muscles will jump and quiver and the patient may sense this and still feel
nothing more. Once in a great while a patient will have such a thorough pain shut-off that he
bounces about, all unconscious of the action, and almost falls from couch to floor. If you run
into this, do not be alarmed: the pain is locked in somehow. Get early enough and you’ll locate
a somatic he can feel, or go late and find an emotional charge.
Don’t be misled if he tells you, with regard to emotion, that he has worked it all out in
psycho-analysis or some such thing. He may have walled in the death of his wife or sweetheart
or child, but the whole engram is still there, crammed with captured units, ready to be run
exactly as an engram.
If you run into a heavy emotional charge, simply let the patient weep, keep him at the
business of running the engram in a soft, sympathetic voice, have it recounted until there is no
charge left in any of it and then run him early into the prenatal area or early childhood to get a
physical pain engram that must have been below that emotional charge and held it in place.
The extravagance of emotional discharge is nothing to be alarmed about. Bringing the
patient out of it and to present time suddenly would cause him unhappiness about it. Running
the painful emotion engram will discharge, in a few recountings, sorrow which society has
believed could never be countered or relieved except by repression. Get the moment he first
heard the news or observed the thing which made him feel so bad. Run it far enough from its
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beginning to make sure that you have the initial shock -- a few minutes of engram time will do
-- and then get him to recount it again. He may observe himself to be far outside himself when
you start. The moment may not discharge until you have run it several times. Remember, he is
returned to the incident, he is not running it as a memory, a thing which would do no good
whatever.
Do not let him replay anything, ever. Repay is a bad habit some pre-clears have of
playing over what they remember they said the last time instead of progressing through the
engram freshly on each recounting and contacting what is contained in the engram itself. Tell
the pre-clear there may be some more in it, ask him what color the bed in the room he is
returned to is, keep his attention, by any quiet mechanism, upon the scene. And do not let him
replay ever, not on any engram at any time: he could replay forever without therapeutic value,
each time saying what he remembered he said the last time. There is a difference between this
and the repeated re-experiencing of the engram to gather additional data and to get rid of the
charge.
Discharge emotion, reduce incidents of physical pain as early prenatally as possible. If
you can’t get into the prenatal area at first, it has many bouncers in it and repeater technique will
take you there.
If the patient keeps saying such a thing as “I can’t remember,” be patient -- always
follow the code. Have him start running that phrase as repeater technique. If he gets a somatic
but contacts nothing else, send him earlier. If he gets another and still can’t contact on “I can’t
remember,” send him earlier, his whole engram bank must be strewn with them -- poor fellow.
Somebody really didn’t want him to know what had happened to him. Eventually you will get
back to an engram which will release a phrase. When he has gone over the phrase a few more
times, he will smile or chuckle or perhaps merely feel relieved. Now you can either run the
engram in which you found the earliest phrase, which is best, or you can come back toward
present time, lifting the phrase as it later appeared. Or you can start on something else which
may block the case.
The goal and the whole goal is to place the standard bank in entire conscious reach of
the individual by deleting (a) early and subsequently all physical pain engrams; (b) all demon
circuits (which are merely contained in engrams and come up more or less automatically); and
(c) all painful emotion engrams.
The process of work is to get as early as you can, preferably prenatal and very early in
that, and try to find and reduce an engram, complete with all somatics (pain) and perceptics
(words and other sensations). If you fail in this, you go late, any time from birth forward to
present time, and find a moment of loss or threatened loss from which you can get an emotional
charge. Then you go back early, early, early and find the engram on which it rested. You try
always, until you are certain you have it, to get basic-basic, the earliest engram. You reduce as
many early engrams as you can find, using the file clerk and repeater system, and when you
seem to run out of material, you go later into life and try to find another emotional charge.
The physically painful engrams cover up later emotional charges. Emotional charges
cover up physically painful engrams. Back and forth, back and forth. Run as much as you can
get early: when it seems to be running out or getting too unemotional, get some later material.
This is the way you work a case. No matter what kind of a case it is, no matter what the
state of its recall, no matter if the case is normal, psychotic or neurotic or what, this is the way.
These are the tools:
(1) Reverie or fixed attention if you cannot get reverie.
(2) Return.
(3) Repeater technique.
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(4) A knowledge of bouncers, holders, groupers, misdirectors, denyers.
(5) A knowledge of the painful emotion engram.
(6) The reduction or the erasure.
(7) The flash answer.
(8) The valence shift.
This is all you need to do:
(1) Keep the patient mobile, able to move on the track.
(2) Reduce or erase everything you get your hands on.
(3) Deduce from the remarks of the patient, in or out of therapy, what must be his
bouncers, holders, groupers, misdirectors, denyers.
(4) Keep it solidly in mind that the number one goal is basic-basic, the earliest moment of
pain and “unconsciousness.”
(5) Keep in mind that the patient may have “computations” which make his illness or his
aberrated state “valuable” to him and discover whence those “computations” come by
flash answer to your questions.
(6) Keep the case progressing, gaining, work only for progress and gain, not for sudden,
soaring results. Worry only when the case remains static and worry then in terms of
finding the engram which is balking everything. Its content will be a close
approximation to the way the patient says he feels about it and will contain the same or
similar words.
(7) Get the patient back to present time each time you work and feed him the canceller. Test
him with an age flash, get his first reply to how old he is, find the holder at that age if
he is not at present time.
(8) Keep your temper no matter what the patient says.
(9) Never try to tell him what his data means: he knows and he alone knows what it
means.
(10) Keep your nerve and run dianetics; like Farragut said, “Damn the torpedoes! Go
ahead.”
(11) Wife, son, whatever you may be to the pre-clear, you are the auditor when you are
auditing. He cannot compute his own engrams to find them -- if he could they would
not be engrams. You can compute them. Do what you think a good auditor would do,
never what the patient says save only when he accidentally concurs in his opinion that a
good auditor would do that. Be the auditor, not a recording device. You and the file
clerk in his mind are running the case: what his engrams and his analytical mind believe
should have no force in any of your computations. You and his file clerk know. He, as
“I” doesn’t know.
(12) Be surprised at nothing. Audit.
These are the things you must not do:
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(1) Dilute dianetics with some practice or belief of yesteryear; you will only slow or
sidetrack a case. Analyzing data received on any other basis than getting more engrams
leads to delay and confusion for the pre-clear. It is a temptation to use this material for
other reasons than getting engrams if one has been trained in another field than
dianetics. Yielding to that temptation before one knows how dianetics works is a very
unfair test of dianetics, completely aside from the way it snarls a case. The temptation is
great because, with dianetics, you get such a wealth of data.
(2) Do not bully the patient. If the case is not progressing, then the fault lies with the
auditor. Do not surrender to an old practice of getting mad at a patient just because he
doesn’t get well. You may be sure the engram you have just reduced out of his reactive
engram bank is the reason he won’t take baths, but if he still refuses to bathe, be certain
there is an earlier reason.
(3) Don’t assume grandly that you have a “different” case just because it doesn’t resolve
swiftly. They are all “different” cases.
(4) Don’t run for help to somebody who does not know dianetics if your nerve fails you.
The reason the case did not progress or became involved is right there -- your nerve
failed you. Only dianetics can work a problem in dianetics.
(5) Do not listen to a patient’s complaints as complaints; use them as data to get engrams.
(6) Do not suppose that just because you cannot reach prenatal engrams in a case that they
are not there. There are scores and scores of them in every case. Remember that an
engram isn’t a memory, it has to be developed to become within recall. There is no
human being walking on earth today who does not have a plentitude of prenatals.
(7) Do not allow the patient to use his mother or his memory of what he has been told as a
by-pass of prenatals. Every time you find a patient talking in past tense instead of
present tense he is not returned to an incident. Unless he is returned, the engram will
not lift.
(8) Do not suppose that because a patient does not feel bad today about a sorrow of
yesterday that a despair charge is not located back on his track when he received the
impact of that despair. Time may encyst, it does not heal.
(9) Do not think in terms of “guilt complexes” or “shame” unless you think of them as
engram content for there they will be found. Never suggest to a patient that he may be at
fault in an engram.
(10) Any departure from optimum behavior or conduct or rationality on the part of the patient
is engramic: don’t make “allowances for human nature” any more than you, as a
mathematician, would make allowances for an adding machine which brought up
wrong answers.Sexual fears, repressions, defenses are not “natural” as they have been
regarded in the past.
(11) Don’t worry about the patient’s aberrations. Work to contact and reduce and erase
engrams. You will find, in any patient, enough aberrations to fill a dictionary.
(12) Don’t fret if your patient does not become a clear in an evening or a month. Just keep
working. You’ll have him above normal so quickly you won’t realize when you passed
it. Above that you are shooting for a very high goal.
STUCK IN PRESENT TIME
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Cases, when they are entered, are found in various positions and situations on the time
track; sometimes they are off the time track entirely and sometimes the time track is all snarled
up in a ball. Now and then the time track is found to be in good condition and the engrams
available, but this is not ordinary.
No case can be said to be more difficult than another except in the matter of recalls,
“dub-ins” and shut-offs. But the case which seems to be “stuck in present time” and on whom
no repeater phrase works is very often quite puzzling to an auditor. The pre-clear will not return
to engrams. Ordinarily there may be pain and emotional shut-offs and the painful emotion
cannot be quickly discharged. Sometimes somatics will turn on but no content can be gained.
Sometimes there is no somatic but content. The situations are quite various.
There are several things an auditor can do. The first of them is to use his wits. The next
is to indoctrinate the patient into returning. This indoctrination is quite simple. The auditor takes
the patient back a few hours and has the patient tell what he sees. The sonic and visio may be
occluded but the patient may have some idea of what is taking place. The auditor then takes him
back a few days, then a few months and finally several years, each time getting the patient to
describe his “surroundings” as best he can. The patient now has the idea of returning. He can
travel at least along portions of his life which are not occluded by engrams.
When the patient is returned to some early moment in his life, begin to use repeater
technique on him, aiming toward obvious things such as feeling shut-offs (going over the word
“feel”) or forgetter mechanisms (such as “forget”). An engram may then be contacted and
reduced.
If repeater technique still does not work and still does not get data, diagnose by his
behavior in therapy and his statements what must be troubling him or occluding his recalls and
again use these guesses as repeater. For instance he may have no recollection of some member
of his family. Have him repeat the familiar name. Or have him repeat his own childhood
nickname until an incident is contacted.
Should this still fail, then find some light locks, incidents which contain minimal pain,
and run those. Such things as falls from a tricycle, getting sent from the table, getting spanked
or scolded, being kept after school and so forth will serve. After he has reduced several locks,
again try to find an engram.
The running of locks will not bring about any great recovery, and there are thousands
and thousands of locks in any case, most of which will vanish without assistance from the
auditor once the severe engrams are located. But locks may be used to indoctrinate the patient
into returning and therapy in general and may even bring about an improved condition in him
by demonstrating to him that he can face his past.
The foremost things to do in any case at the beginning are to (1) attempt to locate and
erase basic-basic, and (2) discharge painful emotion. The sooner emotion can be released, the
better, and there is always emotion on a case just as there are always a plenty of prenatal
incidents.
But when a case is stuck in present time either when it is opened or during progress, it
is highly charged with occluded emotion and it is obeying a restimulated engram to the effect
that it must go all the way to now and stay there. The wording of this engram will generally be
expressed by the patient himself in complaining of his trouble. Repeater technique is used with
this clue. That failing, indoctrinate the patient by taking him back to what he can contact and
when indoctrination is done, as above, start using repeater technique again.
There is one motto which applies to all therapy, “If you keep asking for it, you’ll get
it.” Any and all engrams surrender on the basis of returning the patient to the area time and
again, session after session. The engram bank may be balky but enough asking will bring forth
any data in it sooner or later. Just keep asking, keep the routine of therapy running. Even a
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“stuck in present time” case will eventually begin to return on the sole principle of repeater
technique.
There are certain things that the auditor may be doing which are wrong. He may be
trying to work the case on data taken from parents or relatives, which is usually fruitless in
view of the fact that it undermines the preclear’s faith in his own data (all the data will check
with the relatives; just don’t worry about checking it until the case is finished). Or he may be
trying to work the case in the presence of other people. Or he may be violating the auditor’s
code. A list of these deterrents to progress is to be found elsewhere in this volume.
BASIC-BASIC
The first goal of the auditor is basic-basic and after that always the earliest moment of
pain or discomfort which he can reach. He may have to go late for emotional charges and these
themselves may be physically painful. Emotion may bar the patient from basic-basic. But
always that first turn-off of the analyzer is important and when it is gained, subsequent
engrams are much more easily reduced.
Basic-basic is the vital target for two reasons: (1) It contains an analyzer shut-off which
itself is restimulated every time a new engram is received. The common denominator of all
engrams is analyzer shut-off. Turn it on the first time it was shut off and a vast improvement
takes place in the case, for thereafter analyzer shut-off is not as deep. (2) An “erasure” (which
is to say an apparent removal of the engram from the files of the engram bank and refiling in the
standard bank as memory) of basic-basic widens the track beyond it markedly and brings many
new engrams into view.
Basic-basic is occasionally found weeks before mother’s first missed period, which
would place it much earlier than any examination for pregnancy or an attempted abortion.
Sometimes in a non-sonic case sonic is discoverable in basic-basic but far from always.
Considerable material may be “erased” before basic-basic appears.
Sometimes basic-basic gets “erased” without either the auditor or the pre-clear knowing
that it has been reached, basic-basic being merely another engram in the basic area. Sometimes
much painful emotion must be discharged in the later life areas before basic-basic discloses
itself.
Always, however, basic-basic is the target and until he has a good idea that he has
reached it, the auditor, once every session, makes an effort to get it. Thereafter he tries to get
the earliest moment of pain or discomfort he can reach every session. If he can reach nothing
early, he seeks to discharge a late emotional engram -- when it is completely discharged,
“reduced” or “erased” as an engram -- then he goes down into the earliest material the file clerk
will give him.
Whatever comes up, the auditor seeks to take all the charge out of it, whether that
charge is pain or emotion, before he proceeds on his way to new material. This is done merely
by returning the patient back over the incident many times until it no longer affects him either
painfully or emotionally, or until it seems to vanish.
THE REDUCTION AND THE ERASURE
These two terms are highly colloquial. Serious effort has been made to deter their use
and substitute for them something sonorous and wonderfully Latin, but no progress has been
made to date. Auditors insist on using colloquial terms such as “AA” for attempted abortion,
“louse up” for engrams which seriously aberrate, “aberree” for a person not released or cleared,
“zombie” for an electric shock or neuro-surgical case and so forth. It is feared that a tendency
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exists in them to be disrespectful to the hallowed and sacred tomes of yesteryear, to the dignity
of past Authorities which labeled much and did little. However this may be, “reduction” and
“erasure” are in such common use that to change them is hardly necessary.
To reduce means to take all the charge or pain out of an incident. This means to have the
pre-clear recount the incident from beginning to end (while returned to it in reverie) over and
over again, picking up all the somatics and perceptions present just as though the incident were
happening at that moment. To reduce means, technically, to render free of aberrative material as
far as possible to make the case progress.
To “erase” an engram means to recount it until it has vanished entirely. There is a
distinct difference between a reduction and an “erasure.” The difference depends more upon
what the engram is going to do than upon what the auditor wants it to do. If the engram is
early, if it has no material earlier which will suspend it, that engram will “erase.” The patient,
trying to find it again for a second or sixth recounting, will suddenly find out he has no faintest
idea what was in it. He may ask the auditor who, of course, will give him no information
whatever. (The auditor who prompts is slowing down therapy by making himself the patient’s
memory.) Going through it and trying to find it may cause the patient some amusement when
he cannot. Or it may make him puzzled for here was something which had, on first contact, a
painful somatic and a highly aberrative content which now no longer seems to exist. That is an
“erasure.” Technically the engram is not erased. If the auditor cares to spend some time, solely
for purposes of research, he will find that engram in the standard banks now, labeled “formerly
aberrative: rather amusing: information which may be useful analytically.” Such a search is not
germane to therapy. If the incident had a somatic, was recounted a few times and then, when its
last new material was found, vanished, it is erased so far as the engram bank is concerned. It
will no longer be “soldered” into the motor circuits, will no longer be dramatized, it no longer
blocks a dynamic and is no longer an engram but a memory.
The “reduction” has some interesting aspects. Let us take a childhood incident (age of
four, let us say) which had to do with a scalding. This is contacted while much data remains in
the basic area. It has many things below it which will hold it in place. Nevertheless, it has
emotional charge and therapy is slowed by that charge. The file clerk hands out the scalding.
Now it will not erase, but it will reduce. Here is a job which will take more time than an
erasure. And there may be several aspects to that job.
The somatic is contacted, the incident is begun as close to the beginning as the auditor
can get, and is then recounted. This scalding, let us say, has apathy as its emotional tone (Tone
0.5). The pre-clear slogs through it apathetically, well exteriorized, watching himself be
scalded. Then suddenly, perhaps, an emotional discharge may come off, but not necessarily.
The pre-clear returns to the beginning and recounts (re-experiences) the whole thing once more.
Then again and again. Soon he begins to get angry at the people involved in the incident for
being so careless or so heartless. He has come up to anger (Tone 1.5). The auditor, although
the patient would like to tell how vicious his parents are or how he thinks laws ought to be
passed about scalding children, patiently puts the pre-clear through the incident again. Now the
pre-clear ceases to be angry and finds that he is bored with the material. He has risen up to
boredom on the tone scale (Tone 2.5). He may protest to the auditor that this is a waste of time.
The auditor puts him back through the incident again. New data may show up. The somatic
may or may not be still present at this period but the emotional tone is still low. The auditor
puts the pre-clear through the incident again and the pre-clear may, but not always, begin to be
sarcastic or facetious. The incident is again recounted. Suddenly the pre-clear may be amused
about it (but not always) and the incident, when it obviously has reached a high tone, may be
left. It will probably sag in a few days, but that is a matter of no great importance for it will be
erased wholly on the return from basic-basic. In any case it will never be as aberrative as it was
before the reduction.
A reduction will sometimes result in the whole engram’s apparently disappearing. But it
is obvious when this will occur. Without much lifting in the tone scale, the incident, by
repetition, simply goes out of sight. This is reducing to recession. In a few days that incident
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will be back in force again, almost as strong as ever. There is material before it and emotional
charge after it which make it unwieldy.
Several things can happen, then, to an engram in the process of work. It can reduce,
which is to say, discharge emotionally and somatically and be of no great aberrative power
thereafter. It can reduce to recession, which is to say it merely goes out of sight after several
recountings. It can erase, which is to say, vanish and cease to be thereafter so far as the engram
bank is concerned.
A little experience will tell an auditor what engrams are going to do after he has
contacted them. Erasure takes place, ordinarily, only after basic-basic has been reached or, for
that matter, when the basic area is being worked. The reduction occurs with an emotional
discharge. The reduction to recession happens when there is too much in the engram bank
suppressing the incident.
Every now and then even the best auditor will get hold of an engram and decide to grind
it out now that it has been contacted. It is a sorry job. Perhaps it is better to grind it out than to
merely restimulate it and let the patient be irritated by it for a couple of days. Perhaps not. But
in any case that engram which reduces only to recession was better not contacted in the first
place.
New auditors are forever charging at birth as an obvious target. Everybody has a birth:
in most patients it can be located rather easily. But it is a painful incident and until the basic area
has been thoroughly worked and until late life painful emotion has been discharged and until
the file clerk is ready to hand up birth, the incident is better left in place. It will usually reduce
to recession and afterwards keep popping up to plague the auditor. The patient gets obscure
headaches, gets sniffles, feels uncomfortable afterwards unless birth is taken on the return
(from the basic area). The auditor is wasting time, of course, by trying to remove these
headaches and sniffles because birth, with the whole prenatal life before it, will not properly
reduce or erase but only recede. It is too often the case that birth, if prematurely contacted, will
give the patient a headache and a cold. These discomforts are minor and of no great importance,
but the work the auditor may have invested in working an incident which will only reduce to
recession is lost work.
True, the file clerk occasionally hands out birth: if he does, there is an emotional charge
on it which will discharge and the incident will reduce properly. The auditor by all means
should take it. True, a case sometimes stalls down and the auditor runs birth anyway just to see
if he can speed things up. But merely going back to birth to put one’s hands on an engram
because he knows it is there will bring about discomfort and lost time. Go prenatal as far as
you can and see what the file clerk will hand forth. Try repeater technique in the basic area.
You may get incidents which will erase. If there is nothing there, find out about a
painful emotion engram in late life, the death of a friend, the loss of an ally, a failure of a
business, something. Blow a charge from it and reduce it as an engram and then go back
prenatally as early as possible and see what has turned up. If the file clerk thinks you need
birth, he’ll give it out. But do not ask for birth just to have an engram to work, because it may
prove to be a thoroughly uncomfortable and fruitless endeavor. Birth will come up when it will
come up and the file clerk knows his business.
Charging into any late period of “unconsciousness” such as surgical anesthetic, where
physical pain is present in large quantities, can bring about this needless restimulation. You
can, of course, fare better with such things in reverie than in hypnosis or narco-synthesis
where such a restimulation might bring about severe results. In reverie the effect is light.
HANDLING THE SOMATIC STRIP
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There are two little men on each side of the brain, a set for each lobe, hanging by their
heels. The outer one is the “motor strip,” the inner one, the “sensory strip.” If you wish to
know more about the structure of these pairs dianetic research will have the answer in a few
more years. Currently there is something known about them, a description. To an engineer
who knows dianetics the current description which will be found in the library is not entirely
reasonable. These are, possibly, switchboards of some sort. Readings can be taken in the
vicinity of them -- just aft of the temples -- if you have a very sensitive galvanometer, a
galvanometer more sensitive than any on the public market today. Those readings show
emanations of a field of some sort. When we have established the precise type of energy
flowing here, we can probably measure it with better precision. When we know exactly where
the thinking is done in the body we will know more about these strips. All dianetic research has
established to date is that, beneath a welter of labels, nothing is actually known which is worth
recounting about these structures beyond the fact that they have something to do with
coordination of various parts of the body. We do, however, refer to them for lack of something
better, in the course of therapy. Now that we know something about function, further research
certainly cannot help but yield precision answers about structure.
The auditor can turn somatics on and off in a patient like an engineer handles switches.
More aptly, he can turn them on and off in the body like a conductor runs a street car along a
track. Here we have the game referred to previously when we talked about the time track.
In a patient who is working well, the “somatic strip” can be commanded to go to any
part of the time track. Day by day, hour by hour, in normal life the somatic strip ranges up and
down this track as engrams are restimulated. The auditor, working a patient, may find his own
somatic strip obeying his own commands and some of his own somatics turning on and off, a
fact which is at worst mildly uncomfortable. The whole body, the cells, whatever it is that is
moving we do not really know. But we can handle it and we can assume that it at least passes
through the switchboard of the little men who hang by their heels.
“The somatic strip will now go to birth,” says the auditor.
The patient in reverie begins to feel the pressure of contractions thrusting him down the
birth canal.
“The somatic strip will now go to the last time you injured yourself,” says the auditor.
The pre-clear feels a mild reproduction of the pain of, perhaps, a bumped knee. If he
has sonic and visio recall, he will see where he is and suddenly realize that it was in the office:
he will hear the clerks and typewriters and the car noises outside.
“The somatic strip will now go into the prenatal area,” says the auditor.
And the patient finds himself in the area, probably floating along, not uncomfortable.
“The somatic strip will now go to the first moment of pain or discomfort which can
now be reached,” says the auditor.
The patient drifts around a moment and suddenly feels a pain in his chest. He begins to
cough and feels depression all over him. Mama is coughing (often source of chronic coughs).
“Roll the cough,” says the auditor.
The patient finds himself at the beginning of the engram and begins to run it. “Cough,
cough, cough,” says the patient. He then yawns. “‘It hurts and I can’t stop,’” he quotes his
mother. “Go to the beginning and roll it again,” says the auditor. “Cough, cough, cough,”
begins the patient, but he is not coughing as badly now. He yawns more deeply. “‘Ouch. It
hurts, it hurts, and I can’t seem to stop,’” quotes the pre-clear, listening directly if he has sonic,
getting impressions of what’s said if he does not have. He has picked up words now that were
suppressed in it by “unconsciousness.” “Unconsciousness” is beginning to come off with the
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yawns. “Roll it again,” says the auditor. “‘I can’t stop,’” says the pre-clear, quoting all that he
finds this time. The somatic is gone. He yawns again. The engram is erased.
“The somatic strip will now go to the next moment of pain or discomfort,” says the
auditor.
The somatic does not turn on. The patient goes into a strange sleep. He mutters about a
dream. Suddenly the somatic gets stronger. The patient begins to shiver. “What occurs?” says
the auditor. “I hear water running,” says the pre-clear. “Somatic strip will go to the beginning
of the incident,” says the auditor. “Roll it.” “I keep on hearing water,” says the pre-clear. (He
must be stuck, the somatics did not move. This is a holder.) “Somatic strip will go to whatever
it is that is holding,” says the auditor. “‘I’ll hold it in there awhile and see if it does some
good,’” quotes the pre-clear. “Pick up the beginning of the incident now and roll it,” says the
auditor. “I feel myself being jostled,” says the pre-clear. “Ouch, something bumped me.” “Pick
up the beginning and roll it,” says the auditor. “‘I’m sure I must be pregnant,’” quotes the pre-clear.
“‘I’ll hold it in there awhile and see if it does some good.’” “Is there anything earlier?”
says the auditor. The pre-clear’s strip goes to the earlier moment where he feels pressure as she
tries to get something into the cervix. Then he rolls the engram and it erases.
This is handling of the somatic strip. It can be sent anywhere. It will pick up the
somatic first, usually, and then pick up the content. Using repeater technique, the somatic is
“sucked down” to the incident and the somatics turn on. Then the incident is run. If it does not
lift, find an earlier incident simply by telling the somatic strip to go to the earlier incident.
If the somatic strip does not move, which is to say, if somatics (physical sensations) do
not turn on and off, then the patient is stuck somewhere on the track. He can be stuck in
present time, which would mean he has a bouncer thrusting him all the way up the track. Use
repeater technique or merely try to send the somatic strip back. If it won’t go, get various
bouncer phrases like “Can’t go back,” “Run a mile,” etc. and with them suck the somatic strip
down to the incident and run it.
The somatic strip may move through an incident with full sensation and yet, returning
over the same ground several times will not bring out data. Time after time this can be done
without result in some engrams: the somatics remain almost the same, undulating through the
incident each time but with no other content. Then the auditor is “bucking” a denyer, a phrase
such as “This is a secret,” “Don’t let him know,” “Forget it,” etc. In such a case he sends the
somatic strip to the phrase which denies the data: “Go to the moment a phrase is uttered
denying this data,” says the auditor. After a moment, “‘If he found out about this, it would kill
him,’” quotes the pre-clear, either from sonic or from impressions. Then the auditor sends the
somatic strip back to the start of the incident and it goes on through it, this time with other
perceptic content. The somatics, unless the incident is very late prenatal with basic area full of
material, undulate (fluctuate according to the action of the engram) and diminish to either
reduction or erasure on consecutive recountings.
The auditor tells the somatic strip to go earlier, sometimes it goes later. This is a
misdirector. “Can’t tell which way I am going,” “Going backwards,” “Do just the opposite,”
these are the type of phrases of the misdirector. The auditor recognizes that he has one in the
pre-clear, guesses it or discovers it from the pre-clear’s wording of the complaint about the
action, and by repeater or direct command of the strip, picks up the phrase and the engram,
reduces or erases it and continues.
If the somatic strip does not respond according to command, then a bouncer, a holder, a
misdirector, or a grouper has been restimulated and should be discharged. The somatic strip
will be where the command is which forbids it to function as desired.
There are good and bad conductors of this somatic strip. The good conductor works
closely with the file clerk, using such broad orders as “The somatic strip will pick up the
earliest moment of pain or discomfort which can be reached,” or “The somatic strip will go to
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the highest intensity of the somatic you now have” (when a somatic is bothering the patient).
The bad conductor picks out specific incidents which he thinks might be aberrative, bullies the
somatic strip into them and somehow beats them down. There are moments when it is
necessary to be quite persuasive with the strip and moments when it is necessary to pick out
incidents of physical pain, but the auditor is the best judge of what should take place. As long
as the strip will work smoothly, finding new incidents and running over them, he should not
tamper with it beyond making sure that he reduces everything the strip contacts.
A very fine way to thoroughly wreck a case is to put the somatic strip into an incident,
decide something else is more important and go rushing off to it, get that half lifted and go off
to something else. By the time three or four incidents have been so touched but not reduced, the
strip stalls down, the track starts to bunch up and the auditor has a snarl which may take him
many hours of therapy or a week or two of rebalancing (letting the case settle) to bring back to
a workable state.
The patient will sometimes want a somatic turned off. It has been bothering him. That
means that the strip is somehow hung up in some incident which therapy or the patient’s
environment has restimulated. Ordinarily it is not worth the time and trouble to locate the
incident. It will settle out of its own accord in a day or two and it may be an incident which
cannot be reduced because of the earlier engrams.
The somatic strip is handled in a late incident just as it is sent to an earlier one. Despair
charges are contacted in the same way.
If you want a test to see if the strip is moving, or to test recall, send it back a few hours
and find out what you get. While the prenatal area is easier to reach than yesterday in many
cases, some idea will be gained of how the patient is working.
PRESENT TIME
The beginning is conception. Your patients sometimes have a feeling that they are
sperms or ovums at the beginning of the track: in dianetics this is called the sperm dream. It is
not of any great value so far as we know at this time. But it is very interesting. It does not have
to be suggested to the pre-clear. All one has to do is send him to the beginning of the track and
hear what he has to say. Sometimes he has an early engram mixed up with conception.
At the late end of the track is, of course, now. This is present time. It happens now and
then that patients are not getting back to present time because they have struck holders en route.
Repeater technique with holders will generally free the strip and get it to present time.
A patient may get a trifle groggy with all the things which have been happening to him
in the course of a therapy session. And he may have reduced resistance to engrams as he comes
back up the track and may thus trip a holder. The auditor should be very sure the patient is up
in present time. Occasionally the patient will be so thoroughly stuck and the hour so advanced
that the effort to bring him all the way up is not feasible at the time. A period of sleep will
generally accomplish it.
There is a test whereby the auditor can tell if the pre-clear is up to present time. He
snaps a question at the pre-clear, “How old are you?” The pre-clear gives him a “flash answer.”
If it is the pre-clear’s right age, the pre-clear is in present time. If it is an earlier age, there is a
holder there, and the patient is not in present time. There are other methods of determining this
but it is not very important, by and large, if the patient does fail to make it.
Snapping questions at people, asking how old they are, elicits some surprising
answers. Being stuck on the track is so common in “normal” people that a day or two or a
week or two of failure to reach present time in a pre-clear is far from alarming.
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Anyone who has a chronic psycho-somatic illness is definitely stuck somewhere on the
time track. Snap questions about it get, “Three,” or “Ten years,” or some such answer quite
ordinarily even when asked of people who suppose they are in good health. Reverie reveals to
them where they are on the track. Sometimes, in the first session, a pre-clear shuts his eyes in
reverie to find himself in a dentist’s chair at the age of three. He has been there for the last thirty
years or so because the dentist and his mother both told him to “stay there” while he was
shocky with pain and gas -- so he did, and the chronic tooth trouble he had all his life is that
somatic.
This doesn’t happen very often, but you can find someone you know, it is certain, who
would flash answer “Ten years” and, being put in reverie, would find himself, as soon as the
engram came to view, lying flat on his back in a ball park or some such situation, with
somebody telling him not to move until the ambulance came: that’s his arthritis!
Try it on somebody.
THE FLASH ANSWER
A device in common use in therapy is the flash answer. This is done in two ways. The
first mentioned here is the least used. “When I count to five,” says the auditor, “a phrase will
flash into your mind to describe where you are on the track. One, two, three, four, five!” “Late
prenatal,” says the pre-clear, or “yesterday” or whatever occurs to him.
The flash answer is the first thing which comes into a person’s head when a question is
asked him. It will come from the engram bank, usually, and will be useful. It may be “demon
talk” but it is generally right. The auditor merely asks a question, such as what is holding the
patient, what denies him knowledge, etc., prefacing the question with the remark, “I want a
flash answer to this.”
“I want a flash answer to this,” says the auditor. “What would happen if you became
sane?” “Die,” says the patient. “What would happen if you die,” says the auditor. “I’d get
well,” says the patient. And with this data they then make an estimate of the current
computation on allies or some such thing. In this case, the ally said to the pre-clear when he
was ill, “I’d die, just die if you didn’t get well. If you’re sick much longer I’ll go insane.” And
a former engram said the pre-clear had to be sick. And this is, after all, just an engram. So
repeater technique is used on the word “die” and an ally is uncovered that the pre-clear never
knew existed and a charge is blown.
Much valuable data can be recovered by clever use of the flash answer. If there is no
answer at all, it means that the answer is occluded and that is almost as good a reply as actual
data since it means some kind of a cover-up.
DREAMS
Dreams have been used considerably by various schools of mental healing. Their
“symbology” is a mystic foible forwarded to explain something which the mystics did not
know anything about. Dreams are crazy house mirrors by which the analyzer looks down into
the engram bank.
Dreams are puns on words and situations in the engram bank.
Dreams are not much help, being puns.
Dreams are not much used in dianetics.
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You will hear dreams from patients. Patients are hard to shut off when they start telling
dreams. If you want to waste your time, you will listen.
VALENCE SHIFT
A mechanism used in dianetics is the valence shift.
We know the way a patient gets into valences when he dramatizes his engrams in life.
He becomes a winning valence and he says and does rather much what the person in the
winning valence did in that engram.
The theory behind it is this: returned to a time the patient may consider too painful to
enter, he can be shifted into a valence which felt no pain. A dull way to persuade him is to tell
him he does not have to feel the pain or the emotion and let him go through it. This is very bad
dianetics because it is a positive suggestion and every safeguard must be taken to keep from
giving suggestions to the patient, for he may be very suggestible even when he pretends not to
be. But there is the valence shift and this permits the patient to escape the pain and still remain
in the engram until he can recount it.
Example, father beating mother, unborn child knocked “unconscious.” The data is
available in the father valence with no pain, in the mother valence with her pain, in the child’s
valence with his pain.
The way to handle this, if the patient positively refuses to enter it although he has
somatics, is to shift him in valence. The auditor says, “Go into your father’s valence and be
your father for the moment.” After some persuasion the patient does so. “Bawl your mother
out,” says the auditor. “Give her a fine talking to.” The patient is now on that circuit which
contains no “unconsciousness” and approximates the emotion and the words his father used to
his mother. The auditor lets him do this a couple or three times until the charge is somewhat off
the engram. Then he turns the patient’s valence into the mother: “Be your mother for the
moment now and talk back to your father,” says the auditor. The patient shifts valence and is
his mother and repeats his mother’s phrases. “Now be yourself,” says the auditor, “and
recount the entire incident with all somatics and emotion please.” The patient is able to re-experience
the incident as himself.
This works very well when one is trying to get at an ally. “Shift valence,” says the
auditor to the returned patient, “and plead with your mother not to kill the baby.” “Now be a
nurse,” says the auditor, with the pre-clear returned to some incident he seems very fearful
about entering, “and plead with a little boy to get well.” The patient will correct the auditor’s
concept of the script and usually will proceed.
The patient will often refuse to go into a valence because he hates it. This means there
must be considerable charge in the person he refuses to be.
This mechanism is rarely used but is handy when a case is stalling. The father did not
obey the holders or commands, he uttered them. The nurse would not obey her own
commands. And so forth. Thus many holders and denyers can be flushed to view. It is useful
in the beginning of a case.
Valence shift is seldom used except where an engram is suspected which will not
otherwise be approached by the patient. He will often approach the engram with valence shift
when he will not approach it as himself. Valence shift is somewhat undesirable when employed
on a suggestible subject since it violates the dianetic rule that no positive suggestion be used
beyond those absolutely necessary in returning and recounting and uncovering data. Therefore
valence shift is seldom employed and rarely on a suggestible person.
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TYPE OF CHAINS
Engrams, particularly in the prenatal area, are in chains. That is to say there is a series
of incidents of similar types. This is useful classification because it leads to some solutions.
The chains one can most easily contact in a pre-clear are the least charged. The most aberrative
chains will usually be the hardest to reach because they contain the most active data. Remember
the rule that what the auditor finds hard to reach, the analyzer of the patient found hard to reach.
Here is a list of chains -- not all the possible chains by any means -- found in one case
which had passed for “normal” for thirty-six years of his life.
COITUS CHAIN, FATHER. 1st incident zygote. 56 succeeding incidents. Two branches,
father drunk and father sober.
COITUS CHAIN, LOVER. 1st incident embryo. 18 succeeding incidents. All painful because
of enthusiasm of lover.
CONSTIPATION CHAIN. 1st incident zygote. 51 succeeding incidents. Each incident
building high pressure on child.
DOUCHE CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 21 succeeding incidents. One each day to missed
period, all into cervix.
SICKNESS CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 5 succeeding incidents. 3 colds. 1 case grippe.
One vomiting spell -- hangover.
MORNING SICKNESS CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 32 succeeding incidents.
CONTRACEPTIVE CHAIN. 1st incident zygote. 1 incident. Some paste substance into
cervix. entirely and completely unable to confront and attack an engram which the auditor is
certain is present: and this is rare.
FIGHT CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 38 succeeding incidents. Three falls, loud voices, no
beating.
ATTEMPTED ABORTION, SURGICAL. 1st incident embryo. 21 succeeding incidents.
ATTEMPTED ABORTION, DOUCHE. 1st incident foetus. 2 incidents. 1 using paste, 1
using lysol, very strong.
ATTEMPTED ABORTION, PRESSURE. 1st incident foetus. 3 incidents. 1 father sitting on
mother. Two mother jumping off boxes.
HICCOUGH CHAIN. 1st incident foetus. 5 incidents.
ACCIDENT CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 18 incidents. Various falls and collisions.
MASTURBATION CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 80 succeeding incidents. Mother
masturbating with fingers, jolting child and injuring child with orgasm.
DOCTOR CHAIN. 1st incident, 1st missed period. 18 visits. Doctor examination painful but
doctor an ally, discovering mother attempting an abortion and scolding her thoroughly.
PREMATURE LABOR PAINS. 3 days before actual birth.
BIRTH. Instrument. 29 hours labor.
In that mother was a sub-vocal talker this made a sizable quantity of material to be
erased for the remainder of the patient’s life was in addition to this. This was a 500-hour case,
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non-sonic, imaginary recalls which had to be cancelled out by discovering lie factories before
the above data could be obtained.
There are other chains possible but this case was picked because it contains the usual
ones found.Mother’s lover is not very unusual, unfortunately, for he puts secrecy into a case to
such an extent that when the case seems very, very secret, then a lover or two will seem
indictated. But don’t suggest them to a pre-clear. He may use them for an avoid.
DIANETIC DON’TS
Don’t give any patient a positive suggestion as therapy in itself or to assist therapy.
Don’t fail to give a canceller at every session’s beginning and use it at every session’s
end.
Don’t ever tell a patient he can “remember this in present time” because the somatic will
come to present time and that is very uncomfortable.
Don’t ever, ever, ever, ever tell a patient that he can remember everything that ever
happened to him in present time because that groups everything in present time if the patient has
slid into a deep trance. And that makes it necessary to unsnarl a whole case. Want to waste two
hundred hours?
Don’t ever retaliate in any way when a patient in reverie gets angry at you. Follow the
auditor’s code. If you get angry with him you may throw him into an apathy which will take
you many hours to undo.
Don’t evaluate data or tell a patient what is wrong with him.
Don’t crow. If the pre-clear is your wife, or husband, or child, don’t rub it in that the
favorite argument phrase was out of an engram. Of course it was!
Don’t question the validity of data. Keep your reservations to yourself. Audit the
information for your own guidance. If the patient doesn’t know what you think, the engrams
will never get a chance to evade.
Don’t ever snap a patient to present time just because he begs for it. If he is in the
middle of an engram, the only way out of it is through it. The power of the engram is slight
when the patient is returned to it. It turns on hard when the patient comes to present time. The
patient will have a nervous shock if he is snapped to present.
Don’t ever get frightened, no matter what kind of squirming or squalling a patient may
do. It isn’t serious, any of it, although it is sometimes dramatic.
Don’t ever promise to clear a case: promise only to release it. You may have to go away
or work on something more urgent. And a broken promise to a pre-clear will be taken very
hard.
Don’t interfere with the private life of a pre-clear or give him guidance. Tell him to
make up his own mind about what he should do.
Don’t break the auditor’s code. It is there to protect you, not just the pre-clear. Therapy
can’t hurt him if you do but half a job on it and do half of that wrong; breaking the code can
make you very uncomfortable because it will make you a target of the pre-clear and cost you
considerable extra work.
Don’t leave engrams half-reduced when you are given them by the file clerk.
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Don’t get inventive about dianetics until you have worked at least one case out. And
don’t get too inventive until you have worked a case which has sonic, a case which has shut-off
sonic, and a case which has imaginary sonic. Clear these and you will know. And you will
have met enough engrams to get some ideas that can be of great benefit to dianetics. If you
don’t get ideas after that and after you yourself are in therapy and cleared, there’s something
wrong. Dianetics is an expanding science; but don’t expand it until you know which way it
travels.
Don’t mix gasoline and alcohol, or dianetics and other therapy except purely medical,
dispensed by a professional medical doctor.
Don’t get a case snarled up and then take it to a psychiatrist who knows no dianetics.
Only dianetics can unsnarl dianetics and yesterday’s methods won’t help your patient one
slightest bit when all he needs is another run through the one you snapped him out of too fast.
Take a cinch on your nerve and send him back through the incident again. In dianetics today’s
obvious nervous breakdown is tomorrow’s most cheerful being.
Don’t quit, don’t balk. Just keep running engrams.
And one day you’ll have a release. And another day you’ll have a clear.
TYPES OF SOMATICS
There are two kinds of somatics, those which properly belong to the patient and those
which belong to his mother or some other person. The first actually happened, so did the
second. But the patient should not have his mother’s somatics. If he does, if he is found
complaining of headaches whenever his mother has a headache, there is an engram, very early,
which says he must have whatever she has: “The baby is part of me,” “I want him to suffer as I
suffer,” etc. Or the phrase may be some entirely misunderstood thing literally taken. However,
all this “comes out in the wash” and should be no great concern of the auditor’s.
“UNCONSCIOUSNESS”
While “unconsciousness” has been covered elsewhere in various ways, in therapy it has
two special manifestations. The yawn and the “boil-off.”
The engram of physical pain contains deep “unconsciousness” and if it is going to lift,
particularly in the basic area, it comes off in yawns. After a first or second recounting, the
patient starts to yawn. These yawns are turning on his analyzer.
In a very extreme engram -- a prenatal electric shock which mother received -- five
hours of “unconsciousness” “boil-off” have taken place during therapy. The shock lasted for
less than a minute but so close did it bring the individual to death that when the incident was
first contacted in therapy, he swam and floundered and had strange dreams, muttered and
mumbled for five hours. That is a record. Forty-five minutes of this “boil-off” is rare. Five or
ten minutes of it are not uncommon.
The auditor will take a patient into an area. No somatic turns on. But the patient begins
to drowse into a strange kind of sleep. He rouses from this from time to time, mutters
something, usually idiotic, rouses again with a dream and generally makes no progress to all
appearances. But progress is being made. A period when he was almost dead is coming up to
the surface. Soon a somatic will turn on and the patient will run an engram a few times on
command, will yawn a little and then brighten up. Such a quantity of “unconsciousness” was,
of course, sufficient to keep his analyzer about nine-tenths shut off when he was awake for, if
it was near basic, it was part of every other engram. Such an engram, with such deep
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“unconsciousness,” when released, produces a marked improvement in a case, as much as a
painful emotion engram at times.
It is up to the auditor to sit it through no matter how long it takes. It may make an
uncleared auditor very sleepy to watch all this but it should be done. He will rarely strike one
that lasts an hour but every case has such a period lasting from ten minutes to a half hour.
He should stir the patient up once in a while and try to make him go through the
engram. There is a very special way to stir a patient into life: don’t touch his body for it may be
highly restimulative and make him very upset. Touch only the bottoms of his feet with your
hand or your own feet and touch them just enough to jog him into attention for a moment. That
keeps the “boil-off” in progress and does not permit the patient to sag into ordinary sleep.
The “boil-off” can be confused, by an inexperienced auditor, with an engram command
to sleep. However, if the auditor will observe the patient closely, he will find that in the “boil-off”
the patient gives every appearance of being drugged while in a sleep command, he simply
goes to sleep and does it very smoothly. The “boil-off” is a trifle restless, full of mutterings and
flounderings and dreams. The sleep is smooth.
An engramic command to go to sleep, acting on the returned pre-clear, is broken by
sending the somatic strip to the moment when the sleep command is given. If the pre-clear
contacts it and goes over it, he will quickly awaken on the track and continue with therapy.
The “boil-off” may be full of yawns, mutterings or grunts. Sleep is usually quiet and
gentle.
Just why this is called a “boil-off” and just why auditors are fond of the term is
obscure. It was originally and sedately named “comatic reduction” but such erudition has been
outvoted by the fact that it has never been used.
If you are fond of listening to dreams, you will find them in plenty in the “boil-off.” As
images on the desert are distorted by the glass snakes of heat waves, so are the engramic
commands distorted to the analyzer through the veil of “unconsciousness.”
LOCKS
It is one of the blessings of nature that the lock is something which needs minor
attention. A lock is an incident which, with or without charge, is in conscious recall and which
seems to be the reason the aberree is aberrated. Perhaps this was another way the bank
protected itself. A lock is a moment of mental discomfort containing no physical pain and no
great loss. A scolding, a social disgrace: such things are locks. Any case has thousands and
thousands of locks. The auditor will discover them in plenty if he cares to waste time looking
for them. The treatment of these locks was the main goal of an old art known as “hypno-analysis.”
Most of them can be reduced.
The key-in of an engram takes place at some future date from the time the engram was
actually received. The key-in moment contains analytical reduction from weariness or slight
illness. A situation similar to the engram, which contained “unconsciousness,” came about and
keyed-in the engram. This is a primary lock. Breaking it, if it can be found, produces the effect
of keying out the engram. But it can be considered a waste of time even if it has some
therapeutic value and was used, without understanding, by some past schools.
If an auditor wants to know how the case was reacting to life, he can find some of these
thousands and thousands of locks and look them over. But that is probably all the interest he
has in them, for locks discharge. They discharge automatically the moment the engram holding
them is erased. A whole life rebalances itself when the engrams are gone and the locks need no
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treatment. Neither does the pre-clear now cleared need education as to how to think: like the
blowing of locks, this is an automatic process.
These locks lie down amongst the engrams sometimes. The pre-clear may be deep in
the prenatal area and suddenly think about a time when he was twenty or, as is common in
therapy, think about an engram he heard from somebody else. This is a good clue. Pay no
further heed to the lock: find the engram to which it attached itself, for there is an engram
immediately with it. In dreams these locks in distorted form, come swimming up out of the
bank, complicating the dream.
THE JUNIOR CASE
Do not take on a Junior for your first case if you can avoid it. If father was named
George and the patient is called George, beware of trouble. The engram bank takes George to
mean George and that is identity thought de luxe.
Mother says, “I hate George!” “That means Junior,” says the engram though mother
meant father. “George is thoughtless.” “George must not know.” “Oh, George, I wish you had
some sex appeal, but you haven’t.” And so go the engrams. A Junior case is seldom easy.
It is customary to shudder, in dianetics, at the thought of taking on a Junior case. An
auditor can be expected to slave his hardest when he has a case with non-sonic, which is off the
time track, and which is named after father or mother. Such cases resolve, of course, but if
parents knew what they did to children by giving them any name which might appear in the
engram bank, such as that of parents or grandparents or friends, it is certain the custom would
vanish instanter.
RESTIMULATING THE ENGRAM
“Ask often enough and you will receive,” is always true when working the engram
bank. Simply by returning into an area enough times engrams will appear. If it is not there
today, it will be there tomorrow. But if it is not there tomorrow, it will be there the day after
and so forth. Emotional discharges are most certainly located by asking for them time after
time, returning the patient over the part of the track where the charge is expected to lie. What
repeater technique will fail to do can be done by returning the patient, session after session, to a
portion of his life. Sooner or later it will come into view.
OCCLUDED LIFE PERIODS AND PEOPLE
Whole areas of the time track will be found occluded. These contain suppressors by
way of engram command, ally computations and painful emotion. Persons can vanish utterly
from sight for these reasons. They come to view after a few engrams have been lifted in basic
or the area has been developed as above.
ANIMOSITY TOWARD PARENTS
It always happens, when one clears a child or adult, that the pre-clear goes through
stages of improvement which bring him up the tone scale and cause him, of course, to pass
through the second zone, anger. A pre-clear may become furious with his parents and other
offenders in the engram bank. Such a situation is to be expected. It is a natural by-product of
therapy and it cannot be avoided.
As the case progresses the tone scale, of course, rises and places the pre-clear in a state
of boredom toward the villains who have wronged him. At last he reaches Tone 4, which is the
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tone of the clear. At this time he is very cheerful and willing to be friends with people whether
they have wronged him or not: of course he has the data about what to expect of them, but he
nurses no animosity.
If a parent feels that the child, knowing all, would turn against him, then the parent is
mistaken. The child has already, as an aberree, turned very thoroughly against the parent
whether his analyzer knows all or not and the most uncertain and unlovely conduct may result
from further hiding of the evidence.
It is a matter of continual observation that the good release and the clear feel no
animosity whatever toward their parents or others who had caused their aberrations and indeed
stop negating, defending and fighting so irrationally. The clear will fight, certainly, for a good
cause and he will be the most dangerous opponent possible, but he does not fight for irrational
reasons like an animal and his understanding of people is very much enlarged and his affection
can at last be deep. If a parent wishes love and cooperation from a child, no matter what he has
done to that child, permit therapy and achieve that love and cooperation with the child self-determined
and no longer secretly in apathy or rage. After all, the clear has learned the source
of his parents’ aberrations as well as his own; he recognizes that they had engram banks before
he did.
PROPITIATION
In the process of work a stage will be passed, in the upper range of apathy, of
propitiation. This conciliation is an effort to feed or sacrifice to an all destructive force. It is a
state wherein the patient, in deep fear of another, offers expensive presents and soft words,
turns the other cheek, offers himself as a doormat and generally makes a fool out of himself.
Many, many marriages, for instance, are marriages not of love but of that shabby
substitute, propitiation. People have a habit of marrying people who have similar reactive
minds. This is unfortunate for such marriages are destructive to both partners. She has a certain
set of aberrations: they match his. She is pseudo-mother, he is pseudo-father. She had to
marry him because father tried to murder her before she was born. He had to marry her because
mother beat him when he was a child. Incredible as it may seem, these marriages are very
common: one or the other partner becomes mentally ill, or both may deteriorate. He is
unhappy, his enthusiasms crushed; she is miserable. Either with another partner might be a
happy person yet, out of fear, they cannot break apart. They must propitiate each other.
The auditor who finds a marriage in this condition and attempts to treat one of the
partners, had better treat both simultaneously. Or such partners had better treat each other and
soon. Tolerance and understanding are almost always fostered by mutual help.
Propitiation is mentioned here because it has a diagnostic value. People who start
bringing the auditor expensive gifts are propitiating him, and it probably means that they have a
computation which tells them, engramically, that they will die or go crazy if they become sane.
The auditor may enjoy the gifts, but he had better start looking for a sympathy engram not yet
suspected or tapped.
LOVE
Probably no single subject in the concerns of Man has received as much attention as
Love.
It is not untrue that where one finds the greatest controversy, there he will also find the
least comprehension. And where the facts are least precise there one can also find the greatest
arguments. And so it is with Love.
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Without doubt Love has ruined more lives than war and made more happiness than all
the dreams of Paradise.
Entangled with a thousand songs a year and submerged beneath a solid tonnage of poor
literature, Love should have a proper chance to be defined.
It has been discovered that there are three kinds of Love between woman and man: the
first is covered under the law of affinity and is the affection with which Mankind holds
Mankind; the second is sexual selection and is a true magnetism between partners; the third is
compulsive “Love” dictated by nothing more reasonable than aberration.
Perhaps in the hero and heroine legends there have been cases of the second kind, and
surely as one looks about him in this society he can discover numbers of happy partnerships
based on a natural and strongly affectionate admiration. The third kind we find in plenty:
tabloid literature is devoted to it and its travails; it crams the courts with urgent pleas for
divorce, with criminal acts and civil suits; it sends children weeping into the corner away from
quarrels and it launches from its broken homes broken young women and men.
Dianetics classifies this third kind of love as “reactive mind partnership.” Here is a
meeting of minds -- but the minds are on the lowest computational level possessed by man.
Driven together by compulsion, men and women mate who will find in that mating nothing but
sorrow and reduction of their hopes.
He is pseudo-brother who beat her regularly or he is pseudo-father whom she had to
mind. Maybe he is even pseudo-mother who screamed ceaselessly at her but whom she had to
placate, and he might be the doctor who hurt her so savagely. She may be his pseudo-mother,
his pseudo-grandmother whom he had to love despite the way she undermined his decision;
she may be a pseudo-nurse in some operation long gone or the pseudo-teacher who kept him
after school to whet her sadism upon him.
Before the marriage takes place they only know there is a compulsion that they must be
together, a feeling that each must be extremely nice to the other. And then the marriage takes
place and more and more restimulation of ancient pain is felt until at last each is ill and life,
complicated now perhaps by unhappy children, is an unhappy ruin.
The mechanism of propitiation carries with it covert hostility. Gifts given without cause
and beyond the ability to expend, self-sacrifices which seem so noble at the time compose
propitiation. Propitiation is an apathy effort to hold away a dangerous “source” of pain.
Mistaken identity is one of the minor errors of the reactive mind. To buy off, to nullify the
possible anger of a person perhaps long since dead but living now again in the partner, is the
hope of propitiation. But a man is dead who will not sometimes fight. The hostility may be
masked, it may be entirely “unknown” to the individual who indulges it. Certainly it is always
justified in the mind of the person who exerts it and is supposed to be a natural consequence of
some entirely obvious offense.
The wife who makes inadvertent blunders before the guests and by them accidently
gives away the truth of her husband’s favorite myth, the wife who forgets the little favors he
has asked, the wife who suddenly stabs him with a “logical” pin in the region of his hopes:
these are wives who live with partners whom they must, out of some wrong done years before
the courtship and by some other man, propitiate, and these are wives who, propitiating, numb
the hopes and misunderstand the sorrows of their mates.
The husband who sleeps with another woman and “accidentally” leaves the lipstick on
his tie, the husband who finds her excellent cooking bad and idleness in her days, the husband
who forgets her letters he must mail, the husband who finds her opinions silly, these are
husbands who live with partners whom they must propitiate.
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A soaring, roller-coaster curve of peace and war in the home, failures to understand,
mutual curtailment of liberty and self-determinism, unhappy lives, unhappy children and
divorce are caused by reactive mind marriages. Compelled by an unknown threat to marry,
repelled by fear of pain from trust, this “meeting of minds” is the primary cause of all marital
disaster.
The law lacked definition and so invoked great difficulty in the path of those involved in
such marriages. The track of it is the dwindling spiral of misery which accompanies all chronic
restimulation and leads only down to failure and to death. Someday there will, perhaps, exist a
much more sentient law that only the unaberrated can marry and bear children. The present law
only provides that marriages must be at best most difficult to part. Such a law is like a prison
sentence for the husband, the wife and the children -- all and every one.
A marriage can be saved by clearing its partners of their aberrations. An optimum
solution would include this in any case since it is most difficult for a wife or a husband to rise,
even when divorced, to any future plane of happiness: and where there are children, if clearing
is not effected, a great injustice has been done.
It is usually discovered that when both partners in a reactive mind marriage are cleared
of aberration, life becomes considerably more than tolerable; for human beings often have a
natural liking even when no sexual selection has been present. The restoration of a marriage by
clearing the partners may not bring about one of the great loves that poets strummed about but it
will at least bring a high level of respect and cooperation toward the common goal of making
life worthwhile. And in many marriages so cleared it was discovered that the partners, beneath
the dirty cloth of aberration, loved each other well.
A major gain to such a clearing is for the children’s sake. Nearly all marital discontent
has as its major factor aberration on the second dynamic, sex. And any such aberration includes
a nervous disposition toward children.
Where there are children, divorce does not answer, clearing does. And with clearing
comes a fresh new page of life on which happiness can be written.
In the case of the reactive mind marriage, turn-about clearing is often complicated by the
concealed hostilities which lie below the propitiative mechanism. It is wise for the partners to
look outside the home, each interesting a friend in a therapy turn-about. If such mutual clearing
is begun, with the partners working on each other, much restraint of anger and exertion of
patience must be practiced, and the auditor’s code must be most severely followed. It requires a
saintly detachment to bear the Tone One of the partner who, returned to a quarrel, seasons the
recountings with further recrimination. If it must be done, it can be done but, when many
quarrels and travails have beset a couple, it is easier if they each look without the home for a
therapy partner.
Additionally, there is a kind of “rapport” established between any auditor and pre-clear
and after the therapy session is done, a strengthening of the natural affinity is such that a small
deed or word may be taken as a savage attack with the result of a quarrel and the inhibition of
therapy.
Men can be considered to be best audited by men and women by women. This
condition is changed when one deals with a woman who has such severe aberrations about
women that she is in fear around them or when one is auditing a man who has deep fear of
men.
The dynamics of men and women are somehow different and a wife, particularly if
there have ever been quarrels of any magnitude, sometimes finds it difficult at times to be
sufficiently insistent to audit her husband. The husband may audit, in the usual case, without
great difficulty but when in therapy himself, his feeling that he must rise superior to the
situation forces him to attempt auto-control, a thing which is impossible.
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THE ERASURE
Sooner or later -- if you keep trying -- you will get basic-basic, the earliest moment of
“unconsciousness” and physical pain. You will know when you have it, perhaps, only because
things start to erase rather than reduce. If the patient still has a sonic shut-off, you can still
erase: sooner or later that sonic will turn on, perhaps not even until the case is almost finished.
You will reach basic-basic sooner or later.
The erasure, then, is more or less the same procedure as the entrance. You erase all the
early engrams, always the earliest you can find, and you keep discharging painful emotion
engrams either in the basic area or in the later periods after birth and later in life. You erase as
much as you can find in the early part of the case, then you release all the emotion you can find
later in the case (erase everything in each engram you touch) and then you come back and find
early material.
The reactive engram bank is a hurrah’s nest. The file clerk must have a great deal of
trouble with it. For things are keyed-in early and late, sometimes all he can get is material under
certain topics, sometimes all he can get is material under certain somatics (all teeth, for
instance), sometimes he can go in an orderly parade forward in time and give consecutive
incidents: this last is the most important proceeding.
Not until you have worked out every moment of physical pain and discharged all the
moments of painful emotion will the case be cleared. There will be times when you are sure that
you are almost to the goal only to discover, going into the prenatal area again, a new series of
material uncovered by the later life painful emotion you have released.
One day you will find a case which will not have any occlusions anywhere on the track,
which will no longer be interested in engrams (apathy cases aren’t interested at the start; clears,
at the top level, are not interested either, making a cycle, though the clear is a long way from
apathetic), which will have all recalls, which will compute accurately and make no errors
(within the limitations of the data available) and which, in short, has an exhausted engram
bank. But do not be too optimistic, ever. Keep looking until you are sure. Observe the case to
make certain no aberrations are displayed about anything, that dynamics are high in it and that
life is good. If this person now feels he can solve all the problems of life, lick the world with
one hand tied behind him and feel a friend to all men, you have a clear.
The only way you can go wrong is to compute with the idea that human beings are full
of error and evil and sin and that if you have made a person less unhappy and above normal he
is to bejudged a clear. This is a release.
In gold panning, it is true that every tenderfoot mistakes iron pyrites -- fool’s gold -- for
gold. The tenderfoot will crow with delight over a bright bit of something in his pan which,
actually, is worth a few dollars a ton. And then he sees real gold! The moment he sees real gold
in that pan, he knows what gold really looks like. It cannot be mistaken.
Aside from the fact that psychometry would show a clear phenomenally intelligent,
would show his aptitude and versatility wide, there is another quality, the human quality of a
freed man. You take a release through psychometry and show him to be above normal, too.
But a clear is a clear and when you see it you will know it with no further mistake.
That a clear is no longer interested in his extinct engrams does not mean he is not
interested in the troubles of others. That a person is not interested in his own engrams does not
necessarily argue a clear but may well be another mechanism, the apathy of neglect. To have
engrams and neglect them is a common aberration with the reactive mind on a tone scale of
apathy. To have no engrams and neglect them is another thing. Every apathy case, neglecting
his engrams as an answer to his woe, insisting he is happy, insisting, as he racks himself to
pieces, that there is nothing wrong with him, will, in work, particularly after basic-basic is
lifted, become interested in his engrams and more interested in life. It is easy to tell the apathy
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case from the clear for the two are at opposite ends of the spectrum of life: the clear has soared
up toward victory and triumph, the apathy case knows victory and triumph are not for him and
explains they are not worth it.
What the life span of a clear is cannot be answered now; ask in a hundred years.
How can you tell a clear? How close does the man measure to optimum for Man? Can
he adjust to his environment smoothly? And far more important, can he adjust that environment
to him?
Sixty days and again six months after a clear has apparently been effected, the auditor
should again make a search for any neglected material. He should question the possible clear
carefully as to the events of the past interval. In such a way he can learn of any worries,
concerns or illnesses which may have taken place and attempt to trace these to engrams. If he
cannot then find engrams, the clear is definitely and without question, cleared. And he will stay
that way.
If a case merely stalls, however, and while aberration seems to be present, engrams
cannot be found, the cause probably lies with thoroughly masked despair charges -- painful
emotional engrams. These are not necessarily postnatal, they can be within the prenatal period
and involve circumstances which are very secret -- or so the engrams announce. Also, some
cases have stalled and proven “impenetrable” because of a current or immediately past
circumstance the patient has not revealed.
There are two reasons which can delay a case:
(a) the person may be so aberratedly ashamed of his past or so certain of retribution if he
reveals it that he does nothing but avoid;
and
(b) the person may be in fear because of some existing circumstance or threat.
The auditor is not interested in what the patient does. Or in what the patient has done.
Dianetics treats of what has been done to the person exclusively in therapy. What has been
done by a patient is of no concern. The auditor who would make it any concern is practicing
something other than dianetics. However, a patient, because of his engrams, may become
obsessed with the idea that he must hide something in his life from the auditor. general classes
above cover the general conditions.
These active reasons, as under (a), may be such a thing as a prison sentence, a murder
hitherto unknown (although many people think they have done murder who have not even
threatened it to anyone), abnormal sexual practices, or some such circumstance. The auditor
should promise not to reveal any confidential matter, purely as a matter of routine and explain
the principle of “done to. not done by.” And no auditor would taunt or revile a patient for
having been victimized by his engrams. As under (b) there may exist some person, even the
wife or husband, who has cowed the patient into secrecy. One case is at hand where no
advance was made although there were many incidents contacted: the incidents would not
reduce or erase no matter where they were. It was discovered that this case, a woman, had been
beaten savagely and often by her husband and that she had been threatened with death if she
told the auditor a word of these acts; and yet these acts contained the whole despair charges of
the case and had to be released. Seeing this, finally suspecting, the auditor was able to gain her
confidence and locate the despair charges. Even if he had not gained her confidence, by
constant restimulation of late life areas he would have provoked her tears. In another case, that
of a small child, “dub-in” recall was so obvious and lie factories were so busy that the auditor
at last realized that he was attempting to penetrate not just the secrecy on an engram but the
secrecy imposed upon a child by some one at hand. The mother, in this case, out of the idea
that she would be apprehended, had furiously threatened the child to say nothing about his
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treatment at home. There was more than this behind the case, there were eighty-one attempted
abortions, an incredible number.
Anything is the business of an auditor if it has become an engram. If society has jailed a
man, if all is not well in the home, these are things done to a person. What the person did to
“deserve” this treatment is of no concern.
THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CASE
Now and again an auditor will encounter a strange sort of hold-up in a case. He will be
unable to get anything to clear or make sense in the prenatal area and sometimes in childhood as
well as the prenatal area. He may be encountering a “foreign language case.” Occasionally the
child did not know he was born to other parents (who may have spoken a foreign tongue) than
those he has known as his parents. This is a special sort of mix-up of its own which is rather
easily resolved simply by running engrams. It is always possible for the patient to forget that
his parents spoke some other tongue in the home. Another tongue than the one the patient is
using or other than that of the country in which the patient resides is, in one way, an asset: it
gives a prenatal area which is very difficult to restimulate although it may still be acting upon
the patient’s mind. But it is no asset to the auditor, who must now deal with a patient who does
not know the language, who may not have sonic recall and yet has an engram bank full of data
which once had meaning and really is his basic language.
The best remedy for such a case is to get an auditor who knows both the language used
in the prenatal area and the present tongue. Another remedy is to take a dictionary to the case
and figure out the bouncers et al. from the dictionary. Another way is to regress the patient
often enough into the infant period that he begins to pick up the language again (making the file
drawer of it come forth) and then ask the patient for phrases which, in the foreign tongue,
would mean this or that. Gradually he may recover the language and so exhaust the bank. This
is an extremely difficult case only when there was no childhood use of the other tongue. Given
childhood use of that tongue, the auditor simply keeps returning the patient to childhood when
he knew the tongue and then returning him into the prenatal area: the patient can translate what
is happening. The cliches of other tongues than that the auditor speaks are often quite
productive of other literal meanings than comparable cliches in the auditor’s tongue. This
difference of cliche is a very responsible agent in the social aberrations of one nation as they
differ from those of another. “I have hot,” says the Spaniard. “I am hot,” says the Englishman.
Engramically, they mean different things, even if they mean the same to the analyzer.
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CHAPTER IX
PART TWO
Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy
EXTRA-SENSORY PERCEPTION
Every time the auditor has a case with dub-in recall or which is highly charged with
emotion, the case may return into the prenatal area and start describing scenery. This is the awe
and wonder of some beholders. There is the patient in the womb and yet he can “see” outside.
The patient tells about father and mother and where they are sitting and what the bedroom looks
like, and yet there he is in the womb. Some pretty theories can be advanced for this: one of
them is that the tortured foetus develops extra-sensory perception in order to see what is
coming next. ESP is an excellent theory and some observation may confirm it but not in the
foetus.
One must recall that the foetus, even if it has highly developed and clever cells, is yet
not a truly rational organism. The presence of the engram does not necessarily mean that the
foetus could think. The engram became most severely aberrative when the child finally learned
speech. The engram is not a memory but a recording of pain and percepts.
Returning a grown man or a child into the prenatal area returns there an experienced
mind which, connecting with these engrams, forms conclusions. To listen to some pre-clears
one would think they read Keats and drank lemonade every afternoon at four throughout the
prenatal period.
To return reason and analytical power back into a period when neither reason nor
analytical power existed, of course, impinges upon the returned individual many ideas. All he
is supposed to run are the engrams and their contents. He may additionally, by dream
mechanisms and current computation, try to fashion in a whole technicolor picture of the
scenery.
This prenatal ESP does not in fact exist. It has been proven, after considerable test, that
whenever the returned pre-clear thinks he sees something, the scenery itself is mentioned in the
engrams and gives him an imaginary picture of it. There is no prenatal ESP, in other words.
There are only descriptions and actions which suggest scenery and these suggestions, operating
now upon the imagination, bring about the supposed visio.
This is most chronic with patients who have high powered lie factories. When the
auditor sees this he begins to form a notion of the case he is engaged upon, he knows “dub-in
sonic” may be used and he should find and discharge all painful emotion he can reach for it is
this painful emotion which so disposes a case to avoid. He can find, then, the lie factory itself,
not the lie factory of the lie factory which produces lie factories, but the actual engram which
causes all this delusion.
However, never bring a pre-clear up short on this material. Don’t tell him it is
imaginary, you’ll drive the lie factory into higher effort. For there are sympathy computations
here, despairful losses, great prenatal pain and childhood neglect. And it would take little to
shatter what self-confidence this patient has managed to assemble. Therefore walk softly, look
for despair charges, allies, sympathy engrams and get the lie factory. Then the case will settle
down and progress to clear.
ELECTRIC SHOCK
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It has been found important, in entering a case to locate and relieve all engrams caused
by electric shock of whatever kind. These seem to produce a grouping of engrams, whether
they are received prenatally (as some have been), accidentally, or at the hands of psychiatrists.
Any electric shock seems to have more than usual force in the engram bank and
apparently deranges the memory files of both past and future events surrounding the shock
area. Further, electric shock injury contains a great depth of “unconsciousness” which
thereafter holds the analytical mind in a reduced state.
TACIT CONSENT
In the case of two pre-clears working on each other, each one assuming in his turn the
auditor’s role, a condition can arise where each prevents the other from contacting certain
engrams.
For example, pre-clear A has an ally computation concerning a dog. He unknowingly
seeks to protect this “pro-survival” engram within himself although, of course, failure to
release it will hinder therapy. As he audits pre-clear B he has a tendency to project his own
problems into pre-clear B, which is to say he has some slight confusion of identity. If pre-clear
B is known to have some “pro-survival” engram about a dog, then pre-clear A, auditing, will
actually avoid making pre-clear B contact B’s own engram. This is a mistaken idea that by
letting B keep his dog engram, A can retain his dog engram. This is “tacit consent.” It might be
summed as a bargain: “If you don’t make me get well, I won’t make you get well.” This should
be guarded against: once known that such a condition exists and that such reluctance to clear the
other is manifested, “tacit consent” ceases.
It may also happen that a husband and wife may have a mutual period of quarrels or
unhappiness. Engaged upon clearing each other, working alternately as auditor, they avoid,
unknowingly but by reactive computation, the mutual period, thus leaving in place painfully
emotional engrams.
Tacit Consent is not easily recognized by the individuals so involved, and pre-clears,
alternating as auditors, should be very wary of it for it cannot do other than slow a case.
EMOTION AND PAIN SHUT-OFFS
A case which manifests no emotion or cannot feel pain when emotion and pain should
be present in some incident is suffering from a “feeling” shut-off: this most likely will be found
in the prenatal area. The word “feeling” means both pain and emotion: thus the phrase, “I can’t
feel anything,” may be an anesthetic for both.
If an exteriorized view of the incident (where the patient sees himself and is not in
himself) or what pretends to be prenatal “ESP” is present, the emotional shut-off probably
stems from painful emotion engrams in late life or at least post-birth. If there is no exteriorized
view and the patient is within himself, and yet no sharpness of pain or emotion manifests itself
while he is running through an engram, an early emotional shut-off or an early pain shut-off
should be suspected and should be located by repeater technique. Run the words “No emotion”
until a paraphrase is obtained: run the words “I can’t feel,” or some other phrase meaning the
same thing and the patient, if the engrams are available and are not suppressed by others, will
eventually respond.
It may happen that a case may “work” very well, which is to say that engrams present
themselves and can be run and reduced, without emotion manifesting itself as part of the
content and with somatics which are dull and not so much pain as simply pressure. If the pain
and emotion shut-offs do not yield at first to repeater technique, many engrams may have to be
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run in the basic area without pain or emotion but only with pressure and word content. In such
a case pain and emotion can eventually be contacted, after which therapy is more beneficial.
EXTERIORIZED VIEWS
Whenever you find a patient, returned, outside himself and seeing himself, that patient
is off the track. He should not be told so but the despair charges, which is to say, the painful
emotion engrams, should be found as soon as possible and discharged. This is something of
the same mechanism as the ESP described above.
TELEPATHY
Every few cases some pre-clear may try to palm off telepathy as an aberrative factor.
This is more rainbow chasing. There may be telepathy but so far as research has shown the
foetus doesn’t receive any and even if he receives it, it is not aberrative in any way.
Exhaustive tests were made on telepathy and ESP and in every case an explanation was
found which did not need to go into mind reading or radar sight.
When a patient tries to tell the auditor that he is reciting mother’s thoughts received
prenatally, be certain that somewhere around there is an engram in which she says these exact
words aloud. Mothers, especially when aberrated severely and especially when aberrated
severely enough to attempt abortion, have many engrams they dramatize. The power of the
dramatization commonly manifests itself as monologues. Some mothers have a very great deal
to say to themselves when alone. All of this speech is, of course, transmitted to the child when
he is injured, and he may be injured without mother being injured as in an attempted abortion.
For considerable time after such an injury the child is usually “unconscious” and in pain; he
therefore records in engrams these monologues (and often the voice is quite loud). He doesn’t
hear it: it is simply cellularly recorded. All such monologuing is aberrative, of course, and
produces some remarkable patterns of insanity and neurosis.
But of telepathy, there is none that is aberrative so far as we know at this time. So the
auditor should not accept telepathy any more than he would accept ESP.
PRENATAL LIVING CONDITIONS
It is very noisy in the womb. A person may think he has sonic and yet hear no “womb”
sounds, which means that he does not have sonic but only “dub-in.” Intestinal squeaks and
groans, flowing water, belches, flatulation and other body activities of the mother produce a
continual sound.
It is also very tight in later prenatal life.
In a high blood pressure case, it is extremely horrible in the womb.
When mother takes quinine a high ringing noise may come into being in the foetal ears
as well as her own -- a ringing which will carry through a person’s whole life.
Mother gets morning sickness, has hiccoughs and gets colds, coughs and sneezes.
This is prenatal life.
The only reason anybody “wanted” to “return to the womb” was because somebody hit
mother and yelled “Come back here!” so the person does.
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THE ENGRAM FILING SYSTEM
Engrams are not filed in the orderly fashion managed by a cleared standard bank.
Engrams are filed in a way which would defy Alexander. Hence, it is difficult to know when
the proper consecutive item will appear.
Time, topic, value, somatic and emotion are the methods of filing.
The return from basic-basic may be an apparent orderly progress into late life. Suddenly
a despair charge is triggered and discharged. The auditor looks back at the prenatal area and
finds a whole new series of incidents in view. Progress is then begun back to present time, step
by step, another discharge is triggered and another series of prenatals come into sight. These
are erased and progress is made back toward present time when still another despair charge is
released and still more prenatals come to view. These are erased and so forth and so on.
The engram filing system gives out data by somatic, time, topic, value or emotion.
Usually the file clerk hands out material on the basis of time and topic. Emotion in the
bank keeps the file clerk from getting at a certain series of incidents; when the emotion is
discharged, the incidents become available and incidents are brought out until another emotional
charge stops the file clerk. The wit of the auditor is most used, not in getting prenatals, but in
finding these later life emotional charges and discharging them.
All in all the engram filing system is very poor, unlike the standard bank. But it is also
very vulnerable now that we understand it.
The engram filing system data can be erased. Standard bank data cannot be erased.
Pain is perishable -- pleasure endures.
ALLEVIATION
The psycho-analyst or general counselor in human relations is occasionally faced with a
type of problem which dianetics, applied in small quantity, can resolve easily.
It is possible, when a person has been too disturbed by an event of the day to address
himself to the problem at hand to alleviate his disturbance with a few minutes of work.
A sudden change in the aspect of a patient, a sudden deterioration of his serenity,
generally stems from some incident which has caused him mental anguish. Although this
change of mind has its source in the restimulation of an engram, the moment of restimulation,
which is a lock, may be addressed and alleviated with success.
Using reverie or merely asking the patient to close his eyes, the analyst can request him
to return and be in the instant wherein he was disturbed. That instant may be in the same day or
the same week as the office call. A moment of analytical shut-down will be discovered wherein
some restimulative person or circumstance upset the equilibrium of the patient. This moment is
a lock. It can be recounted, ordinarily, as an engram and the latest source of tension will relieve
so that work can be continued. The engram itself, upon which the lock depended, may not be
accessible without a full dianetic address to the problem.
The auditor, finding a patient much disturbed, can often save time by relieving the lock
which caused the immediate disturbance of the pre-clear.
Locating locks on a wholesale basis is unremunerative from a dianetic viewpoint since
there are thousands and thousands of them in every case. Locating the last lock, which is
hindering work, may be of benefit.
THE TONE SCALE AND REDUCTION OF ENGRAMS
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Because it is very important, the mechanism of the reduction of a late painful emotion
engram must be specifically detailed.
The uses of reduction on late engrams are wide and various. When the auditor gets into
trouble with his pre-clear by some violation of the auditor’s code, he can treat the violation as a
painful emotion engram and reduce it, at which moment the effect of his blunder will be gone in
the pre-clear. The auditor merely returns the pre-clear back to the blunder and runs the error
itself as an engram. When the husband has quarreled with his wife or she has found out some
unpleasant thing about his activities, he can treat the quarrel or the discovery as a painful
emotion engram and release it with the result of no further worry about it by his wife. When the
little boy’s dog has just been run over, the incident can be treated as a painful emotion engram
and released. When the pre-clear’s wife has just left him, treat the leaving as a painful emotion
engram and release it. Whatever the shock or upset, it can be reduced in an individual by
regular reduction technique and the individual will cease to be troubled by it in the painful
emotion sense. It does not matter whether the engram occurred two hours or ten years ago,
painful emotion can be reduced from it. It is run exactly like any other engram, beginning at the
beginning of the first shock with the patient returning to it and continuing far enough along it to
adequately embrace its first impact.
The aspect of this reduction is a pattern which does not much vary. If the news struck
the individual into apathy, then, as he recounts, he will, unless there is a severe emotional shut-off
elsewhere, progress through the incident a time or two, perhaps, before he contacts it
properly. Then there will come the tears and despair of apathy. Another two or three runs
should bring up anger. Then further recounting (always from beginning to end as re-experience)
brings the tone up into boredom. Further recounting should bring it to Tone 3 or
4, release or, most favorably, laughter.
This progress of the tones is the clue which led to the establishment of the tone scale
from 0 to 4. A Tone 4 is laughter.
There is sometimes a stage in the Tone 2 area where the patient begins to be offhand
and flippant. This is not Tone 4, it denotes more data present. He may resist recounting at this
point, saying the incident is released. The auditor must insist on further recounting whenever
he finds the pre-clear unwilling to recount again, for here is data being suppressed and more
charge is present. The flippancy is generally found to be an escape mechanism and is
sometimes uttered in the very words which are yet concealed. More recounting (without the
auditor insisting any certain words be found) is then done until the patient reaches Tone 4.
Here we have, in vignette, the behavior of the whole engram bank in the process of
therapy. The entire bank rises from its initial tone level eventually up to Tone 4, higher and
higher as more and more engrams are erased or reduced. The bank’s rise is not, however, a
smooth upward curve for new engrams will be contacted with apathy in them and some have
manics in them. The painful emotion engram, however, does a rather smooth rise. If it is going
to release at all it will rise up the scale. If it does not rise up the scale -- apathy to anger, anger
to boredom, boredom to cheerfulness or at least no concern -- then it is suppressed by an
incident with similar content.
An engram may begin at Tone 1 -- anger -- and rise from there. If it is found to be in
Tone 2 at the start -- boredom -- it is hardly an engram.
It may, however, be in a false Tone 2 and suppressed by other data so that the patient
merely appears bored and careless about it. A few recountings may bring about release of it, at
which moment it will sag instantly to apathy -- Tone 0 -- and then come on up the scale of the
tones. Or another engram may have to be contacted.
The whole physical being follows this tone scale throughout a course of therapy. The
mental being follows this tone scale. And painful emotion engrams follow it.
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On an erasure down in the basic area or when returning from basic-basic, two or three
runs will erase an engram of whatever kind unless it is the basic on a new chain of similar
incidents. But engrams which show no emotion anywhere on the track are suppressed by
emotional or feeling shut-offs, late painful emotion or early engrams which simply shut off the
pain or emotion in so many words.
A case should be kept “live.” There must be variability of emotion. A monotone
recounting, which is to say, one which does not vary the engramic tone but merely reduces, is
necessary in the basic area at times, but anytime a patient becomes orderly and “well-drilled”
and expresses no concern over his engrams as he recounts them, there is late painful emotion to
be tapped or early emotional shut-off. Conversely, if the patient is too continuously emotional
about all and anything, if he weeps awhile and then laughs hysterically, therapy is being done
but one should be alert for something engramic in the prenatal area which says he has to be “too
emotional” -- which is to say, he has engrams which make him emotional by their command
content.
The tone scale is very useful and is a good guide. It will be most prominent in reducing
post-speech engrams, but will also appear earlier.
Any painful emotion engram can be run. If it is properly reducing and not suppressed
elsewhere, it follows the tone scale upwards to Tone 4.
IF THE PATIENT DOES NOT WORK WELL
ON REPEATER TECHNIQUE
If, when the patient repeats a line the auditor has given him, the patient does not move
to an incident, three things can be wrong: first, the patient cannot move on the track; second,
the phrase may be sensibly withheld by the file clerk until such time as it can be cleared; or
third, the phrase does not exist as engramic material.
The patient may also have strong “control yourself” engrams which manifest
themselves by his snatching control from the auditor, being very bossy or simply refusing
cooperation. Repeater technique, when directed at “control yourself” and “I’ve got to operate”
and allied phrases, can then work.
The usual reason repeater technique does not work is that the patient is in a holder. If he
is returned but does not shift on the track when repeater technique is given him, use repeater
technique on the holders.
Remember that a “feeling” shut-off can deny all somatics so that the patient does not
feel them. If the patient seems insensible to trouble on the track, be sure that he has a feeling
shut-off.
A large emotional charge may also inhibit repeater technique.
The somatic strip does not go well into emotional charges -- painful emotion engrams --
and repeater technique is therefore indictated.
If repeater technique “the worst thing that could happen to a baby” and so forth and
from his conversation may be garnered new phrases for repeater work which will take the
patient into an engram.
SINGLE WORD TECHNIQUE
Words as well as engrams exist in chains. There is always a first time for the recording
of each word in a person’s life. The whole common language may lie within the engram bank.
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The possible combinations of that common language may well approach infinity. The ways
various denyers, bouncers et al., can be phrased are always beyond count.
Two “happy” facts exist, however, to reduce the auditor’s labors. First, the dramatis
personae of his engrams are at this date aberrated. Each aberree has standard dramatizations
which he repeats over and over in restimulative situations. The reaction, for instance, of the
father to the mother is repetitious: if he utters a set of phrases in one engramic situation, he will
utter it in subsequent similar situations. If the mother, for example, has an accusative attitude
toward the father, then that attitude will be expressed in certain terms and these terms will
appear in engram after engram. The second fact is that where the father or mother is abusive to
the other, the other will eventually begin to suffer contagion of aberration and will repeat the
other’s phrases. In a first-born child, where parental brutality is present, one can observe the
parents through the engrams of the patient and see one or the other gradually take up the other’s
phrases either to worry about themselves or to redeliver them. All this tends to make the
engrams appear in chains of incidents, each incident much like the next. When one has the
basic on each type of chain, the subsequent incidents on that chain are sufficiently similar to
permit many incidents to be reduced or erased immediately after the first is found. The first
incident on the chain, the basic for that chain, holds the others more or less in place and out of
sight; therefore, the basic of the chain is the goal.
Each word in the bank can be discovered to have been delivered to the bank for the first
time. Words also reduce in chains with the virtue that each subsequent appearance of the word
in the bank locates automatically a new engram, which, of course, is reduced or erased as soon
as it is contacted or as soon as its basic can be located.
Single word technique is very valuable and useful. It is a special kind of repeater
technique. On most patients, the repetition by themselves of one word will cause the associated
words to suggest themselves. Thus, one asks the patient to repeat and return on the word
Forget. He starts repeating the word Forget and shortly has an associated set of words, making
a phrase, such as “You can never forget me.” Here we have a phrase in an engram and the
remainder of the engram can then be run.
When a late engram has had to be contacted to progress a case and yet will not relieve, it
is possible to take each word or phrase of that late engram and run it back with repeater
technique. Thus the earlier engrams which hold this late engram in place can be located and
reduced, and eventually one will have reduced the late engram itself. This, by the way, is a
common and useful practice.
There is a law about this: When any phrase or word in an engram will not reduce, the
same phrase or word occurs in an earlier engram. One may have to discharge late emotion to
get the earlier phrase, but ordinarily single word repeater or phrase repeater will attain it.
There are only a few dozens of words necessary to get almost any engram. These
would be the key single word repeaters. They are such words as these: forget, remember,
memory, blind, deaf, dumb, see, feel, hear, emotion, pain, fear, terror, afraid, bear, stand, lie,
get, come, time, difference, imagination, right, dark, black, deep, up, down, words, corpse,
dead, rotten, death, book, reed, soul, hell, god, scared, miserable, horrible, past, look,
everything, everybody, always, never, everywhere, all, believe, listen, matter, seek, original,
present, back, early, beginning, secret, tell, die, found, sympathy mad, crazy, insane, rid,
fight, fist, chest, teeth, jaw, stomach, ache, misery, head, sex, Anglo-Saxon four letter words
of sex and profanity, skin, baby, it, curtain, shell, barrier, wall, think, thought, slippery,
confused, mixed, smart, poor, little, sick, life, father, mother, familiar names of parents and
any others of household during prenatal and childhood period, money, food, tears, no, world,
excuse, stop, laugh, hate, jealous, shame, ashamed, coward, etc.
Bouncers, denyers, holders, groupers, misdirectors et al., each have their common
single words and these are few. The bouncer would contain: out, up, return, go, late, later, etc.
205.206
The holder would contain: catch, caught, trap, trapped, stop, lie, sit, stay, can’t, stuck,
fixed, hold, let, lock, locked, come, etc.
The grouper would contain: time, together, once, difference, etc.
The single word technique shines nowhere brighter than in the Junior Case -- where the
patient carries the name of one or another parent or grandparent. By clearing out the patient’s
name from the prenatal engrams (where it is applied to another person but misinterpreted by the
patient as himself) the patient can regain his own definition and valence. Always use the
patient’s first name and last name (separately) as repeater, Junior or not.
If the engram bank is blank on a phrase, it probably is not blank on a common word.
Any small dictionary will provide an ample fund for single word technique. Use also any list of
familiar first names, male and female, and you may discover allies or lovers not otherwise
contactable.
The painful emotion engram sometimes yields slowly by simply directing the somatic
strip to it. Sometimes the patient finds it difficult to approach an overcharged area. Single word
technique using the name of the ally, if known, or words of sympathy, endearment, death,
rejection or farewell and the love name of the patient as a child in particular will often yield
swift results.
By the way, in using repeater technique, word or phrase, the auditor must not stir the
case up too much. Get what shows and reduce that. Reduce the somatic the person
manifests when he goes into reverie and always try to find it for a while, even if you don’t
succeed. If you stir up something en route down a chain which won’t reduce, mark it to be
reduced when you have the basic.
Using single word technique one often obtains phrases which would otherwise remain
hidden but which come into view when the key word is tapped. Using “hear” as a single word,
for instance, the following phrases came to light which had thoroughly impeded the progress of
the case. No effort was being made to contact such an engram in the prenatal area. Indeed, the
“fight” chain had never been suspected since the patient had never dramatized it and because
such a violent prenatal fight chain existed the fact that his parents fought violently in the home
was utterly struck from the standard banks so that he would have denied such a thing with
shocked surprise had it been suggested. The somatic was unusually severe, caused by the
father kneeling on the mother and choking her:
Patient repeated “hear” several times, the auditor asking him to return to an incident
containing that word. The patient continued to repeat and then suddenly sank into a stupor
when he reached the prenatal area. He remained in this “boil-off” for about thirty minutes
and then, the auditor rousing him occasionally to make him repeat the word “hear,” manifested
a strong somatic. “Hear” became “Stay here!” The somatic became stronger and “Stay
here” was repeated until the patient could move freely on the track through the engram. He
contacted his father’s voice and was most reluctant to carry on with the engram, due to its
intense emotional violence. Coaxed and edged into it by the auditor, the engram was
recounted.
FATHER: “Stay here! Stay down, damn you, you bitch! I’m going to kill you this
time. I said I would and I will. Take that! (Intensified somatic as his knee ground into the
mother’s abdomen) You better start screaming. Go on, Scream for mercy! Why don’t you
break down? Don’t worry, you will! You’ll be blubbering around here, screaming for mercy!
The louder you scream the worse you’ll get. That’s what I want to hear! I’m a punk kid, am I?
You’re the punk kid! I could finish you now but I am not going to! (Auditor suddenly has
trouble, patient taking last phrase literally and stopping his recounting; auditor starts him again)
This is just a sample. There’s a lot more than that where it came from! I hope it hurts I hope it
makes you cry! You say a word to anybody and I’ll kill you in earnest! (Patient now running
ahead with such an emotional surge that commands are less active on him. This command to
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remain quiet disregarded) I’m going to bust your face in. You don’t know what it is to be hurt!
(Somatic lessened by removal of the knee) I know what I’m going to do to you now! I’m going
to punish you! I’m going to punish you and God is going to punish you! I’m going to rape
you! I’m going to stick it into you and tear you! When I tell you to do something you’ve got to
do it! Get up on the bed! Lie down! Lie still! (Crack of bones as she is struck in the face with a
fist. Blood pressure coming up and hurting baby) Lie still! You’ll always be here! I’m going to
finish this! You’re unclean! You are dirty and diseased! God’s punished you and now I’m
going to punish you! (Coitus somatic begins, very violent, further injuring child) You’ve got
something terrible in your past. You think you’ve got to be mean to me! You try to make me
feel like nothing! You’re the one that’s nothing! Take it, take it!” (String of sexual banalities
screamed for about five minutes) The patient recounted this three times and it erased. It was
basic-basic! Three days after conception as nearly as could be judged by the subsequent days to
the missed period. It threw into view almost all the other important data in the case, which then
resolved and was cleared.
The single word might have landed the patient on some other of the “hears” in the case.
In this event it would be necessary to pick it up at its earliest moment or the remainder of the
engram might not erase or reduce.
The word “hear” might also have landed the patient later on the track in which case the
engrams would have had to have been traced back earlier until one was found which would
erase, reducing each one as it was encountered until the earliest was reached when all would
erase.
In using single word repeater as in phrase repeater, the auditor should not permit a
rapid, unmeaning repetition but a slow repeat, the auditor requesting the somatic strip to return
the while and asking the patient to contact anything else which might associate with the word.
Caution: if the patient is not moving on the track, do not give him repeater words or
phrases at random as these will pile up engrams where the patient is stuck. Use only efforts to
get the patient moving on the track by discovering and reducing the phrase that is holding him.
Caution: basic-basic does not always have words in it, often being only painful and
accompanied with womb sounds. It will, nevertheless, hold everything in place by its
perceptics.
SPECIAL CLASSES OF COMMANDS
There are several distinct classes of commands. They are outlined here for ready
reference with some samples of each.
Aberrative commands can contain anything. The auditor does not much concern himself
with them. Refer back to our young man and the coat in Book II and there we find, in the guise
of hypnotic commands, some idea of what aberrative commands are. “I am a jub-jub bird,” “I
can’t whistle Dixie,” “The world is all against me,” “I hate policemen,” “I am the ugliest person
in the world,” “You haven’t any feet,” “The Lord is going to punish me,” “I always have to
play with my thing,” may be very interesting to the patient and even amusing to the auditor and
may have caused a considerable amount of trouble in the patient’s life. Where dianetic therapy
is concerned, these all come up in due course. Looking for a specific aberration or a specific
somatic is sometimes of interest and sometimes of some use, but it is not usually important.
These aberrative commands may contain enough data to make the patient a raving zealot, a
paranoid or a catfish, but they are nothing to the auditor. They come up in due course. Working
on them or about them is secondary and less.
The primary business of the auditor in any case is to keep the patient moving on the
track, keep his somatic strip free to come and go and reduce engrams. The moment the patient
acts as though or responds as though he was not moving or the moment the file clerk will not
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give forth data, then something is wrong and that something has to do with a few classes of
phrase: there are thousands of such phrases contained in engrams, variously worded, but only
five classes:
DENYERS
“Leave me alone,” which means, literally, that he must leave the incident alone. “I can’t
tell” means he can’t tell you this engram. “It’s hard to tell” means it is hard to tell. “I don’t
want to know” means he has no desire to know this engram. “Forget it” is the classic of the
sub-class of denyer, the forgetter mechanism. When the engram simply won’t come to view
but there is a somatic or a muscle twitch, send the somatic strip to the denyer. It is often
“Forget it” or “Can’t remember” as a part of the engram. “I don’t know what’s going on” may
be Mama telling Papa something but the pre-clear’s analyzer, impinged, then doesn’t know
what’s going on. “It’s beyond me” means he is right there but he thinks he isn’t. “Hold on to
this, it’s your life!” makes the engram “vital” to existence. “It can’t be reached,” “I can’t get in
there,” “Nobody must know,” “It’s a secret,” “If anybody found out, I’d die,” “Don’t talk,”
and thousands more.
HOLDERS
The holder is the most frequent and the most used since whenever the pre-clear can’t
shift on the track or come to present, he is in a holder. A holder combined with a denyer will
still hold: if it can’t be found, look for the denyer first, then the holder. “I’m stuck” is the
classic phrase. “That fixed it” is another. “I’m caught” doesn’t mean to the pre-clear what
Mama meant when she said it. It may mean to her that she is pregnant but it tells the pre-clear
he is caught on the track. “Don’t move,” “Sit there until I tell you to move,” “Stop and think”
(on this last phrase, when it is uttered on a first recounting the auditor may have to start him
going again for he does just that, he stops and thinks and he would stop there and think for
some time: the auditor will see this strange obedience to this literal nonsense as he works a
case). And thousands more. Any way words literally understood can stop a person or keep
him from moving.
BOUNCERS
The bouncer could best be demonstrated by a curve. The pre-clear goes back into
prenatal and then finds himself at ten years of age or even present time. That’s a bouncer at
work. He goes early on the time track: it says come back up.
When the pre-clear can’t seem to get earlier, there is a bouncer ejecting him from an
engram. Get a comment from him on what’s happening. Take the comment or some phrase
which would be a bouncer and use repeater technique until he settles back down on the engram.
If he contacts it easily, it won’t bounce him again. “Get out” is the classic bouncer. The patient
usually goes toward present time. “Can’t go back at this point” may mean Mama has decided
she will have to have the baby after all or finish the abortion but to the pre-clear it means he
must move on up the time track or that he can’t get any earlier period. “Get up there.” “Run a
mile” (“Beat it,” would not be a bouncer; it would mean the pre-clear should beat the engram).
“I must go far, far away,” so he does. “I’m growing up,” “Blow you higher than a kite,”
“Batter up.” And thousands more.
GROUPER
The grouper is the nastiest of all types of command. It can be so variously worded and
its effect is so serious on the time track that the whole track can roll up into a ball and all
incidents then appear to be in the same place. This is apparent as soon as the pre-clear
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hits one. The grouper will not be discovered easily. But it will settle out as the case progresses
and the case can be worked with a grouper in restimulation. “I have no time” and “Nothing
makes any difference” are the classic groupers. “Everything comes in on me at once” means
just that. “They’re all in there together,” “Screwed up,” “Balled up,” “It’s all right here.”
“You can remember all this in present time” (a serious auditor error if he uses this to a
suggestible patient, for it will gloriously foul a case). “You associate everything.” “I am
tangled up,” “Jam everything in there at once,” “There’s no time,” and thousands more.
MISDIRECTOR
This is an insidious character, the misdirector. When it appears in an engram, the
patient goes in wrong directions, to wrong places, etc. “You’re doing it all backwards.” “All
up now” is a grouper and a misdirector. “Always throwing it up to me” puts the pre-clear up
the track some distance and from there he tries to pick up engrams. “You can’t go down” is
partly bouncer, partly misdirector. “We can’t get to the bottom of this” keeps him off from
basic-basic. “You can start over again” keeps him from finishing the recounting, whereupon
he goes back to the beginning of the engram instead of running it. “Can’t go through that
again” keeps him from recounting. “I can’t tell you how it began” keeps him starting his
engrams in the middle and they will not then reduce. There are many such phrases. “Let’s
settle down” and all “settlings” make him drift backwards down the track. “I am coming down
with a cold” puts the aberree in a common cold engram. This can be counted upon to make
every cold much worse. “Come back here” is really a call back but it directs him away from
where he should be. A patient who reaches present time with difficulty and then begins to go
back has a “Come back here” or a “Settle down.” “Down and out” misdirects him not only
away from present time but to the bottom of the track and off it. This is a misdirector and a
derailer all at once. “Can’t get past me” is a misdirector on the order of a reverser. “You don’t
know down from up” is the classic phrase. “I’m all turned around.”
A special case is the derailer which “throws him off the track” and makes him lose
touch with his time track. This is a very serious phrase since it can make a schizophrenic and
something of this sort is always to be found in schizophrenia. Some of its phrases throw him
into other valences which have no proper track, some merely remove time, some throw him
bodily out of time. “I don’t have any time” is a derailer as well as a grouper. “I’m beside
myself” means that he is now two people, one beside the other. “I’ll have to pretend I am
somebody else” is a key phrase to identity confusion. “You’re behind the times” and many
more.
There is another special case of the misdirector. The auditor says to go to “present time”
and the file clerk throws out a phrase with “present” in it. It does not matter if the present in the
phrase was a Christmas present, if it is in the prenatal area, the pre-clear goes there, ignoring
what the auditor meant. “That’s all at present,” is a vicious phrase, putting everything in
present time. “It’s a lovely present.”
And others. “Now” is sometimes confused with present time but not often. The auditor
should not say “Come to now,” because if he did he would find more “nows” than he could
comfortably handle. “Present” is a rarer engramic word and is therefore used. “Now” appears
too frequently.
Several severely aberrated persons who had little memory of the past have been found
to be entirely off their time tracks, regressed into the prenatal area and stuck when the case was
entered. As far as their wits were concerned, they had only a few months of past from where
they were back to conception. And yet these people had managed somehow to function as
normals.
Emotional charges usually hold the person off his track and, indeed, are the only things
which give these engram commands any power according to current findings.
209.210
DIFFERENCES
There are two axioms about mind function with which the auditor should be familiar.
I. THE MIND PERCEIVES, POSES AND RESOLVES PROBLEMS RELATING TO
SURVIVAL.
II. THE ANALYTICAL MIND COMPUTES IN DIFFERENCES. THE REACTIVE
MIND COMPUTES IN IDENTITIES.
The first axiom is of interest to the auditor in his work because with it he can clearly
establish whether or not he is confronting a rational reaction. The seven-year-old girl who
shudders because a man kisses her is not computing; she is reacting to an engram since at seven
she should see nothing wrong in a kiss, not even a passionate one. There must have been an
earlier experience, possibly prenatal, which made men or kissing very bad. All departures from
optimum rationality are useful in locating engrams, all unreasonable fears and so forth are grist
to the auditor’s mill. The auditor, with the above law, should study as well, the Equation of the
Optimum Solution. Any departure from optimum is suspect. While he cares little about
aberrations, at times a case will stall or seem to have no engrams. He then can observe the
conduct of his patient and his patient’s reactions to life in order to gain data.
The second law is dianetics’ contribution to logic. In the philosophic text this is more
fully entered. Aristotle’s pendulum and his two-valued logic were abandoned not because of
any dislike of Aristotle but because broader yardsticks were needed. One of these yardsticks
was the spectrum principle whereby gradations from zero to infinity and infinity to infinity
were used and Absolutes were considered utterly unobtainable for scientific purposes.
In the second axiom the mind can be conceived to recognize differences very broadly
and accurately, in its nearest approach to complete rationality and then, as it falls away from
rationality, to perceive less and less difference until at last it achieves a near approach to utter
inability to compute any difference in time, space or thought and so can be considered
completely insane. When this follows one thought only, such as a sweeping statement that “All
cats are the same,” it is either careless or insane since all cats are not the same, even two cats
who look, act and sound alike. One could say, “Cats are pretty much the same,” and still be
dealing with rather irrational thought. Or one could recognize that there was a species felix
domesticus but that within it cats were decidely different not only from breed to breed but cat to
cat. That would be rationality, not because one used Latin but because he could tell the
difference amongst cats. The fear of cats has as its source an engram which usually does not
include more than one cat and that is a very specific cat of a specific breed with a certain (or
perhaps uncertain) personality. The pre-clear who is afraid of all cats is actually afraid of one
cat and a cat which is most likely dead these many years at that. Thus as we swing from
complete rationality down to irrationality there is a narrowing of differences until they nearly
vanish and become similarities and identities.
Aristotle’s syllogism in which two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other
simply does not begin to work in logic. Logic is not arithmetic, which is an artificial thing Man
invented and which works. To handle a problem in logic the mind flutters through an enormous
mass of data and computes with dozens and even hundreds of variables. It does not and never
did think on the basis that two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other except
when employing mathematics it had conceived the better to resolve abstract problems. It is an
abstract truth that two and two equal four. Two what and two what equal four? There is no
scale made, no yardstick or caliper or microscope manufactured, which would justify the
actuality, for instance, that two apples plus two apples equal four apples. Two apples and two
apples are four apples now if they are the same apples. They would not equal four other apples
by any growth or manufacturing process ever imagined. Man is content to take approximations
and call them, loosely, exactitudes. There is no Absolute anything save in abstract terms set up
by the mind to work out exterior problems and achieve approximations. This may seem to be a
210.211
stretched conception, but it is not. The mathematician is very well aware that he is working
with digit and analogue approximations set up into systems which were not necessarily here
before Man came and will not necessarily be here after he is gone. Logic, even the simple logic
of wondering about the wisdom of going shopping at ten, is handling numerous variables,
indefinites and approximations. Mathematics can be invented by the carload lot. There is no
actual Absolute, there is only a near approach. Our grammarians alone, much behind the times,
insist, probably in memory of the metaphysician, on Absolute Reality and Truth.
This is here set down partly because it may be of interest to some but mainly because
the auditor must realize that he has an accurate measuring stick for sanity. Sanity is the ability to
tell differences. The better one can tell differences, no matter how minute, and know the width
of those differences, the more rational he is. The less one can tell differences and the closer one
comes to thinking in identities (A = A) the less sane he is.
A man says, “I don’t like dogs!” Spot it, auditor, he has an engram about one or two
dogs. A girl says, “All men are alike!” Spot it, auditor, here’s a real aberree. “Mountains are
so terrible!” “Jewelers never go any place!” “I hate women!” Spot them. Those are engrams
right out in broad daylight.
Those engrams which inhibit the analytical mind in differentiating are those engrams
which most seriously inhibit thinking.
“You can’t tell the difference,” is a common engram. “There is no difference,”
“Nothing will ever make any difference to me again,” “People are all bad,” “Everybody hates
me.” This is insanity bait, as the auditors say, and puts a man “spin-bin bound.”
There is another class of identity thought and that is the group which destroys time-differentiation.
“You don’t know when it happened!” is a classic phrase. “I don’t know how
late it is,” and others have a peculiar effect on the mind for the mind is running on a precision
chronometer of its own and the engrams can thoroughly misread the dial. On a conscious level
one goes along fairly well on analytical time. The engrams slide around back and forth
according to when they are keyed-in or restimulated. An engram may underlie today’s action
which belonged forty years ago on the time track and should be back there. It is not remarks
about time difference so much that aberrate, it is the untimed character of engrams. Time is the
Great Charlatan, it heals nothing, it only changes the environmental aspects and a man’s
associates. The engram of ten years ago, with all its painful emotion, may be encysted and
“forgotten” but it is right there, ready to force action if restimulated today.
The reactive mind runs on a dime-store wrist watch, the analytical mind runs on a
battery of counter-checking chronometers of which a liner could be proud. The cells think that
wrist watch is a pretty fair gimmick -- and it was, it was, back there in the days when Man’s
ancestor was washed in by the waves and managed to cling to the sand.
Thus, a primary test for aberration is similarity and identity, the primary test for
rationality is differentiation and the minuteness or largeness with which it can be done.
“Men are all alike,” she says. And they are too! To her. Poor thing. Like the fellow
who raped her when she was a kid, like her detested father who said it.
RELATIVE IMPORTANCESAND “BELIEVE” AND “CAN’T BELIEVE”
The auditor will find himself confronted with two arch enemies in “you must believe
it,” and “I can’t believe.”
The mind has its own equilibrium and ability and it is aided no more by engrams than
an adding machine is aided by a held-down seven. One of the most important functions of the
mind is the computing of the relative importances of data.
211.212
In discovering and conducting research on dianetics, for instance, there were billions of
data about the mind accumulated throughout the last few thousand years.
Now, with a six foot rear vision mirror we can look back and see that here and there
people had expressed opinions or turned up unevaluated facts which are now data in some of
the axioms of dianetics or parts of its discoveries. These facts existed in the past, some exist
now in dianetics, but with a tremendous difference: they are evaluated. Evaluation of the data
for its importance was vital before the information was of value. Dr. Sententious might have
written in 1200 A.D. that he believed actual demons did not exist in the mind; Goodwife Sofie
in 1782 was heard to say that she was certain that prenatal influence had warped many a life;
Dr. Zamba might have written in 1846 that a hypnotized patient could be told he was crazy and
that he would thereafter act crazy. Dr. Sententious might have said also that angels, not
demons, caused mental illness because the patient had been evil; Goodwife Sofie also might
have said that punk water poultices cured “ravings”; Dr. Zamba might also have declared that
hypnotized patients needed only a few more positive suggestions to make them well and
strong. In short, for every datum which approached truth there were billions which were
untrue. The missing part of each datum was a scientific evaluation of its importance to the
solution. The selection of a few special drops of water from an ocean of unspecial drops is
impossible. The problem of discovering true data could be resolved only by jettisoning all
former evaluations of humanity and the human mind and all “facts” and opinions of whatever
kind and starting fresh, evolving the entire science from a new highest common denominator
(and it is true that dianetics borrowed nothing but was first discovered and organized; only after
the organization was completed and a technique evolved was it compared to existing
information).
The point here is that monotone importance in a class of facts leads to nothing but the
most cluttered confusion. Here is evaluation: opinions are nothing, authority is useless, data is
secondary: establishment of relative importance is the key. Given the world and the stars as a
laboratory and a mind to compute the relative importance of what it perceives, and no problems
can remain unsolved. Given masses of data with monotone evaluation and one has something
which may be pretty but is useful.
The stunned look of fresh-caught ensigns of the Navy when they first see in the metal
the things about which they have so laboriously read is a testimony to more than the faulty
educational system currently employed: the system seeks to train something which is perfect --
the memory -- ; it aligns little or nothing with purpose or use, and ignores the necessity of
personal evaluation of all data both as to need for it and its use. The stunned look comes from
the overwhelming recognition that whereas they have thousands of data about what they see,
they do not know whether it is more important to read the chronometer when they take a sextant
sight or use only blue ink in writing a log book. These gentlemen have been wronged
educationally not because they have not been given thousands of data relative to ships but
because they have not been told the relative importance of each datum and have not experienced
that importance. They know more facts than the less educated but they know less about factual
relation.
More pertinent to the auditor, there are two species of engramic commands which give
monotone evaluation to data. The persons who have either of these as a major content in the
engram bank will be similarly aberrated even if each manifests the aberration with opposite
polarity.
Every now and then some unfortunate auditor finds a “Can’t believe it” on his hands.
This case is extremely trying. Under this heading come the “I doubt it,” the “I can’t be sure,”
and the “I don’t know,” cases.
Such a case is easy to spot for when he first comes into therapy he begins by doubting
dianetics, the auditor, himself, the furniture and his mother’s virginity. The chronic doubter is
not an easy case because he cannot believe his own data. The analyzer has a built-in judge
212.213
which takes in data, weighs it and judges it right, wrong or maybe. The engramic doubter has a
“held down 7” to the effect that he has to doubt everything, something much different from
judging. He is challenged to doubt. He must doubt. If to doubt is divine, then the god is
certainly Moloch. He doubts without inspecting, he inspects the most precise evidence, and he
still doubts.
The auditor will return this patient to a somatic which tears half his head off, which is
confirmed by scars, which is confirmed by aberration, and which is doubted as an incident.
The way to handle this case is to take his pat phrases and feed them to him in reverie or
out of reverie with repeater technique. Make him go over and over them, sending his somatic
strip back to them. Shortly a release of the phrase will take place. Feed all doubter phrases
which the patient has used in this manner. Then continue the case. The object is not to make
him a believer but to place him in a situation where he can evaluate his own data. Don’t argue
with him about dianetics -- arguing against engrams is senseless since the engrams themselves
are senseless.
In ten or twenty hours of therapy such a patient will begin to face reality enough so that
he no longer doubts the sun shines, doubts the auditor or doubts that he had a past of some
sort. He is only difficult because he requires these extra hours of work. He is usually, by the
way, very aberrated.
The “Can’t believe it” finds difficulty in evaluation because he has difficulty giving
credence to any fact more than any other fact: this produces an inability to compute relative
importances amongst data with the result that he may be as concerned with the shade of his
superior’s tie as with the marriage he himself is about to undertake. Similarly, the “You must
believe it” case finds difficulty in differentiating amongst importances of various data and may
hold equally firmly the idea that paper is made from trees and that he is about to be fired. Both
cases “worry,” which is to say they are unable to compute well.
Rational computation depends upon the personal computation of the relative
importances of various data. Reactive “computation” deals exclusively with the equation that
widely different objects or events are similar or equal. The former is sanity, the latter is
insanity.
The “Must believe it” case will present a confused reactive bank, for the bank embraces
the most unlikely differences as close similarities. The “Must believe it” engram command can
dictate that one person, a class of persons, or everyone must be believed, no matter what is
written or said. The auditor, returning the patient, will find major aberrations held in place by a
lock containing only conversation.
When father is the actual source and is an ally of the patient, the auditor will discover
that almost everything father said was accepted literally and unquestioningly by his child. The
father may not have been aware of having established this “Must believe it” condition and he
may even be a jocular man, given to jokes. Every joke will be found to be literally accepted
unless the father carefully labeled it a joke, which meant it must not be literally accepted. One
case folder is to hand here where father was the source of “Must believe”: one day the father
took his daughter, three years of age, down to the seacoast and, through the fog, pointed to a
lighthouse. The lighthouse gave an eerie aspect in the foggy night. “That’s Mr. Billingsly’s
place,” said the father, meaning that Billingsly, the lighthouse keeper, lived there. The child
nodded faithfully, if a little frightened, for “Mr. Billingsly” threw around a mane of hair-shadows
-- glared to seaward with one eye sweeping the water and stood a hundred feet tall
and “Mr. Billingsly” let out moans which sounded quite ferocious. His “place” was a ledge of
rock. As a pre-clear twenty years later the daughter was discovered to be frightened of any low
moaning sound. The auditor patiently traced down the source and found, much to the delight of
himself and the daughter, “Mr. Billingsly.” Vast quantities of aberration, peculiar conceptions
and strange notions were found to derive from casual statements the father had made. Being
skilled in his task, the auditor did not bother to try to locate and erase everything the father had
213.214
said -- a task which would have taken years and years: he located, instead, the prenatal “You
must believe me” and its engramic locks, and all the non-engramic locks, of course,
disappeared and were automatically re-evaluated as experienced data rather than “held-down
sevens.” Of course there is always much more wrong with a case than a mere “You must
believe me,” but the change of viewpoint which the patient experienced immediately afterwards
was startling: she was now at liberty to evaluate her father’s data, which she had not been
before.
Because they teach in terms of altitude* and Authority, educational institutions
themselves form a social “You must believe it” aberration. It is impossible to reduce an entire
university education even if it sometimes appears desirable, but by addressing the moments
when the patient was hammered into believing or accepting school, from kindergarten forward,
many a fact-clogged mind can again be made facile which was not so before, for the facts will
be re-evaluated automatically by the
* (By altitude is meant a difference of level of prestige -- one on a higher altitude carries
conviction to one on a lower altitude merely because of altitude. The auditor may find himself
unable to gain sufficient altitude with some patients to work them smoothly and he may have so
much altitude with others that they believe everything he says. When he has too little altitude,
he is not believed; when he has too much he is believed too well.) mind for importances, not
accepted on monotone evaluation as is the case in “formal education.”
The “Can’t believe it” is a subject so weary and dreary to the auditor that he may find
himself, after a few finished cases, running adroitly away from one. The “I don’t know” and
the “I can’t be sure” cases are not as bad as the “I can’t believe it.” The prize case in difficulty
in dianetics is a patient who is a Junior named after either father or mother, who has not only
shut-down pain, emotion, visio and sonic recall but also “dub-in” for them on a false basis,
with a lie factory working full blast, who is uncooperative and who is a “Can’t believe it.”
Monotone evaluation hinders the “Can’t believe it’s” acceptance of all facts. Any case
may have a few “Can’t believe its” but some cases are so thoroughly aberrated by the phrase
that they disbelieve not only reality but also their own existence.
The mind has a “built-in doubter” which, unhindered by engrams, rapidly sorts out
importances and, by their weights, resolves problems and arrives at conclusions. The rational
mind applies itself to data presented, compares it to experience, evaluates its veracity and then
assigns it relative importance in the scheme of things. This is done, by a clear, with a rapidity
which sometimes requires the splitting of seconds. By a normal the time required is extremely
variable and the conclusions are more apt to be referred to another’s opinion or compared to
Authority rather than to personal experience. That is the fundamental effect of contemporary
education which, through no particular fault of its own and despite every effort it has made to
free itself, yet, through lack of tools, is forced to follow Scholastic methods. These, by
contagion of aberration, persist against all efforts of advanced educators. The normal is taught
on one hand to believe or else he’ll fail and on the other to disbelieve as a scientific necessity:
belief and disbelief cannot be taught, they must be personally computed. If a mind could be
likened to a general served by his own staff, it could be seen to have a G-2 which, as a combat
intelligence center, collected facts, weighed them for importance and formed an estimate of a
situation or the value of a conclusion. As the intelligence officer would fail if he had a signed
order to disbelieve everything, so does the mind fail which has a reactive command to
disbelieve. Certainly a military organization would lose to every puny enemy if it had,
conversely, a command to believe everything, and a man will fail if he has a reactive mind
order to believe all information in the world around him.
The believe and disbelieve engrams present different manifestations, and while one
cannot be said to be either more or less aberrative than the other, it is certain that the disbelieve
engram, by and large, seems to make the less sociable man.
214.215
Disbelief occurs in various degrees, of course. There is, for instance, a social disbelief
engram which promotes a class of literature which is as insincere as it is unwitty. Insincerity,
shame of emotional demonstration, fear of praising may stem from other things than merely a
disbelief engram, but a disbelief engram is most certainly present in the majority of such cases.
The auditor will find, when he is trying to enter a very strong “Can’t believe it” case,
that experience is disbelieved, the auditor is disbelieved, hope of results is disbelieved and that
the most ridiculous and unreasonable insults and arguments may be presented. The patient may
squirm in a veritable snake pit of somatics and still disbelieve that he is re-experiencing
anything.
It is a sadly chronic fact that an aberree has a certain set of cliches from out of his
engram bank. He will repeat these cliches for all occasions and circumstances. Mother, having
an engram bank of her own and father having his, will be found to be uttering pretty much the
same sort of statement time after time. These are dramatizations. One of the parents may have
had an “I don’t know” ready to precede everything he or she said, which makes a whole
“stack” of “I don’t knows” in the engram bank: which much undermines understanding. In the
same way, “You must believe!” or “You can’t believe!” may become “stacked” in the engram
bank. Once one has heard a few engrams from a patient, he knows he will have many, many
more similar engrams from that source. Once an auditor has listened to the personnel in the
patient’s engram bank for a very short time he knows pretty much what he will have in many,
many more engrams. Hence any phrase is liable to be much repeated in the engram bank, with
varying somatics and accompanying perceptics. If Mother is troubled with high blood pressure,
it is raised by Father -- to the intense discomfort of the child and a degree which often produces
a later migraine headache -- she is apt to utter, “I can’t believe you would treat me this way.”
Privately, she must have been hard to convince (one doesn’t convince much against engramic
“reasoning”), for he treated her this way about every three days; and every three days she was
saying, “I can’t believe you” or “I can’t believe you would do this to me,” or “I can’t believe
anything you say,” or some such thing.
The “Can’t believe” is apt to be rather hostile since “Can’t believe” is often hostile
conversation. “You’ve got to believe me” is more apt to be a pleading or whining sort of an
engram. “Believe what I tell you, God damn it,” is, however, fully as hostile as an auditor
might expect.
An auditor who finds a case intensely and unreasonably skeptical should expect a
“Can’t believe” stack in the engram bank. If he finds a patient incapable of holding an opinion
of his own but weather-vaning to each new person or quoting an Authority (all authorities get
easily identified with father in the reactive bank), he should suspect a “Must believe” in some
form as well as other things. There are many manifestations of either case. The chronic aspect
in therapy is that the “Can’t believe” suspects his own data so strongly that he alters it
continually and the engrams which, after all, have just one, exact package of content, will not
properly reduce; the “Must believe” takes up every engram he hears about as his own and that
does him little good.
Do not suppose that any case has a standard aspect, however. The language contains
many words and combinations of words, and aberrees are not unusual who have the entire
basic language and all its idioms securely connected up to some somatic or other. Cases
ordinarily contain “Can’t believe” and “Must believe” phrases in the same bank. Only when
these phrases become top-heavy does the person respond in a set pattern. When the set pattern
is of either species of phrase, then the auditor confronts a patient who must have had, at best, a
most unhappy life. But either case clears. They all clear, even Juniors.
PHYSICAL PAIN AND PAINFUL EMOTION COMMANDS
215.216
Besides visio and sonic, another vital recall to therapy is the somatic, which is to say
the physical pain of the incident. Running a physically painful incident without a somatic is
worthless.
If physical pain is present, it may come only after considerable “unconsciousness” has
been “boiled-off.” If the incident contains pain but the somatic is not turned on, the patient will
wriggle his toes and breathe heavily and nervously or he may have jumping muscles. The foot
wriggling is an excellent clue to the presence of any somatic turned on or not turned on.
Breathing heavily and jumping muscles and various twitches without pain denote two things:
either a denyer is in the incident and the content isn’t being contacted or, if the pre-clear is
recounting, the somatic may be shut-off in the incident or elsewhere, either earlier by command
or late by painful emotion. The patient who wriggles a great deal or who does not wriggle at all
is suffering from a pain or emotion shut-off or late painful emotion engrams or both.
There is a whole species of commands which shut-off pain and emotion
simultaneously: this is because the word “feel” is homonymic. “I can’t feel anything” is the
standard, but the command varies widely and is worded in a great many ways. The auditor can
pick up his own book of these from patients who, describing how they feel or rather, how they
don’t feel, give them away. “It doesn’t hurt” is a class of phrases specifically shutting off pain,
a class which includes, of course, such things as “There isn’t any pain,” etc. Emotion is shut-off
by a class of phrases which contain the word “emotion” or which specifically (literally
translated) shut off emotion.
The auditor should keep a book of all denyers, misdirectors, holders, bouncers and
groupers which he discovers, each listed under its own heading. In this way he adds to material
he can use for repeater technique when he sees something is wrong with the way the patient is
moving on the track. But there are four other classes of phrases which he should also study and
list: shut-offs, exaggerators, derailers and lie factories. He can also add to his classes.
He will discover enormous numbers of commands in engrams which can accomplish
these various aspects. And he should be particularly interested in the pain and emotion shut-offs
and the exaggerators, which is to say, those engramic commands which give the aspect of
too much pain and too much emotion. There is no reason to give large numbers of them here.
They are quite various, language being language.
Many combinations are possible. A patient can be found to weep over the most trivial
post-speech things and yet have few or no somatics. Several things can cause this. Either he
had a mother or a father who wept for nine months before he was born or he has an
exaggerator at work which commands that he be emotional about everything: “Too much
emotion.” In combination with this he can have something which says he can feel no pain or
can’t hurt or even can’t feel.
A patient who aches and suffers and yet cannot weep would have a reverse set of
commands: he has a “no emotion” command early on the track or a long chain of them and yet
has commands which dictate pain to excess: “I can’t stand the pain,” “The pain is too great,” “I
always feel I’m in agony,” etc. “I feel bad,” on the other hand, is a shut-off because it says
there is something wrong with the mechanism with which he feels and implies disability to feel.
Both pain and emotion can be commanded into exaggeration. But it is a peculiar thing
that the body does not manufacture pain to be felt. All pain felt is genuine, even if exaggerated.
Imaginary pain is non-existent. A person “imagines” only pain he has actually felt. He cannot
imagine pain he has not felt. He may “imagine” pain at sometime later than the actual incident
but if he feels pain, no matter how psychotic he is, that pain will be found to exist somewhere
on his time track. Scientific tests have been carefully conducted in dianetics to establish this fact
and it is a valuable one. You can test it yourself by asking patients to feel various pains,
“imagining them” in present time. They will feel pains for you so long as you ask them to feel
pains they have had. Somewhere you will find the patient unable to actually feel the pain he is
216.217
trying to “imagine.” Whether he is aware of it or not, he has had pain wherever he “imagines” it
and is simply doing a somatic strip return for you on a minor scale.
This aspect of pain is quite interesting in that many patients have, at one time or another
in their lives, pretended to the family or the world that they had a pain. The patient thought,
when he asserted this “make-believe” pain, that he was lying. In therapy the auditor can use
these “imaginings” for they lead straight to sympathy engrams and actual injury. Further, these
“imaginary” pains are generally displayed to the person or pseudo-person who was the
sympathy ally present in the engramic moment. Thus, if a small boy always pretended to his
grandmother, and thought he was pretending, that he had a bad hip, it will be discovered
eventually that sometime in his early life he hurt that same hip and received sympathy during
the engramic moment which is now eclipsed from the analyzer. Patients often feel quite guilty
over these pretenses. Sometimes soldiers in the recent war have come home pretending they
had been wounded and, when in therapy, are afraid the auditor will find out or give them away
to their people. This soldier might not have been wounded in the war, but an engram will be
found which contains sympathy for the injury of which he complains. He is asking for
sympathy with a colorful story and believes he is telling a lie. Without informing him of this
dianetic discovery, the auditor can often flush into view a sympathy engram which might
otherwise have to be arduously hunted down.
“Cry baby” is a phrase against which the pre-clear will negate in an engram, thus
inhibiting tears. It is quite ordinary to find the pre-clear confusing himself with older brothers
and sisters who are in his prenatal life: their jeers, mother’s orders and so forth then all
register. If the pre-clear knows of any older children, the auditor should look for them in the
engrams of prenatal life, for children are quite active and often bounce up and down on
mother’s lap or collide with her. Any childish phrases of derision are then not always post-birth.
It has been said during dianetic research that if one could release all the painful emotion
of a lifetime, he would have ninety-percent of the clearing done. However, the painful emotion
is only a surface manifestation of the physical pain engrams and would not be painful if the
physical pain did not co-exist or exist priorly.
When emotion and pain shut-offs exist in a case, the patient is normally tense of muscle
and nervous, given to twitching or merely tension. When pain and emotion are exaggerated by
commands, one has a highly dramatizing case on his hands.
THE ALLY VERSUS THE ANTAGONIST
It is necessary for the auditor to know the reactive mind’s evaluation of importances.
Moronic or not, the reactive mind distinguishes violently between friend and foe, about the
only piece of differentiation it does.
There is a prime test for an ally. And recall that the ally is a part of sympathy engrams,
the things which are most likely to produce psycho-somatic illnesses, immaturities and
confusion on a grand scale. As long as it can rebel and negate, the reactive mind takes care of
the enemies so far as it is able. It can, of course, be twisted by circumstance into the valence of
the enemy and so cry havoc and abreact in general if this was a winning valence. But it will not
ordinarily use the data of the enemy contained in a contra-survival engram save to negate
against it. When the general tone nears Zone One, of course the reactive mind starts picking up
and obeying antagonistic commands. Thus, if father is the villain of the piece, an antagonist,
father’s commands are not the reactively obeyed commands but the commands the aberree will
usually negate against or avoid.
This is not the case, however, with the ally. The ally, the person from whom sympathy
came when the patient was ill or injured, is heeded and obeyed since his “purpose” is
apparently aligned with the purpose of the individual to survive. If one thing about a person is
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right then, according to our moronic little friend, the reactive mind, everything about that
person is right, everything that person says and does is right and particularly is right whatever
that person said in the engram.
The chronic psycho-somatic illness is ordinarily from a sympathy engram. This is quite
important, for the sympathy engram will be the last or hardest to reach, being aligned with
survival purpose.
A “Must believe” from an ally means that the person must believe. A “Must believe”
from an antagonist ordinarily brings about a circumstance that the person must not believe.
Here, in the ally and the antagonist, we have the age-old tale of the hero and the villain,
the heroine and the villainess, Mazda and Ahriman, the cowboy in the white hat and the
cowboy in the black. The Hindu trinity is found, as source, in father, mother and unborn baby.
But the war of “good and evil” is found as reactive data in the engram bank in the form of the
ally and the antagonist.
The very best logic of which the reactive mind is capable is two-valued, white and
black, and two-valued logic finds its response only in the reactive bank. And the reactive mind
works out all problems in absolutes, bringing about logical monstrosities, for there is the
absolute of good, the absolute of evil and the absolute of identity thought. Any rational
computation demonstrates an absolute to be impossible from a standpoint of truth or
workability: but the reactive mind never quibbles, it just reacts. It knows a champion when it
sees one (it thinks) and it knows a villain (it supposes). The ally, the champion, is everybody
who has any characteristic of the ally and the antagonist, the villain, is everyone who has any
characteristics of the antagonist. Further, anything associated with the ally is a champion and
everything associated with the antagonist is villainous. If the ally is an aunt, then aunts are
good. If the antagonist is a sign painter, then sign painters are all evil. Further, the dollies
Auntie crocheted mean that dollies are good and that all lacework is good and that anything on
which lacework sits is good and that anything which looks like lacework is good and so on in
the ad absurdum which only the reactive mind can manage without a qualm. And the signs the
painter painted were evil and where they sit is evil and paint is evil and smell of paint is evil and
brushes are evil so hair brushes are evil so the dresser on which hairbrushes sit is evil and so
on.
There is an axiom here which is well not to slight in working a patient:
ANY CHRONIC PSYCHO-SOMATIC ILLNESS HAS AT ITS SOURCE A
SYMPATHY ENGRAM.
And another:
A REACTIVE MIND WILL NOT PERMIT AN INDIVIDUAL TO BE ABERRATED
OR CHRONICALLY PSYCHO-SOMATICALLY ILL UNLESS THE ILLNESS
HAS SURVIVAL VALUE.
This does not mean that the individual has a power of choice analytically. It does mean
that the reactive mind, working quietly and hitherto hidden so well, chooses, on identity
computation, physical and mental conditions to match any circumstance even remotely similar
to any concept in the engram bank.
There is such a thing as necessity level. This rises and keys-out engrams and can key
out the control of the reactive mind itself. Necessity level often rises. The individual can force it
to rise analytically whether or not actual cause exists. A person may have no engram about
going to the electric chair for murder and yet have an engram about murdering people.
Necessity level rises and analytically overwhelms all impulse to kill for the analyzer knows all
about electric chairs. When the necessity level cannot rise, then one is dealing with a low
dynamic individual. An artist, terribly aberrated about his work through the kind efforts of
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obligingly caustic critics, can yet boost himself by his necessity bootstraps to do another piece
of work and damn the aunt who said he gave her too many chins in her portrait and ripped the
work to shreds or damn the critics who said he was too new and his work too swift. Necessity
level can soar above the reactive mind by, as the marine sergeant said, “Sheer guts.” Given too
many current restimulators, used too hard by life, an individual, caught in the dwindling spiral
of reactivated engrams, may come at last to a point where he cannot longer remain well. If this
is his first serious sag and if the sag is deep, a psycho-somatic illness will appear and become
more or less chronic and, this is important, it will stem directly from a sympathy engram.
All psycho-somatic ills carry with them, if less obvious, aberrative commands which
mean that a person suffering from psycho-somatic illness, whether he relishes the idea or not,
is also suffering from the aberration which is part of the same engram.
If the auditor wants to find the real holders, the real reasons his case appears to resist
getting well, the real aberrative factors and illnesses, he will look to the ally or allies, for any
case may have many. He will exhaust from them the painful emotion of loss or denial and
backtrack immediately to find the underlying engrams.
Remember too that the reactive mind is not bright enough to realize that two sides of the
same person are the same person. Hence we can have Mother-the-white-angel and Mother-the-howling-
harridan. As the white angel she is implicitly followed, as the harridan she is negated
against. Father may be Father-the-beneficent and Father-the-baby- killer. And so with all allies.
But only the pure, the absolute, the never changing ally who, resolute and firm, stayed the cold
sharp hand of death and placed tenderly in the expiring hand of the wistful child the strong and
flaring torch of life (or at least said, “Poor baby, you feel so bad; please don’t cry,”) is the
model, the paragon, the gold-footed idol with free access to the gods. (This was grandpop: he
drank too much and he cheated at cards, but the reactive mind doesn’t see it that way because
grandpop hauled baby through pneumonia and was darned sure baby got well: good acts if he
hadn’t been so melodramatic about it and if he hadn’t talked so much while the poor kid was
“unconscious.”)
Question the patient adroitly about Father and Mother: if he isn’t much disturbed by
their deaths (if they are dead) or if he is simply careless of them or if he bares his teeth, they are
antagonists; the allies are elsewhere. If the mother and father are indifferently or angrily or
propitiatively regarded, be very sure then, that the patient had a rough time of it between
conception and birth and later and be sure, if this is the case, that there will be allies in plenty
for the child will have sought them out in every scrape or injury. But you will not find the
allies, usually, by mere questions. The reactive mind considers them to be pure gold even if the
engrams in which they appear have somatics enough to wreck a person for life. It hides allies.
The auditor has to look for them through discharging painful emotion. The death, departure or
denial by an ally is a certain painful emotion engram. One way or another, working at it from
later painful emotion or earlier physically painful engrams, the ally will eventually uncover and
can be entered as memory in the standard banks and erased as illness out of the engram bank.
The solution of chronic psycho-somatic ills lies largely in the field of sympathy
engrams. These will not erase early, however, for they are the inner bastion behind which the
reactive mind crouches and observes the storming of the outer defenses by antagonists. The
painful emotion of ally losses masks, at times, not only allies but antagonists as well. The
sympathy engram is not the only source of psycho-somatic illness by far, but it is the source of
the chronic psycho-somatic ill.
By the way, nothing in this dissertation about allies should be construed to mean that
one should not show love to a child. Observers in the past have jumped at questionable
conclusions when they felt that demonstrated affection aberrates a child. Lack of affection may
kill him, but the reverse is not true. The only way an ally can aberrate a child is by talking to
and sympathizing with a child who is very ill or “unconscious” from injury. If he does this he
alloys the child’s personality with his own, creates an eventual possibility of psycho-somatic
illness and aberration and may generally disable the child for life (except for dianetics, of
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course). Love a child best and do for him best when he is well. Do anything you please with
him when he is well, say what you please. When he is sick or hurt, it is best, as the bosun
said, “Patch him up and keep God-damned quiet!”
TOKENS
The tale of the magic amulet, the lucky talisman, the belief in the charm and the long
catalogue of fetishes, the objects and mannerisms which one keeps as sakes are the “dearly
beloveds” of the reactive mind.
There is nothing wrong with a man keeping llamas in the parlor or wearing purple and
green suspenders or rubbing fire plugs for luck, nor is there anything wrong with sighing over
a stolen lady’s slipper or smoking Pittsburgh stogies. Any Rights of Man should provide for
such eccentricities. But the auditor can use this data to detect vital information.
In dianetics, the term token is defined to embrace the objects and habits which an
individual or society keeps by not knowing they are extensions of an ally.
By identity thought there are associative restimulators for every restimulator in the
environment -- these things connected with the restimulator. Being blank on the subject, the
analytical mind, apprised by physical reaction that a restimulator of something is nearby, then
picks up the associative restimulator but does not select the actual restimulator. (In Book II, the
young man’s signal to remove his coat was a touch of the tie: he did not cite the tie in his
complaint, the nearest he came to it was the person and clothing of the hypnotic operator.
These were associative restimulators.)
A restimulator for a contra-survival engram might be an electric light; the aberree looks
to the shade, the pull chain, the room or the person under the light to be a source of annoyance,
and not only does he not know that a restimulator is present but supposes that the associated
objects have some evil in themselves.
The associative restimulator for a contra-survival engram needs no name other than that,
associative restimulator. The pain is the thing, the things associated in any way with the thing
are the thing, are other things, etc. is the reactive equation which fills the world of the aberree
full of fear and fills him full of anxiety. Leave a child in a place or a room where he has been
unhappy and he may become ill, for he is confronted with some restimulator and he can at best
explain, like the adult, his fear in terms of things not rationally connected to the restimulator.
This is the mechanism of engramic restimulation.
It is mostly terribly uncomfortable to any aberree who, try as he might, cannot say why
he does not like some person or object or locale and who cannot connect any of the three with
the actual item which is the restimulator and does not know he has an engram about it. This
method of detecting engrams leads nowhere quickly since one cannot select objects, persons or
locales and know they are restimulators. They may be only associative restimulators to the
actual restimulator item in the environment. (Words contained in engrams, by the way, and any
other precise restimulator can “push-button” the aberree into action or apathy if they are used
upon him. In words it has to be the exact word; for instance painted will not do when painter is
in the engram. What is painted, however, may be an associative restimulator and the aberree
may declare he does not like it; that he does not like it does not mean that it will “push his
buttons” and made him cough or sigh or get angry or get sick or whatever the engram
containing the word dictates he should do.)
The token is a very special kind of restimulator. While the auditor may not find much
use for the associative restimulator as applied to contra-survival engrams, he can employ the
token as a means of detection to locate allies.
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The token is any object, practice or mannerism which one or more allies used. By
identity thought the ally is survival; anything the ally used or did is, therefore, survival. The
valence of the ally is that one most frequently employed by the aberree. While the clear can shift
himself into valences he imagines or beholds at will and convenience and out of them at will
and can stabilize in his own at will, the aberree skids around into valences without his
knowledge or consent and is most likely to be in any valence but his own. The person who
seems to be a different person every time he is met or a different person to each person he
meets, with special valences manifesting here and others manifesting there, is shifting into
various winning valences; interfered with in his shifts, he goes into secondary valences; if
forced into his own valence he becomes ill. It is understood, of course, that all valences
manifest something of himself.
Shifting into ally valences is the fundamental practice of the aberree. He will feel most
at ease when his own valence is alloyed to some degree with an ally valence. So long as the ally
or the pseudo-ally is not available, the aberree reminds himself of the ally valence with tokens.
These tokens are the things the ally possessed, practiced or did.
An aberree will often inextricably associate himself with a pseudo-ally, as in marriage,
and then make the astonished discovery that he is not partnered with the optimum ally conduct.
(Mother was an ally, Mother baked bread; wife is pseudo-Mother though neither she nor he
knows it; wife does not bake bread: Mother frowned on lipstick, wife wears lipstick; Mother
gave him his way, wife has a bossy attitude; wife is pseudo-Mother because she has similar
voice tones only.) The aberree then reactively and unknowingly attempts to coax wife or
partner into the ally valence by assuming that the moment of the sympathy engram is present
time -- a mechanical shift caused only by the restimulation of the sympathy engram because of
voice tones or some such thing -- and proceeds to manifest the ghost of the engram illness or
injury or operation as a psycho-somatic sickness. The computation of the reactive mind is
simple -- just like Simple Simon -- one forces the ally into being by manifesting the somatic
with which the ally sympathized. This can also be an effort to turn a partner in which the
reactive mind thinks it has discovered an ambivalent friend-enemy into the sympathy valence.
Wife is cruel.
Mother was cruel until the injury, then she was nice. Manifest the injury as a chronic
psycho-somatic illness and wife will be nice. Actually wife isn’t nicer, so the computation gets
stronger, the illness gets stronger, and down into the dizzy dwindling spiral we go. The
psycho-somatic illness is also a denial of dangerousness, a plea of helplessness -- a shade of
opossum playing, fear paralysis: “I’m no menace to you. I’m sick!”
The aberree goes into his own valence of the time of the sympathy engram in his bid for
sympathy and his denial of his own dangerousness. The valence of himself, of course, is
complicated by the age-tab and somatic of the engram in which he was immature and not well.
The psycho-somatic illness is, as well, a token, which is to say it is a reminder of a time
when he once had love and care and was told so. He needs it about as much as he needs to be
atom bombed, of course, but this is good, solid reactive mind “survival” and the reactive mind
is going to make it so he can survive if it kills him.
This is all mechanical and is actually merely restimulation of an engram, but it is better
understood as a low order computation.
In the absence of an ally, and even in the presence of the ally, he uses reactive mimicry.
Conscious mimicry is a wonderful way to learn. Reactive mimicry is most alloying to the
personality. Reactively, he once had an ally and imitates the ally. Consciously he may not even
recall the ally or the habits of the ally.
The ally, remember, is somebody who has entered the interior world of the mind when
the analyzer was shut down by illness or injury or an operation and gave forth sympathy or
protection. The ally is part of the sympathy engram. If a child had grandparents he liked and
was lucky enough not to be ill around them or be talked to by them in sympathetic terms when
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he was ill or injured, the grandparents would still be much loved. In dianetics an ally is only
some one who has offered sympathy or protection in an engram. We don’t have to have
engrams to be loved or to love: quite the contrary, one is better loved and loves more without
engrams.
The token applies, dianetically, only to the ally and is an object, practice or mannerism
similar to an object, practice or mannerism of the ally.
The ally smoked Pittsburgh stogies, so the aberree may smoke Pittsburgh stogies no
matter what they do to his throat or his wife. The ally wore bowlers, the lady aberree dotes on
riding habits but has never ridden a horse. The ally knitted, the aberree specializes in wearing
knit things or a lady at least makes a pretense of knitting and sometimes wonders why she ever
took it up, she is so bad at it. The ally used profanity, the aberree uses the same profanity. The
ally wipes his nose on his sleeve and picks his nose, the aberree wipes his nose on a dinner
jacket and fiddles with his nostrils.
The token may be a reminder of pure ally or it may be a reminder of the friend side of
an ambivalent friend-enemy. And it may be a winning valence that was also ambivalent toward
the aberree. The token is never an associative restimulator in the meaning that it reminds of
some antagonist, for associative restimulators are abhorred.
The most chronic token, the most constant habit, practice or mannerism of the pre-clear
is a direct arrow to the pure ally. And the pure ally is the one the reactive mind will guard to its
highest level of the beset donjon keep. And that is the target of the auditor. He may have to
relieve the majority of the engram bank before he can erase the engram which is most likely to
aberrate the individual, to saddle him with strange practices and to make him chronically ill.
Observe your pre-clear and see what he does and says that are strange to his
personality, things he does but does not much seem to enjoy. See what he uses and what his
mannerisms are. Amongst this collection you may, by asking discreet questions, jog an ally
into his memory which he had forgotten and so jogging, reach swiftly toward the sympathy
engram in which that ally is contained or reach toward, for an emotional discharge, the painful
emotion engram of the loss of that ally, his illness or incidents concerning him.
Another but special token is that which stems from a “die if you don’t” command.
Fathers, for instance, suspicious of paternity, sometimes claim while trouncing or upsetting
mothers that they will kill the child if it isn’t just like Father. This is a very unhappy type of
token to say nothing of being, usually, a bad engram; it can go to the extent of remodeling
structure, of making noses long or hair absent; it may compel an aberree into a profession he
does not admire and all out of the engramic command that he must be like the parent. As this
type of command is usually given before birth it is often addressed, unknowingly, to a girl,
fathers not being gifted ordinarily with clairvoyance; in such a case it will bring about a most
remarkable structural change in a woman and form some unusual mannerisms, “ambitions”
(like the dog that gets whipped if he doesn’t fetch the duck) and some habits which, to say the
least, are astonishing. Father, post-birth, to accomplish the reactivation of such an engram,
must be quite ambivalent so that the friend-enemy compute comes into being. Not to be like
father is to die: to force father into his sympathy engram self the reactive mind must manifest
the token of illness. Token and likeness is the answer to such a computation. And recall, all
such computations are not simple but are made further complex by the addition of dozens of
other engramic computations.
The friend-enemy is rather easy to find as an enemy, not too hard to find as a friend.
Standard technique with its repeater and return et al. would in themselves at last locate any
engram and erase the bank so that it properly refiles. The use of the token facilitates the
auditing.
In the case of the pure ally, the champion of the right, standard technique also at last
arrives. But here how smooth the use of the token sometimes makes the road! For the token
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may be as alarmingly strange as an elephant in a bird cage. It takes a real ally to keep some of
these odd habits around.
Measure the pre-clear against his environment and education and his society and
profession. See what doesn’t seem to belong amid the things he uses, the objects he adores
and the mannerisms his friends find so strange. Then find out if he or the spouse knew of
anyone who did those things or liked those things.
Do not suppose from all this that our clear has jettisoned all strange mannerisms. Self-determinism
is individuality in the extreme; personality is inherent and revealed by clearing,
looms up high above the aberree. The engrams compress a man and make him small and afraid.
Released his power comes into play. The sympathy engram is to a man like a crutch when he
has two sturdy legs. But oh, the pre-clear sobs where he loses old Uncle Goston, whose habit
of spitting on the floor, as transplanted, so astonished our pre-clear’s friends and business
associates. But the grief is brief, usually the half-hour it takes to run the sympathy engram out.
Suddenly the pre-clear recalls Uncle Goston, recalls a thousand things Uncle Goston and he
used to do, for the engram had Uncle Goston occluded and amongst those missing from the
sight of “I.” Although it might have said in the engram, “All right, there, there, there, Billy. I’ll
take care of you. Don’t thrash around so. You’ll be all right.
There, there, there. Poor little fellow. Poor little fellow. What a terrible rash you’ve
got. How feverish. There, there, there, Billy. You’ll be all right as long as I am here. I’ll take
care of my Billy. Go to sleep now. Go to sleep and forget it.” And Billy was all the time
“unconscious” and never “knew” about it. Afterwards he got a partner who looked like Uncle
Goston (but happened to be a fool), and when bankrupt somehow developed a rash and a
chronic cough and got very “feverish” about his business affairs. He took to spitting on the
floor no matter where he was; and his health got worse and he got worse: but if you had asked
him about any uncles before he went into therapy, he would have been very vague. “Give me a
flash reply,” says the auditor. “Who used to spit on the floor? “Uncle Goston,” answers the
pre-clear. “Gosh, that’s funny (hawk, spit), I hadn’t thought of him for years. He was never
around much, though (not more than ten years constantly, the auditor may discover). Don’t
suppose he’s important. Let’s take up Mrs. Swishback, that teacher I had -- “ “Let’s return
now to the time Uncle Goston helped you,” says the auditor, “The somatic strip will now go
back to the time your Uncle Goston helped you.” “I feel like my skin’s on fire!” complains the
pre-clear. “This must be -- hey, it’s my allergy! But I don’t see anybody. I don’t -- Wait, I get
an impression of somebody. Somebody -- Why, it’s Uncle Goston!” And he runs it and the
rash goes away. But maybe the auditor had to get a hundred engrams before he got this one.
And then the pre-clear suddenly remembers about him and Uncle Goston and the time -- but get
on with therapy.
Complete remembering seems to be a synonym for complete sanity. But don’t suppose
that just because a clear gets rid of his Uncle Gostons and his habit of spitting on the floor that
he will not now indulge in any eccentricity. The difference is, he is not compelled into
eccentricity without his consent. Good Lord, what a cleared mind can think up to keep itself
from being bored!
WHAT TO DO IF A CASE STOPS PROGRESSING
Even in the easiest cases there will come times when progress seems to stop. Here is a
list of possibilities of why:
1. The pre-clear is not moving on the track despite appearances, but is being subject to one
of the five types of commands which can inhibit his free motion or information. The
commonest of these is a holder and the pre-clear may be found to be in an engram and
in a strange valence.
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2. There is an emotional or pain shut-off. These can always be detected even at the
beginning of a case. The patient’s muscles will tremble or twitch when he is in an
engram but he will not feel the somatic: this is inevitably a pain shut-off. Out of therapy
the patient may be very tense, his neck muscles in particular may be tight: this is often
an emotional shut-off. Either of these conditions can be observed in many aberrees
before beginning therapy. If they appear while therapy is in progress, look for pain or
emotional shut-offs.
3. There is an exaggerator of emotion and a pain shut-off so that the patient weeps over
anything but wriggles and twists when asked to approach pain. He is feeling emotion
without feeling the pain.
4. There is an emotional charge in some area which has not been discharged but which is
ready to discharge. Or, conversely, if you have been trying to get an emotional
discharge in a late painful emotion engram and have had no success, there is a feeling
shut-off early in the prenatal area.
5. The Auditor’s Code has been broken. Change auditors or reduce the moments when the
code was broken.
6. There is an emotional upset in the patient’s life current with therapy. Question him
closely and remove the charge, if possible, of the emotional upset as an engram.
7. The auditor has missed an important point in this book. Study it.
IF A CASE “REFUSES” TO GET WELL
It has long been a popular idea, if an erroneous fact, that people desire to retain their
neuroses. In any case which “resists” therapy, you may be certain that the engrams are
resisting, not the patient; do not, therefore, attack the patient but the engrams.
There are many computations which give the appearance of resistance. The commonest
of these is the ally computation, which derives from engrams containing allies who seem to
plead that the patient is not to rid himself of anything. An ordinary situation is one in which
some relative or friend of the mother’s is advising the mother against aborting the child. The
ally is pleading, “Do not get rid of it!” The pre-clear knows this person to be a friend of his of
the highest order. The pre-clear may interpret this to mean that he is not to get rid of his
engrams.
Another computation is the stupidity computation, wherein the pre-clear begins to
believe he will be stupid or lacking a mind if he gives up engrams. This stems, for example,
from the mother saying she will lose her mind if she loses the child: she calls the child “it.” A
whole chain of these may appear in a case, giving the pre-clear the idea that if he parts with any
engrams, he will lose his mind. This is the primary reason why past schools believed that the
mind was composed of neuroses instead of an inherent personality. The engrams, even though
unknown, appeared very valuable, which they are not -- none of them.
Yet another computation is one of secrecy. It seems to the pre-clear that his life depends
upon holding some secret. This is common in a case where the mother has had a lover. Mother
and the lover both enjoin secrecy. The pre-clear, obeying engramic commands, believes that he
has much to lose if he tells this secret even though those who enjoined it were not even aware
that he was present, or if they knew, that he was “listening.” One secrecy computation stems
from the mother’s fearing to tell the father that she is pregnant: if the mother is an ally of the
child, then the child will be extremely tenacious of this type of engram.
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All cases have one or more computations which inhibit a delivery of engrams. Some
have all the above and more. This is no great worry to the auditor for, by repeater technique,
he can open the engram bank.
DRUGS
The so-called hypnotics have no great use in dianetics except, on occasion, when a
patient is psychotic and narco-synthesis is employed. By hypnotic is meant such preparations
as phenobarbital, hyacine, opium and so on. These sleep-producing drugs are undesirable save
only as a sedative and would be administered as sedatives by a medical doctor. Any patient
who needs a sedative already has a medical doctor whose business it is. The auditor should
not, then, concern himself with hypnotics or anything producing sleep. Some pre-clears will
beg to be given sleeping drugs to “facilitate therapy” but any such drug is an anesthetic and
shuts down somatics, inhibiting therapy. Further, none but the insane should be worked in
amnesia trance, particularly a drug trance, for the work is longer than necessary and the results
slow, as elsewhere explained. Dianetics wakes people up; it does not try to drug them or
hypnotize them. Hence, the hypnotic drug is worthless to the auditor.
Patients who wish to be knocked over the head with lead pipes or otherwise put into a
deep trance should not be allowed to have their way even when they humorously present their
own lead pipes.
The trick is to put “I” in contact with the file clerk. All hypnotics work to shut-down
“I.” While the file clerk can be reached and sonic and visio are available and even while, with
much labor, a clearing can be so effected, even the most “hopeless” case is better worked in
contact; the work is faster, more satisfactory and less troublesome.
When one discovers the science of mind, he inevitably discovers numerous other things
not properly in his province. Amongst these is the confusion which has unwittingly existed
about hypnotics. Those things labeled “hypnotics” as named above are not hypnotics at all but
anesthetics. And those things labeled anesthetics are not anesthetics but hypnotics. This will
become brilliantly clear to the auditor when he finds himself tangling with his first “anesthetic”
nitrous oxide engram in some pre-clear. Perhaps there will have been another engram wherein
morphine was administered for days and even weeks, leaving the patient in a stupor which, by
the definition “hypnotic” should have been a trance: the aberrative material will be there but it
will be found to be slight -- compared to a chloroform or nitrous oxide engram.
Ether, chloroform and nitrous oxide, the “anesthetics,” place the patient in a deep
hypnotic trance: the reactive bank is wide open and all reception is sharp, clear and aberrative in
the extreme. Of the three, nitrous oxide is easily the worst, being no anesthetic which would
dull pain at all but a first class hypnotic. In nitrous oxide the pain is filed and the content is filed
with high and brilliant fidelity. Some years ago some investigator wondered if nitrous oxide did
not make the brain decay. Fortunately brains do not decay that easily; but nitrous oxide does
bring into being particularly severe engrams. The serious late-life engrams which the auditor
will encounter may include, at the list’s top, a nitrous oxide dental or surgical or obstetrical
engram. Nitrous oxide engrams are particularly bad when they involve exodontistry; they often
form the most severe late-life engram. Aside from the fact that all exodontists have in the past
talked too much and have offices which are far too noisy with street sounds, running water and
flapping drill belts, nitrous oxide is not at all anesthetic and sharpens rather than dulls pain.
In reverse, nitrous oxide makes an excellent hypnotic for institutional therapy. It is far
from the best obtainable from the chemists, that is certain, for some brilliant chemist will
certainly be able to bring out a good gas hypnotic now that dianetics is known and the need of it
in institutions is realized.
There are some drugs which assist reverie, however. The commonest and most easily
obtainable is plain, strong coffee. A cup or two of this occasionally alerts the analyzer enough
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so that it can reach through deeper layers of “unconsciousness.” Benzedrine and other
commercial stimulants have been used with some success, particularly on psychotic patients.
These bring the mind enough awake to permit it to overcome engramic commands. Such
commercial stimulants have the disadvantage of exhausting a Q quantity in the mind.
This Q Quantity has not been much studied. It is as though the brain burns a certain
amount of Q when it is exhausting engrams. For instance, therapy every day may bring results
more rapidly but it will also bring some stale sessions. Therapy every two or three days
produces the best results as observed. (Therapy once a week permits the engrams to sag and
slows a case, one week being too long.) Benzedrine burns up Q. After a few sessions with
benzedrine the current stock of Q is exhausted and the work has been observed to deteriorate
either until a higher dosage was administered -- and there is a close limit to that -- or until more
Q was manufactured.
Here, with all this, must be included an important and vital fact. It should be on a page
by itself and underscored. All patients in therapy should be given a dosage of vitamin B1 orally
or by injection at the minimum of 10 mg. per day. Reducing engrams exhausts Q which seems
to depend in some measure on B1. You can be absolutely certain of nightmares in a patient who
is not taking his B1. Taking liberal doses of that, he will have no nightmares. DT’s are
probably caused by a similar exhaustion of Q Quantity. DT’s are best treated by B1 and
dianetics. Something like DT’s on a very minor scale have been observed to develop in
occasional patients who were negligent about their B1. With it, in therapy, they thrive.
Alcohol is rarely an assist to the auditor. In fact, alcohol is rarely an assist to anyone. A
depressant, classifiable at best as a poison, alcohol has the single virtue of being highly taxable.
All alcoholics are alcoholic because of their engrams. All alcoholics, unless they have injured
their brains -- which case is cited only because it is possible, not because research in dianetics
demonstrated any real evidence of it -- can be released. Alcoholism is engramic. It has become,
in some very understandable way, a class of contagious aberration whereby the reactive mind
confuses alcohol and “being a good sport” or “having fun” or “forget your troubles.” Some of
these things can also be obtained by strychnine and cyanide. Alcohol has its uses: one can put
specimens of frogs and such in it: one can clean the germs off needles with it: it burns well in
rockets. But one would not consider preserving his stomach in a glass jar and, unless insane,
does not think of himself as a needle. While some drunks think they act like rockets, few have
been observed to reach an altitude of more than the floor. It is not only a poor stimulant-depressant,
it is also an hypnotic in the finest sense: what is done to a drunk becomes an
engram. The chronic alcoholic is physically and mentally ill. Dianetics can clear him or even
merely release him without too much trouble for alcohol is apparently not physiological in its
addictive effect. With the whole range of chemistry to choose stimulants and depressants from,
why the government chooses a superiorly aberrative and inferiorly stimulative compound to
legalize is a problem for the better mathematicians, possibly these who deal exclusively in tax
income problems. Opium is less harmful, marijuana is not only less physically harmful but also
better in the action of keeping a neurotic producing, phenobarbital does not dull the senses
nearly as much and produces less after effect, ammonium chloride and a host of other
stimulants are more productive of results and hardly less severe on the anatomy: but no, the
engrams, contaging unpleasantly along from the first crude brew which made one of our
ancestors drunk, decree that alcohol is the only thing which is to be drunk if a person wants to
“forget it all” and “have a good time.” There is really nothing wrong with alcohol save that it
depends mainly on engrams and other advertising for its effect and is otherwise remarkably
inferior in performance: that it makes such aberrative engrams is probably its main claim to
fame and infame. Making one drug immoral and another one taxable is a sample of the alcohol
engram in society. However, although it is immensely legal, it is doubtful if the auditor will
find any use for it in therapy.
And speaking of drugs, that three thousand cycle note in your ears came either from a
nitrous oxide engram or mother taking lots of quinine before you were born in the hope that she
would not be a mother, saying the while, “It makes my ears ring so: it just keeps on and on and
on and will not stop!”
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AUTO-CONTROL
Since the beginning of dianetics research eleven years ago, patients have, in the
majority, had some belief that they could run their cases in auto-control.
Not understanding that an auditor is only interested in what has been done to, not done
by a patient, some shyness or imagined guilt often prompts this vain hope that one can
accomplish therapy alone.
It cannot be done. That is a flat statement and it is a scientific fact. The auditor is
necessary for a large number of reasons. He is not there to control or order the pre-clear about,
but he is there to listen, to provide insistence, to compute the trouble the pre-clear is having and
remedy it. The work is done on these equations:
The dynamics of the pre-clear are less than the force in his reactive bank.
The dynamics of the pre-clear plus the dynamics of the auditor are greater than the force
in the pre-clear’s reactive bank.
The analytical mind of the pre-clear is shut down whenever he reaches an engram and
he is then unable to pursue it and recount it enough times to discharge it without auditor
assistance.
The analytical mind of the pre-clear plus the analytical mind of the auditor can discover
engrams and recount them.
(There is another equation, not elsewhere mentioned, but germane to the auditor’s code,
which demonstrates mathematically the necessity of that code:
The force of the pre-clear’s engram bank plus the force of the auditor’s analytical mind
is greater than the analytical mind and the dynamics of the pre-clear. This explains the
necessity of never attacking the pre-clear personally. It also explains the behavior of the aberree
under attack in usual life and why he grows angry and apathetic, for this equation overwhelms
his analyzer.)
These equations demonstrate actual natural laws.
Auto-control finds the pre-clear attempting to attack something which has never been
overcome by his analyzer although his analyzer has never been trying, interiorly, to do
anything else but attack that bank so long as the analyzer would operate. The fact that the pre-clear’s
analyzer shuts down whenever he comes into an area of “unconsciousness” was why
the engrams could take him over and use him as a puppet when they were restimulated -- they
simply shut down the analyzer.
Many efforts by many patients have been made to put dianetics on an auto-control level.
They have all failed and thus far it is believed to be utterly and completely impossible. The pre-clear
in auto-control reverie may be able to reach some locks: he can certainly reach pleasant
experiences and achieve data recall by return: but he cannot attack his own engrams without a
standard auditor-pre-clear arrangement.
Aside from dianetic reverie, some pre-clears have been foolish enough to attempt auto-hypnosis
and thus reach their engrams. Hypnotism in any form is unwarranted in dianetics.
Auto-hypnosis used in dianetics is probably as close to fruitless masochism as one can get. If a
patient places himself in auto-hypnosis and regresses himself in an effort to reach illness or
birth or prenatals, the only thing he will get is ill. Of course, people will try. None are ever
convinced until they have tried once they begin to agitate about auto-control. But be sure to
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have a friend and this book handy so that he can audit away the headaches and such that
suddenly turn on.
Dianetic reverie, which means with an auditor present, is not dangerous or severe.
Auto-control is often very uncomfortable and often fruitless. It should not be attempted.
The clear alone can auto-control his whole time track back to conception and does when
he wants specific data from anywhere in his life. But he is clear.
ORGANIC MENTAL ALTERATIONS
There are several things which can happen to the nervous system including the brain
which can cause structural change. These are called in dianetics, organic mental alterations.
They are not called “organic neuroses,” or “organic psychoses” because the alteration of
structure does not necessarily produce aberrations. There has been a confusion in the past
between behavior caused by organic differences and behavior caused by engrams: this
confusion came about because the engram bank and the reactive mind were not known.
Any human being with an organic mental alteration also has engrams. The behavior
dictated by the engrams and the action caused by alteration are different things. Engrams carry
dramatizations, delusions, tantrums and various inefficiencies with them. Alterations establish
inabilities to think or perceive or record or recall. For instance the radio set may have new
filters and circuits added to it which change and vary its performance and reduce it from
optimum; these would be engrams: the radio set might have original tubes or circuits deleted
from it or it might have some of the wires crossed; this would be organic mental alteration.
The sources of organic mental alteration are as follows:
1. Variation of the blueprint of structure by reason of a changed gene pattern. Some parts
of the body would grow too much or too little to establish any alteration of structure.
This is usually so gross a change that it is obvious. The feeble-minded and so on may
suffer either from engrams or an altered blueprint, but usually both.
2. Alteration of the nervous system by disease or growths which divides into two classes:
(a) Disease destruction as in paresis. (b) Additional construction as in the case of
tumors.
3. Alteration of the nervous system by drugs or poisons.
4. Alteration by physical disorder as in the case of a “paralytic stroke” wherein certain
tissues are inhibited or destroyed.
5. Physical change in structure due to injury as in the case of a head wound.
6. Alteration of structure by surgery as a necessity to remedy injury or disease.
7. Iatrogenic alterations (caused by doctors) undertaken under a misapprehension of brain
function. These can be divided into two classes: (a) Surgical, to include such things as
the trans-orbital leukotomy, pre-frontal lobotomy, topectomy and so forth. (b) Shock
“therapies” of all kinds including electric shock, insulin shock, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.etc.etc.
The first six sources of organic mental alteration are much less common than has been
supposed. The body is an extremely hardy mechanism and its repair facilities are enormous. If
an individual can be made to speak or follow orders at all, it is conceivable that the techniques
of dianetics can be applied to reduce the engrams in the engram bank, bringing about
considerable improvement in the condition and mental ability of the individual. When these
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various sources are so severe that they inhibit any use of therapy, and when it is certain that no
recourse to therapy is possible and that it is utterly impossible to reach the engram bank by
standard technique, hypnotism or drugs, such cases can be considered beyond help of
dianetics.
Category 7 presents another problem. Here we have selective experimentation at work
and it would be flatly impossible to conceive, without months of study of their experimental
subjects, how many brands and varieties of operation have been performed and how many odd
and bizarre shocks have been used.
All iatrogenic alterations of the nervous system can be considered under the heading of
“reduced ability,” in other words, inability. In each case something has been done to reduce the
ability of the individual to perceive, record, recall or think. Any of these complicate a case for
dianetics, but they do not inevitably bar dianetics from working.
In shock cases, such as electric shock, tissue may have been destroyed and the memory
banks may in some way have been scrambled, the time track may be altered and other
conditions may exist.
In all such iatrogenic alterations, the results of dianetics must be considered equivocal.
BUT IN ALL SUCH CASES, PARTICULARLY THOSE OF ELECTRIC SHOCK,
DIANETICS SHOULD BE USED IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY IN AN EFFORT TO
IMPROVE THE PATIENT.
All shocks and operations should be picked up for what they are -- engrams.
NO PERSON WHO CAN PERFORM ROUTINE TASKS OR WHOSE ATTENTION
CAN BE ATTRACTED AND FIXED SHOULD FEEL DESPAIR OR BE CONSIDERED
HOPELESS.
Any person who has been subjected to such treatment may not be able to reach optimum
mental efficiency but he may be able to reach a level of rationality even yet in excess of the
current normal. The thing to do is try. In spite of what has happened or what has been done, in
the large majority of cases there may be a chance of excellent recovery.
ORGANIC DERANGEMENT
A standard class of prenatal engrams has as its content the worry of the parents that the
child will be feeble-minded if not now aborted in earnest. This adds an emotional overload to
such engrams and it adds, as importantly, an aberrative condition in the now grown patient that
he is “not right,” “all wrong,” “feeble-minded,” and so forth. The difficulty of aborting the
child is nearly always underestimated: the means used are often novel or bizarre: the worry
because the child has not come out of the womb after the abortion attempt is acute, and the
concern that he is now damaged beyond repair all combine to make severely aberrative engrams
and, because of their content, engrams which are difficult to reach.
The aberrative quality of the “feeble-minded” species of remark is of course, high. The
worry that the child may be born blind or deaf or otherwise incapacitated is common. The
former class of engramic remarks can bring about actual feeble-mindedness; the latter concern
over blindness and so on bring about, at best, impaired visio and sonic recall.
The shut-off of the recalls is occasioned as well by an engramic belief in the society at
large that the unborn child is blind, unfeeling and not alive. This belief is introduced into AA
(attempted abortion) engrams by people’s self-justification remarks while attempting an
abortion: “Well, he can’t see, feel or hear anyway.” Or, “It doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s
blind, deaf and dumb. It’s a sort of growth. It isn’t human.”
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The greater part of all sonic and visio recall shut-off has as its source the remarks made
at such times or by painful emotion and other engramic data. Hundreds of hours of therapy
may pass before these recalls turn on.
The bulk of all shut-offs will turn on in the course of therapy. There are thousands of
engramic remarks and emotional situations which will deny the pre-clear his recall and that
recall can be expected ordinarily to restore.
A very low dynamic patient (for people have various native strengths of the dynamic)
may have recalls shut-off rather easily. A high dynamic patient would require much more
aberration before the recalls are closed down.
These recalls can be turned on simply by running out the physically painful and painful
emotion engrams.
It must not pass unremarked, however, that the abortion attempts actually can, if rarely,
derange the brain and nervous mechanisms beyond the foetal ability to repair. The result of this
is actual, physiological disability.
Children and adults now classified as feeble-minded may then be separated into two
groups: the actual, physiological class and the aberrated class. Further, recall shut-offs must be
classified into two classes as well, regardless of the dynamic and intelligence of the individual:
those occasioned by brain damage received during an attempted abortion and those which are
solely aberrational and derived from engramic commands and emotion.
The ability of the foetus to repair damage is phenomenal. Brain damage can ordinarily
be repaired perfectly regardless of how many foreign substances were introduced into it. Just
because the brain was touched in an attempted abortion is no reason to suppose that the recall
shut-off has this as a source, for this is the rarer of the two causes.
It is understood that this is being read by many with recall shut-offs and it is understood
that it may well produce a considerable upset. But remember this, sonic and visio recall are not
vital to a nearly full release. This comment about organic damage does not mean that a release
cannot be effected which will leave the person more competent and happier, for this can always
be done regardless of the recalls. And remember this, recalls almost always turn on even if it
takes five hundred hours or more. This condition is only remarked because it will be found in
some few cases.
The “tests” and “experiments” with human brain vivisection in institutions are not,
unfortunately, valid. For all the pain and trouble and destruction caused by these
“experiments,” they were done without a proper knowledge of aberration and mental
derangement. None of such data is of any value beyond showing that the brain can be cut in
various ways without entirely killing the man. For the patients used responded both to
engramic disorder and the physical disorder caused by the psychiatrist, and there is no way to
differentiate between these after the operation except by dianetics. Conclusions drawn from this
data are then invalid conclusions, for the response of the patient after the operation might have
stemmed from a number of sources: engramic, the engram of the operation itself, attempted
abortion damage early in life, brain disability on account of the operation and so forth. Hence,
draw no conclusions that impairment of conceptual thinking, for instance, results only when a
part of the brain is removed, that recall is shut off only when the brain is vivisected and so on.
From a scientific standpoint no such “findings” were conclusive of anything except that the
brain can be damaged late in life without entirely killing a man and that surgery of any kind
often brings about a mental change in the patient. True, it may have been discovered that this
or that portion of the switchboard called the brain, when removed, removed also some ability to
perform.
DIANETIC FIRST AID
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It will be of interest to those associated with emergency hospital work particularly that
the healing and recovery of any patient can be enormously benefited and the term of illness
shortened by removing the engram occasioned at the moment of injury.
The accident case sometimes dies, in a few days, from shock, or does not recover and
will not heal swiftly. In any injury -- a burn, cut, a bruise of whatever kind -- a trauma lingers
in the injured area. The moment of the injury created an engram. This engram inhibits the
release of the trauma. The fact that the injured part still hurts is an organic restimulator which
depresses the ability of the patient to recover.
Using reverie or merely working the patient with his eyes closed, and working the
patient as soon after the injury as possible, the doctor, nurse or relative can return the injured
person to the moment when the injury was received and usually recover and exhaust the
incident as a usual engram. Once the engram of the injury is reduced, the general mental tone of
the patient improves. Further, the injured area is no longer inhibited from healing.
Some experimental work on this demonstrated that some burns would heal and
disappear in a few hours when the engram which accompanied their reception was removed.
On more serious injuries tests showed definite and unmistakable acceleration of the rate of
healing.
In operations, when anesthetics have been used, dianetics is useful in two ways: (1) as
a preventive measure and (2) as a recovery measure. In the first, no conversation of any kind
should be held around or with the “unconscious” or semi-conscious patient. In the second, the
trauma of the operation itself should be recovered and relieved immediately afterwards.
A PROBLEM IN MUTUAL THERAPY
R and his wife C cleared each other in eight months with dianetics, working four hours
a night four nights a week, each of them auditing the other for two hours of the four. This
mutual arrangement had been complicated by the fact that whereas R was very eager to be
cleared, his wife was quite apathetic about the work: he had managed only after much
persuasion to get the cases started.
He was a high dynamic case with much emotion encysted; she was an apathy case who
entirely neglected her troubles (black panther mechanism). He was troubled with a chronic
ulcer and anxieties about his job; she was troubled with a general allergic condition and a
chronic carelessness in domestic affairs. They were not to any great degree mutually
restimulative, but they had problems about tacit consent, avoiding the subjects which had most
upset them while together, such as a miscarriage she had had and the loss of their home by fire
many years before, as well as other shocks. Further they were faced by R’s intensity on the
one hand and his introversion, which caused him to slight her therapy, and C’s apathy on the
other hand, which at once aided R’s effort to take more time as the pre-clear than she and which
made her less interested in being a good auditor.
Further complication took place because C did not understand the auditor’s code or its
use and on several occasions had become angry and impatient with R when he was in session
and returned, an attitude which tended to force R into an anger valence.
Along this uncertain course therapy had been continuing. R was then informed of tacit
consent and told he had better release some of their mutual painful emotion. He thereafter
addressed the engram of the burning home and suddenly found himself able to audit some early
sympathy engrams of his wife’s which had not heretofore been available. It was discovered
that her allergies stemmed from a father sympathy compute and that R was the pseudo-father.
This resulted in a marked improvement in C’s case. She began to suffer less from her allergies
and a chronic heart pain she had had so long that she no longer heeded it vanished as well. She
became interested in being a good auditor and studied the subject. She became slightly annoyed
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with R when he demanded more than his share of therapy time. (This increase of interest is
always true of any apathy case which began with neglect of engrams.)
R, however, was much inhibited by her periods of anger and found that he now
operated almost exclusively under auto-control, a condition wherein he decided what should be
run and what should not be run in himself. This auto-control is, of course, useless, since if he
knew about his aberrations and the data in his engrams, they would not be engrams. He,
therefore, started on a period of refusing to display any emotion since she had mocked him
about it, would not follow her directions and was, in short, obeying the engrams which she
had given him when angry with him during past sessions. C was advised to pick up the
moments of anger she had displayed as an auditor during therapy and when these were
reduced, it was found that R worked well again and cooperated.
His ulcer stemmed from an attempted abortion. His father, an extremely aberrated
individual, had sought to abort the baby when it was seven months in the womb. The mother
remonstrated that the baby might be born alive. The father said that if it were alive when born
he would kill it as soon as it came out. He had said, further, that the mother had to hold still
while he operated. On another occasion the father had said that he would lock the mother in a
closet until she decided to abort the child. (This case was much complicated because the mother
had been afraid to tell the father and had pretended not to be pregnant for three months, giving
the husband the belief that the child, seven months along, was actually only four months along.
Therefore, there was much secrecy in the case, much confusion and conflicting data.) This
meant that R had a severe holder in the prenatal area: he was held by the engram which included
a penetration of his stomach. This was the key engram, which is to say other engrams, by the
mechanism of similar somatic and content, had gathered around it to suppress it. This was the
tangle of incidents which C was confronting unknowingly: it had become more tangled by her
anger. R would now cooperate but his time track had wound into a ball around the holder
engram, the key. Two exodontistries for the removal of wisdom teeth with nitrous oxide
anesthesia were also suppressing the prenatals.
C worked for some time trying to get at the late extraction engrams, which contained an
enormous amount of conversation between the dentist and his assistants and R’s mother, who,
unfortunately for his sanity, had accompanied him to the dentist’s office.
R was made intensely uncomfortable by the continual restimulation of engrams which
yet could not be reached. He was no more uncomfortable than he had often been in the past
and his discomfort would have been absent had C understood and followed the auditor’s code.
The case made no progress for several weeks.
C’s therapy was progressing. It was intensely restimulative to R to work upon her and
increase his discomfort, but the more he worked on her the better auditing she did and the more
intelligent she was (her I.Q. went up about fifty points after five weeks of therapy). C desired
to know how she could break the impasses in his case and was informed that she was now
practicing tacit consent, for she had many times been needlessly thoughtless of R long before
therapy was undertaken and she now realized what she had done to him and yet could not bring
herself to face the fact that she was a responsible party to so much of his unhappiness -- she
had quite ordinarily used angry language to him which she well knew would “push-button”
him into doing something or into retreating from a quarrel, which language had been
restimulative to him long before therapy.
C thereupon entered into painful emotion engrams late in R’s life and, by working early
physically painful engrams which said R could “feel nothing” alternately with late engrams
when he was feeling intensely on an emotional plane but could not exhibit it, began to release
the emotion in the case. R then showed steady improvement. Late painful emotion was released
and early prenatals would show to be reduced, at which more late emotion would be visible for
reduction.
232.233
It was suddenly disclosed in the case that the reason R was so easily upset by C lay in
the person of a nurse who had attended R during his tonsillectomy when he was five years of
age. C had some similarity of mannerism to this nurse. This was a sympathy engram, and
when it was released the time track began to straighten out and the abortion engrams could be
more easily contacted.
It so happened that R had been well off his time track most of his life, his memory
occluded, his recall in poor condition. This was found to lie in the hidden key engram, the
abortion attempt wherein his father had vowed to kill him if he came out and had added that the
child could not see, feel or hear anything anyway, engramic material which was demonstrated
by R’s inability to move on his time track.
The moment the key was found -- two hundred and eighty hours of therapy had elapsed
-- R came back on the time track, could move on it, and the erasure of his engrams proceeded
in an orderly fashion.
C had been cleared about two months before R reached the final engram. C’s allergies,
however, disappeared long before her case was cleared completely and R’s ulcer and some
other psycho-somatic difficulties also vanished well before his case was finally cleared.
A PROBLEM IN A RESTIMULATED CASE
G was cleared in ten months of sporadic sessions. His case had the initial diagnosis of
non-sonic, non-visio, pain and emotional shut-off, permanent light trance, permanent
“regression” at the age of three years. This is to say that the instant he went into reverie he was
startled and frightened to find himself in a dental chair, three years old, and having a tooth
pulled, an engram in which he had been situated, unknowingly, about half of his ensuing life.
It had been the partial cause of his chronic tooth decay and his inability to sleep as negation
against the anesthetic. The situation was obvious since he immediately began to wrestle about
and lisp, which condition was instantly remedied by running the engram so that he could come
to present time, which he did.
He had had considerable difficulty in life, was a high dynamic but manifested apathy. It
was discovered after seventy-five hours, at which time release took place, that his wife was
sometimes his pseudo-grandmother and also, by ambivalence, was his pseudo-mother. As his
sympathy computation demanded that he be ill so that his grandmother would stay with him
and as his contra-survival engrams demanded that his mother was only nice to him when he
was ill, the reactive computation added up to the fact that he must be ill continually, which
demand had been obeyed by his body for twenty-three years. All this was recovered and
remedied, of course, only by reducing engrams.
The erasure began to take place at the end of about two hundred hours of therapy and
was proceeding when the case suddenly stopped all progress. For fifty or more hours of
therapy, few engrams could be located, those which were located could not be reduced, no
painful emotion could be reached and whatever engrams were reached and reduced were
located and treated only because the auditor in this case used highly skilled forcing techniques
which are almost never necessary and should not be employed save in psychotic cases. Such
endeavor had not been necessary at the beginning of the case. Something was obviously
wrong.
On close questioning it was discovered that G’s wife was violently opposed to
dianetics, that she never lost any chance of leveling the most scathing attacks against it to G and
particularly when he was in the company of friends. She derided him as being psychotic. She
sought a lawyer to give her a divorce (announcing it after he had entered therapy but actually
having had continual consultation on it with a lawyer for two years past) and generally agitated
and disturbed G to such an extent that he was continually receiving painful emotional engrams
even though he did not display any emotion against her.
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They had a child, nine years of age, a boy. G was very fond of the boy. The child had
had an unusual number of childhood illnesses and suffered from eye trouble and chronic
sinusitis; he was backward in school. The wife was somewhat sharp with the child. Anything
he did made her nervous.
The auditor in the case, on learning the facts about her attitude toward her husband in
general and dianetics in particular, held a conference with her about her husband. She was
found to be unopposed to therapy for herself. Shortly after the conference, G and this woman
had a brief quarrel in which G made the remark that she must be aberrated. She took intense
affront at this and said that he must be the one who was crazy since he was interested in
dianetics. He countered with the fact that of the two he must be the least aberrated since he was
taking steps to do something about it. Further, he pointed out that she must be aberrated or she
would not be as quarrelsome with the child as she was, a fact which definitely indictated that
she must have a block on her second dynamic, sex.
The following day he came home from work and found she had withdrawn the money
from the bank and gone to another town, taking the boy with her. He followed and found her
staying with some of her relatives. She had told them that he beat her and had gone so crazy
that he had to have therapy. The truth of the matter was that he had never touched her brutally
in his life. In this meeting, before witnesses, she began to rave and revile any “system of
psychiatry” which believed in pre-speech memory. He pointed out to her that many schools of
the past had believed in pre-speech memory, that the whole background of psychiatry had long
talked about “memories of the womb” without knowing what they were, and so forth.
Her relatives, seeing him so calm about it, forced her to return home with him. En route
she made a dramatic gesture, although in no way threatened, of committing suicide by leaping
out of the car.
The auditor in the case had a private conversation with her on her return. He had
somewhat belatedly deduced the fact that there was something in her life which she was afraid
her husband would find out and that, confronted with a science which could recover all
memory, she had become wildly emotional about it. She at length admitted under close
questioning, that this was the case, that her husband must never know. She was so disturbed
that the auditor, with her consent, gave her a few hours of therapy. It was instantly discovered
that her father had many times threatened to kill her mother and that her father had not wanted
her. Further, it was found that her father’s name was Q and that her engram bank was strewn
with remarks such as “Q, please don’t leave me. I will die without you.” Additionally, when
she was no longer in session, she suddenly volunteered what was to her a hysterically
humorous fact that all her life she had been having affairs with men named Q no matter what
their shape or size or age. This was far from a release but in view of the fact that his other
patient, G, was jeopardized by all this unnecessary hubbub and that therapy was being stalled,
the auditor further questioned her. She divulged that she had tried many times to abort their son
because she was terribly frightened that he would be a blond whereas she and her husband had
dark hair. Further, the engrams of that child, she knew, contained data which she considered
incriminating beyond mere abortion; while pregnant she had had intercourse with three men
other than her husband.
The auditor pointed out to her that this guilt feeling, no matter how real, was still
engramic in her and that it was doubtful if her husband would kill her on receipt of these
tidings. He told her that she was condemning a child to a second-rate existence and that she
was reducing her husband to apathy by her fears and causing the auditor far more work than
was necessary. In her husband’s and the auditor’s presence she confessed her infidelity and
learned with some amazement that her husband had known about it for years. He had not
known about her attempts on their child.
She was requested to study a therapy manual and clear the child which, with her
husband’s help, she did. The auditor continued G on to clear, who then cleared his wife.
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ADVICE TO THE AUDITOR
The hidden source of human aberration was hidden for a number of very specific
reasons. The auditor will encounter all of these and although with these techniques, the ability
of the reactive engram bank to deny him is precisely nil, he should know the nature of the beast
he has under attack.
The mechanisms of protection which the engram bank had -- although they are not very
good now that we know how to penetrate this armor of insanity’s cause -- are as follows:
1. Physical pain.
2. Emotion in terms of captured units.
3. “Unconsciousness.”
4. The delayed character of the key-in.
5. Delay between restimulation and illness.
6. Utter irrationality.
Of the physical pain we know much -- that the mind, in memory, sought to avoid it just
as the mind in life seeks to avoid it as an outside source: hence, memory blockage.
Emotion of loss piles up to make a buffer between the individual and the reality of
death.
“Unconsciousness” is not only a mechanism of hiding data, it is also a block to memory
which cannot jump the gaps of past moments when the fuses were blown.
An engram might slumber for the better part of a lifetime and then, given the correct set
of restimulators in the right moment of physical weariness or illness, manifest itself, making an
apparent cause of insanity or lesser aberration many years after the actual incident had taken
place.
Another aspect of the bank protective mechanism was the restimulator lag, which is to
say that when a keyed-in engram was restimulated it often required two or three days for action
to take place. (Example: say a migraine headache has as its restimulator a rhythmic bumping
sound; that sound is heard by the individual who has the engram; three days later he suddenly
has a migraine.) Given this lag, how could one locate the cause of a specific restimulation of a
sporadic illness?
The utter irrationality of an engram, the ultimate in irrationality, that everything equals
everything else in the engram and that these are equal to things in the exterior environment
which are only vaguely similar is a feat of idiocy which any sentient man might be expected to
overlook as a “thought process.”
Man has been looking for this source for some thousands of years; but he was looking
for something which was complicated on the grounds that anything which could be so
harrowing, so destructive, so vicious and so capable of producing complex manifestations
must therefore have a complex source; on examination it is remarkably simple.
The auditor will have very little to do with trying to draw a line between sanity and
insanity, they are such relative terms. He will be asked to compare dianetics with old standards
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such as the complex classifications of Kraepelin: it can be done but it has the usefulness of
Aristotelian natural history, of interest only to the historian.
If an individual is incapable of adjusting himself to his environment so as to get along
with or obey or command his fellows, or, more importantly, if he is incapable of adjusting his
environment, then he can be considered to be “insane.” But it is a relative term. Sanity, on the
other hand, closely approaches, with dianetics, a potential absolute meaning for we know the
optimum mind. Modifications of education and viewpoint may make the rational action of one
person appear irrational to another but this is not a problem of sanity, it is a problem of
viewpoint and education, with which the auditor will have but small concern.
Thus the patients the auditor will encounter will fall into the three general dianetic
classes of non-sonic recall, imaginary recall and sonic recall. The question of sanity does not
arise: the question of how difficult or how long the case may be is fairly well determined by the
degree of these three conditions.
However, the auditor will find that he may have in his hands a truly “insane” case, one
which is “psychotic.” The treatment of such a case depends on which of the three above classes
the psychotic patient may be entered. The problem is to de-intensify the engrams of the patient
as swiftly as possible.
The conditions and mechanisms which hide the engram bank do not vary: they are
uniformly present in every patient, in every human being. The techniques of dianetics may be
improved upon -- and what scientific technique, particularly in its first few years of existence
cannot be -- but they also do not perform selectively but are applicable to all individuals.
Hence, if we have an “insane” patient, the fundamental problem does not change and
dianetic technique works as in any other case. The task is to reduce the intensity of charge in
the case so that it can be resolved by standard technique.
Insane patients are often found stuck on the time track, in which case a holder is fed to
them, one kind after another, until they are moving again. If the patient is regressed, he has
become so thoroughly stuck that he has lost touch with the present time. Any patient can begin
to relive instead of merely return and the auditor, as the remedy for this, merely snaps at them
that they can remember this, which places them in a returned status again. Insane patients are
often found listening to one engram over and over, in which case it is again only necessary to
fix attention and feed them holders until they are once more moving on the track. Insane
patients are sometimes discovered completely off the time track, listening to demons or seeing
illusion. The problems are always the same; use repeater technique when, by one means or
another, their attention has been fixed and then either get them moving on the track or get them
back on the time track. The schizophrenic is usually a long way off his time track.
The best way to de-intensify a case so that it can be entered in routine therapy is to
discover and discharge painful emotion engrams. If ordinary means fail, get the help of a
medical doctor, place the patient under nitrous oxide or sodium pentothal and reach a deep level
of trance where the patient will be found, ordinarily, to be capable of moving on his track even
though he was off his track when awake. Find a late despair engram and discharge it as
described in the chapter on emotion. The technique for deep trance is no different except that
very cautious safeguards must be taken to say nothing which will aberrate the patient further
but to limit all conversation to therapy patter, being very careful to include the canceller.
The insane patient is obeying some engramic command, perhaps many, no matter what
he is doing. That command may dictate, by the patient’s misinterpretation, some strange action;
it may dictate demons; it may dictate anything. But diagnosis merely consists of observing the
patient in order to discover, by his actions, what the engramic command might be.
This volume does not cover Institutional Dianetics beyond these few remarks, but an
auditor who knows the fundamentals in this volume and with any understanding can bring
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about a “sanity” in patients in a short time which the boards of these institutions normally
consider a miraculous recovery. The patient, however, is very far from a release, and many
more hours should be spent in discharging further painful emotion and reducing engrams
before an auditor should consider it safe to permit him to leave therapy.
The auditor should be extremely cautious, at least for the next twenty years, about any
case which has been institutionalized, for he may be getting a case with iatrogenic psychosis --
caused by doctors -- in addition to the patient’s other engrams. Dianetics may help a mind a
little in which the brain has been “ice-picked” or “apple-cored,” but it cannot cure such insanity
until some clever biologist finds a way to grow a new brain. Electric shock cases are equivocal:
they may or may not respond to treatment, for brain tissue may have been burned away to a
point where the brain cannot function normally. In entering any such case, the auditor will be
perplexed by the scrambled condition of the standard bank, to say nothing of the circuits by
which he should be able to reach the engram bank. Syphilis and other brain erosions should be
similarly classified and should be approached or undertaken only with the full knowledge that
dianetics may not be able to help the dismembered machine at all. There have been many
thousands of these brain “operations” and hundreds of thousands of electric shock treatments:
thus the auditor should be alert not to engage upon what may be a hopeless cause when there
exist so many cases which can better be helped. Any case which has been institutionalized
should be suspected. And if anything unusual in the way of memory scramble or lack of
coordination is observed, searching inquiry may reveal hidden institutionalization. Further, an
auditor called upon to assist a case which is about to be institutionalized should always be
wary. The case which is being sent to an institution may be a case which has been in one
before, regardless of the protestations of relatives or friends that such is not the circumstance.
Similarly combat exhaustion cases should be warily undertaken, for the case was
probably processed before quitting the service, at which time electric shock or brain operation
or narco-synthesis may have been applied without the knowledge or consent of the patient.
These warnings are given not because the auditor will be in any particular physical
danger -- patients seldom do anything but cooperate, sane or insane, when dianetics is applied,
even if they snarl about it -- but because much work may be expended only to discover that the
entire mental machinery has been wrecked beyond repair.
If the auditor undertakes an electric shock case, he should address his primary attention
to the release of that shock as an engram, for there is all manner of careless chatter contained in
these institutional engrams, which may further inhibit treatment. This is aside from the fact that
any electric shock, anywhere in the body, has a tendency to derange the engram bank and bind
it so that its incidents are more than usually snarled.
For no other reason than the advance of dianetics, and the conservation of an auditor’s
time, it should also be remarked that the third degree methods of some police departments and
general police abuse of criminals or ordinary citizens may have to be released in a case before it
can be further treated. Prison terms may contain large despair charges sufficient to derange the
mind and yet may be hidden by the patient under the mistaken idea that the auditor is interested
or will be disappointed in his “character.”
Various other things enter into the engram bank which would not be suspected as
obstacles to therapy unless mentioned. Hypnotism can be extremely aberrative and may hold up
a case. An auditor should have some working knowledge of it so that he can release the
engrams it makes, not so he can work dianetics. Hypnotism is the art of implanting positive
suggestions in the engram bank. Here they may append themselves to engrams and become
locks on those engrams. As most engram banks contain a sample of most common words,
hypnotism is almost certain to be aberrative. The reduction of analytical power by artificial
means places the subject in an optimum condition for the receipt of an engram. The hypnotist
uses the forgetter mechanism with most of his suggestions and most people have similar
engramic remarks which make it impossible for the hypnotist’s suggestion to release.
Hypnotism can be considered as a “high-powered” lock and may be a serious obstacle in the
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patient’s engram bank. With clearing, the suggestions having no anchors of pain below them in
engrams, vanish as locks. But hypnotic suggestions may have to be found and cleared before a
case can proceed. Hypnotism is very commonly used in this society and it is very often the case
that, with the forgetter mechanism, the patient is unable to recall whether he had ever been
hypnotized or not. Return technique will discover it, repeater technique, making the patient
return with repetition of hypnotic patter (by the patient) such as “Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to
sleep,” can be depended upon to locate it.
Not all hypnotism is in the parlor. Perverts quite commonly use it despite the fact that
the “moral” nature is supposed to rise in a hypnotized subject. Incidents even with people of
repute have been found in patients when examining their childhood. These incidents were often
entirely occluded to the patient, so thoroughly cowing were the commands contained in the
hypnotic suggestion.
Dianetics and hypnotism can be combined, but so can dianetics and astronomy. The
auditor will find himself working with hypnotic patients and will have to be very careful with
patter in order to install minimal words of his own in the engram bank so as not to turn
dianetics into hypnotism.
Any benefit derived from hypnotism is in the field of research or the installation of a
temporary manic engram. The latter has far more harm than value. Hypnotic anesthetic is vastly
overrated. And hypnotism as a parlor game is a thing which no society should tolerate, for it
may be sufficiently destructive to cause the engrams to restimulate to a point of insanity. And
the hypnotist never knows the content of the engram bank. Any good hypnotist, if he can
conquer his desire to talk, should make a good auditor: but if he tries to combine dianetics and
hypnotism he will find himself with a very thoroughly sick patient on his hands. Never install a
positive suggestion of any kind in a patient no matter how much he may beg for one. It has
proven nearly fatal.
An entire case can be worked in deep amnesia trance. It is often possible to waken a
sleeping person into a deep trance simply by speaking to him quietly several nights in
succession at the same hour and finally getting him to respond to the invitation to talk. Dianetic
therapy can then be entered upon and pursued and will succeed particularly if the auditor is not
careless enough to artificially restimulate a late physical pain engram, treating in the post-birth
life mainly engrams of painful emotion.
If the person on whom the therapy is being done is aware of the action, he can be put
into reverie so that earlier data can be reached, “I” being more powerful than the weak if wise
attention units which constitute basic personality. He is alternately worked in amnesia trance
and then in reverie. The case will resolve eventually even if reverie is not used. But there are
grave responsibilities with amnesia trance: a canceller must always be installed and used in
every session. Minimal conversation must be employed. All auditor desires should be stated as
questions if possible, as these are not aberrative to the degree that commands are. This method
has been successful and can be used, but reverie, even if it appears slower, even if sonic is not
present, is far more satisfactory for the excellent and incontrovertible reason that the patient
recovers more swiftly and recovers on a steady upgrade whereas amnesia trance may
incapacitate him for days together, when incidents are apparently lifted in deep trance but
nevertheless “hung up” in the awake state. Amnesia trance is definitely not advised: it has been
subjected to much research and has been found to be both uncomfortable for the patient and
harassing to the auditor. However, if other methods cannot be used for one reason or another
(and none of those reasons include the desire of the pre-clear who, if the auditor would let him,
might crave drugs, hypnotism and positive suggestion in an effort to escape his engrams and
who, if allowed, would have himself a wonderfully messy case for the auditor to unsnarl),
amnesia trance can be employed, but always with the greatest caution and always with the full
knowledge that the patient’s recovery is retarded by as much as a factor of three, for working
on a level with the engram bank leaves the analyzer circuits unused in the discharge. Reverie is
best.
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EXTERNAL PROBLEMS WITH PATIENTS
It may happen that a patient who has made progress suddenly ceases to make further
progress. The answer may lie elsewhere than therapy. The environment of the pre-clear may be
so intensely restimulative that he is distracted, always in restimulation and thus works slowly.
It may be discovered, in such a case, that the pre-clear (as in one case) has made a bargain with
a wife or husband who desires divorce that he or she wait until the pre-clear is cleared. Other
situations of a life nature can place an environmental value on not being cleared. The auditor
has no business with the private lives of his pre-clears, but in a case where therapy itself is
made difficult by existing situations the auditor, with his time at stake, has every right to
discover the reason. All these reasons will compute into some environmental advantage in not
being clear. Removing the pre-clear temporarily from his home, for instance, may change his
environment and advance therapy. The auditor has a right to ask that, clear or not, the patient
resolve the problem on his own initiative. It is common with pre-clears that they do not realize
that they are releases for so glittering is the goal of clear that they cease to compare themselves
to the normal which they have already overpassed.
A patient can commonly be expected to introvert to a very marked degree in the course
of dianetic therapy. As the case progresses this introversion reaches an acute stage about three-quarters
or thereabouts through and thereafter recedes. Ambiversion is a marked characteristic
of the clear. When introversion has been marked, a fairly good gauge of the advance of the case
is in the pre-clear’s interest in exterior things.
Nearly all pre-clears talk a great deal about their engrams up to the point when they are
very solid releases. If they don’t or won’t talk about their engrams in common conversation,
the auditor can suspect something highly protected in the engram bank concerning the necessity
to hide something: the auditor can act accordingly. Although the auditor may weary of such
conversation, it nevertheless reveals much new material to him if he observes the phrases
which the pre-clear uses about engrams.
It is very, very true that aberration is caused by what has been done to not what has
been done by the patient.
The actions of the patient in dramatizing, in committing crimes and so forth are not
aberrative to the patient. Therefore the pre-clear’s activities need be no concern whatever of the
auditor’s. Whole cases have been completed without the auditor’s knowing what the pre-clear
did for a living. While responsibility for his actions is necessarily demanded of him by an
aberrated society, antisocial activity is the resuit of engrams which dictate it. The patient is not
responsible for what he himself has done. Cleared, the matter is different. A clear can be
considered entirely responsible for his own actions, for he can compute rationally on the basis
of his experience. But the aberree has little or no real control over his actions. Therefore, the
auditor should make it plain that he does not care what the aberree who becomes a pre-clear has
done in life. The problem on hand between the auditor and the pre-clear is an engram bank
which contains, exclusively, what other people have done in life and what has been done to the
pre-clear in moments when he could not protect himself. This approach is not only truth, it has
a therapeutic value, for in so explaining himself an auditor can often obtain cooperation which
would otherwise be denied.
The auditor should never violate the auditor’s code with a patient. Extended terms of
therapy inevitably result from such violations.
RESTIMULATION
The mind is a self-protecting mechanism -- but so is dianetics. A science of thought
which works would so closely approximate the working principles of the mind that it would
follow in parallels the injunctions and provisos of the mind itself. Such is the case with
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dianetics: the mind is diagnosed by its reaction to therapy, therapy is improved by the reactions
of the mind to it. This is a working principle of great value since it explains much observed
phenomena and predicts most of the remainder. Part of this parallelism is the self-protection
feature.
It is almost impossible to injure a mind: it is an extremely tough organism. Of course,
when one begins to hew and saw upon it with metal or poison it with drugs or bacteria or
throw its natural armor aside as with hypnotism, unfortunate things can occur.
Charlatanism is almost impossible where dianetics in any of its principles is being
practiced. One either practices all dianetics and gets results or practices himself into a decline:
that is a mechanical, scientific fact. Dianetics, as a self-protecting science, demands practice by
clears or at least good releases. A clear very closely follows in all his conduct the better aspects
of the auditor’s code: his ethical level is very high. Hence, anyone starting a practice of
dianetics is going to find himself, no matter what his original intention, thrust toward the goal
of being a clear.
There is an excellent reason for this. There is a principle known as restimulation of the
auditor. We have an understanding now of what makes an engram come into restimulation.
When it comes into restimulation, it forces the pain or the action of the engram into being in the
organism. The observation of some percept in the environment which approximates a
recording, sound or sight or organic sensation, in the engram brings the engram into greater or
lesser play. Similarly, when an auditor is not cleared himself or when he is not in therapy
himself working toward the goal of a clear, he becomes restimulated. He is, after all, listening
constantly to engramic material in a patient. This engramic material is the very stuff of which
insanity is made. Anyone has engrams: sooner or later a patient is going to start going over an
engram of his own which will approximate the auditor’s own engrams. This leads to great
discomfort for the auditor unless the auditor is in therapy and can have the discomfort so
brought forth released. So long as one is merely working late locks, this is not so much the
case and has made it possible for practitioners and mental healers of the past to escape much of
the penalty of their own aberrations, but when one deals with the root material of these
aberrations, a constant hammering by restimulators can bring about a serious condition. This is
the mechanism which causes people in asylums to fall prey themselves to psychoses, although
one must have had them in the first place for them to have been restimulated.
The auditor may run one or two cases without any serious repercussion: indeed, no
matter what the repercussion, it can be eliminated by dianetics. To save his own comfort,
however, he should himself be cleared or released as soon as possible. He can work as a
release without too much trouble, and this makes it possible for him to make a mutual compact
where he is worked on while he is working the other. A condition can then come about where
two pre-clears are each auditors. This alternation between the couch and the auditor’s chair will
usually work very well.
Two persons, however, after they have begun work, may discover that they are
mutually restimulative -- which is to say each is a pseudo-person in the other’s engrams or one
is restimulated (voice tone, incidents) by the other. This should be no bar to therapy. It has
been overcome and therapy has gone forward despite the most severe restimulative
circumstances. A common avoidance technique on the part of a subject is to claim the auditor
restimulates him: it is not sufficiently important to stop therapy. It may be, however, that two
people can enter a third into the chain and by one clearing the next considerably ease the
tension. The triangular work plan, where no person is working on the person who is working
him, is quite successful.
A husband and wife who have quarreled long and often may find it too restimulative to
clear each other. It is possible to do if other arrangements cannot be made and it is often done:
but if therapy does not go well, he should find a therapy partner and so should she. Mothers
who have attempted abortion on their children or otherwise maltreated them can accomplish
therapy on those children, but in any case of restimulative circumstance such as this, the
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greatest precaution must be taken by the auditor to adhere severely to the auditor’s code -- to do
otherwise might bring much more stress into therapy than is necessary. In such a case, the
mother had better herself have at least a release accomplished upon her before she attempts to
clear her children -- and she should not touch those children until they are at least eight.
The subject of auditor-restimulation, where the auditor restimulates the pre-clear or the
pre-clear restimulates the auditor, does not include the routine aspect of therapy that the pre-clear
is always being artificially restimulated via standard therapy. An engram can be
restimulated by being touched several times and so it will lift. The auditor-restimulation
problem is a specific one where the auditor is a pseudo-enemy, a similarity to a person who has
harmed the patient. Wild antagonism on the part of a patient to an auditor is usually traced to
this. Some patients have such a hatred of men that only women can work them, some have
such a hatred of women that only men can work them. But even when there is a wild antipathy,
if there exists no other auditor or person who can be trained quickly as one, therapy can
proceed anyway: and it will accomplish results.
REBALANCING A CASE
Any case dropped out of therapy will rebalance itself in a few weeks, which is to say, it
will settle to a new high for the individual. Unless drug hypnotism or some other dianetically
illegal method is used, all cases will so rebalance, much benefited. Restimulations can be
expected to die down if they are due to therapy. The patient will gradually find his own level in
the released state. Cases do not have to be carried forward to clear if auditor time is short, but it
is, of course better if they are and, indeed, the majority of patients will insist that they be.
WORKING TIME IN THERAPY
The usual period of a dianetic treatment is two hours. In these two hours, with the
usual patient, everything is going to be accomplished which can be accomplished on that day.
Working every day is not necessary, but working every two days or every three days is
desirable. Working with periods a week apart is not optimum, for the case tends to rebalance.
Further, there is a “sag” in a case, usually every fourth day when it is not worked in periods as
short as three days. The fourth day “sag” is a natural mechanical thing: an engram, keyed-in,
when it is restimulated in life, takes about four days to cut in sharply. In therapy, three days is
sometimes required to “develop” an engram. This does not mean that three days have to elapse
before it is available and it does not mean that work has to stop for three days, but it does mean
that engrams, not being memories and articulate as such, take three days, sometimes, to come
to the surface.
To be more clear, an engram can be asked for on day one and will be found on day
three. Meanwhile the auditor is getting other engrams. This process is so automatic that it
requires no attention and will not come to notice except in cases that are being worked once a
week. The engram is asked for on day one, is ready to reduce on day three, sags on day four
and is rebalanced by day seven.
The three day aspect is interesting in another sense. This time of three days is just an
observation of the average behavior of pre-clears. Precision investigation may fix it at 2.5 days
or 3.6 days (it varies in individuals), but three days is close enough for our purposes. When
one is doing just a release on a case, he will sometimes find that it is necessary to take a late
engram and run it: the physical pain engram of later life (post-birth) will appear to rise, will
remain constant for three days and then will “sag.” When it sags, the auditor will have to go
back to it and run it again. Taking out these “sags” will eventually make the later life engram
stay in a recessed state.
Euphoria often sets in on a case when the auditor touches an engram which contains a
manic. The patient will then go around saying how wonderful dianetics is because he is now in
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magnificent condition and is so happy. Watch out. In three or four days this manic will have
sagged back to a depressive state. Be wary if somebody experiences one of these sky-rocket
“recoveries” for it is about as permanent as the fire of a burning match. It goes out and leaves
very cold ashes. The auditor, seeing this euphoria, had better enter the case again and reduce
the engram it contains more thoroughly or get a more basic engram.
The length of time it takes to clear a person is quite variable. By blowing despair
charges and working a few early engrams, an auditor can get a better state of being in the
patient than in any past therapy in twenty or thirty hours: this is a release. It compares to two or
three years of past therapeutic work. The length of time it takes to get a clear cannot be
compared to any past standard because a clear is something no past standard ever dreamed
about.
In a sonic case, where recall is in good condition, a clear can be obtained in a hundred
hours. In a case which has thoroughly shut down recalls, anything can happen up to, in
extremity, a thousand hours. Similarly, the imaginative case which has things which never
happened, may be long.
Look at it this way: we can get the results of two or three years of psycho-analysis in a
score or two of hours of dianetics and what we accomplish with dianetics does not have to be
done again, which is not true with psycho-analysis. This is the release. He can go about his
business in a far more competent fashion, his emotional charges being largely freed. In the
clear we are attempting and can achieve a supernormal state of mind. Thousands and thousands
and thousands of hours were spent in the education of a man: the expenditure of two or even
ten thousand hours of work to make him rank about what would formerly have been possible
for him is work well spent. But we do not have to spend anything like this amount of time.
People have been cleared in anything from thirty hours, when they had sonic and little volume,
to five hundred hours when they had shut-down recall plus imaginary recall. What an auditor
can do with his first few cases by way of time is a question mark. He will get to the clear
eventually and certainly in less than twelve hundred hours in a severe case. All the time he is
working toward a clear he is achieving a higher and higher release which, after at least fifty
hours, rises well above the current norm and keeps right on soaring. Improvement is such that
from week to week the charge is physiologically noticeable and psychologically startling. If one
thinks the reach for clear is a short jump and a small gain, then he has no conception of just
how high that goal is.
Most auditors will try for release at first and are wise if they do. When their own case is
finally cleared, only then will they suddenly realize that the state was worth far more time than
was expended to attain.
It is impossible to forecast, with a new auditor, just how much time he will consume in
making errors, learning his tools, attaining skill. It is therefore impossible to estimate for him
how long it will take him to gain a clear in a patient. A well trained auditor never takes more
than eight hundred hours with the worst of cases: five hundred is high.
DATA FROM RELATIVES
The auditor will always be plagued by the anxiety of the patient to get data from
relatives or friends. The request for this data itself is restimulative both to the pre-clear and the
relative. Mothers have been made very ill by being given the restimulators of their own past
illnesses by the child who has “suddenly found out.”
It is a uniform experience that the data obtained from relatives, parents and friends by
the pre-clear is absolutely and utterly worthless. Here we are depending upon an aberree’s
memory when we have at hand, with dianetics, a reliable source of accurate material. Auditors
have had cases progress very smoothly and then suddenly stop progress: on inquiry it is
discovered that the pre-clear has been running around to his parents and relatives for material
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and they, wanting nothing more than that he forget all about what they have done to him, throw
him red herrings which have to be carefully eliminated. These are the villains of the piece, the
people who have done the things to the pre-clear which made him an aberree. If one expects
accurate data from them, one might as well expect the moon to be green cheese.
If the auditor wants data from these people and requests it, by-passing the pre-clear, he
may get somewhere. But any data so received has a value which, in intelligence, is used to
label “Incompetent Source -- Improbable Material.”
Warn a pre-clear not to bother his relatives and parents and explain to him that he can
make them ill by asking for data, on the restimulator principle. If we want confirmation of the
data received, the only way to get it is put the parent or relative in therapy. At such time, we
shall get the basic dramatization sources: in the prenatal life and childhood of the parent. This is
a problem of research, not of therapy.
If the auditor has Mama available, he can run off the child’s birth and then Mama giving
birth, keeping the two apart, and get his check on the accuracy of therapy. And there are other
data that can be so compared, using proper safeguards.
The subjective reality, not the objective reality, is the important question to the auditor.
First, last and always, does the patient get well?
STOPPING THERAPY
The woman scorned has a violent rival in the pre-clear on whom therapy has been
stopped by the auditor’s decision.
Keeping the pre-clear in therapy, no matter how seldom are the sessions, satisfies in
some measure the effort his basic personality makes to fight clear of the aberrations.
The basic personality, the file clerk, the core of “I” which wants to be in command of
the organism, the most fundamental desires of the personality, may be considered synonymous
for our purposes. There is an enormous surge of this basic self -- which is really the individual
himself -- to conquer the engrams. The engrams, borrowing life from their host, appear as
things which do not want to be conquered. As mechanistic as all this actually is, the auditor will
often find himself wondering at the resistance the engrams can make and marveling at the
efforts of the basic personality to conquer the engrams. He works with the basic personality,
the individual himself, and ignores the engramic efforts to interfere. But there is a situation in
which the basic personality seems to give free play to the engrams in an effort to accomplish
therapy.
In work, a “patient” might have been skeptical, sarcastic or even vicious to the auditor.
Or the patient may have been thought to be completely neglectful of his engram bank. Or the
patient may even rage that he hates therapy. For some of these reasons the auditor may
injudiciously decide to cease working the patient. The patient is so informed. For a short while,
perhaps, the patient may manifest no reaction but in a few minutes, a few hours or a few days,
basic personality, denied a route out, may begin to use every weapon to hand to compel the
auditor to resume therapy.
Disturbed by cessation of therapy, even though he may have insisted upon its being
stopped, the ex-patient may begin either to rapidly decline or to attack to his face or behind his
back the auditor and even therapy itself. The woman scorned has rarely made such thorough
upsets as ex-patients who have been refused continuance of therapy. Auditors have been
personally reviled, have had other pre-clears searched out and undermined by violent attacks
upon therapy itself, have been targeted by all manner of accusations and whispering campaigns
and have been made most uncomfortable by pre-clears who have had further therapy denied to
them before a release had taken place. Even solid, legitimate releases, whose psycho-somatic
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ills have disappeared and who should be quite cheerful, have been observed to create
turbulence when the auditor would not take them through to clear. Any number of mechanisms
may be used by the ex-patient. as many mechanisms as men use to force other men into action.
One of the mechanisms is a resumption of apathy and a “swift decline.” Another is wild
campaigning against therapy. Another is personal attack of the auditor. Each has, as its
provable intention, the resumption of therapy.
The mind knows how the mind works. And the mind which has tasted a way out of
pain and unhappiness may be expected, if that way is blocked, to use all methods to cause
therapy to be resumed.
No matter how thoroughly disagreeable the ex-patient has been, the moment the auditor
starts therapy upon him again, the attitude alters. No further destructive efforts are made against
the auditor or therapy but all is almost as well as it was before the cessation was declared.
Do not suppose, however, that the pre-clear, if he has been neglectful, recalcitrant or
generally uncooperative before, will now embrace therapy as chastened patient. Far from the
case, he is now at least as difficult to work as he was before plus some additional antagonism
engendered by the cessation order.
In such a case the auditor is damned if he does and double-damned if he doesn’t. But
there is a way out of this. The phenomenon of “transference,” where the patient simply
transfers his griefs to the practitioner, is not the mechanism here at work; transference is a
different thing, bred of a thirst for attention and a feeling of needed support in the world.
Transference can be expected to keep up forever if permitted; the patient of a doctor, for
instance, may go on and on having illnesses just to keep the doctor around. Transference may
occur in dianetic therapy, the patient may lean on the auditor solidly, beg the auditor for advice,
appear to hold out engrams in an effort to keep the auditor working hard and available and
interested; all this is the resultant of a sympathy computation and is aberrated conduct. The
clever auditor will not give advice or attempt to run anyone’s life, for a person works well only
as a self-determined organism. In dianetic therapy, no matter what the attitude of the patient, no
matter how great his “desires to be ill” or his transference of burden, no matter about even his
vicious remarks to the auditor during sessions, the condition cannot obtain forever.
Basic personality is trying to get through; “I” is trying to integrate self. Even indifferent
work will eventually release enough charge from a case and reduce enough engrams to bring a
higher stability to the patient. Basic personality gets stronger and stronger and therefore more
self-reliant. The introversion occasioned by continual effort to reach the interior world of the
engram bank de-intensifies and extroversion comes more and more into being as the case
advances. The way out is to work the patient smoothly and well and one day he will be well
released or clear. But meanwhile, if you stop therapy on anyone, don’t be surprised at anything
that happens; you can only remedy it by resuming the case.
AUDITOR EVALUATION
The auditor must do much evaluation to himself. He does not evaluate or force upon his
pre-clear any computation. If the pre-clear computes that this was what was making him ill,
then this is what the auditor accepts. Explaining to the pre-clear what it was in the engram
which affected him so and so is not only a waste of time but also makes the pre-clear confused.
The reason an auditor evaluates is to make sure he is not accepting imagined data or incomplete
data as engrams.
An incident will not lift unless the data in it is correct: this is automatic. Change just one
syllable in the incident and it will stick. Or, if it seems to go away, it will be back. So there is
no fear that any incident which decreases with recounting is incorrect. The data in it must be
more or less correct or it would not so reduce. Thus the auditor who challenges incidents, data
or otherwise plays god is going to have a thoroughly fouled up case on his hands before he
goes very far, and he is going to have a subject who is not progressing. If the subject begins to
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run an engram where Mama is having intercourse with five Eskimos, let him run it and never,
never, never, never tell him that you feel it was untrue. If you tell the subject you think he is
imagining things, you may give him a serious set-back. Tell him you think Mama had her
reasons and you have sided with the opposition: you are not attacking the engram, you are
helping Mama attack the subject. To criticize, correct or otherwise judge the pre-clear has no
slightest part in dianetics and will do more to slow up a case than any other single action. An
auditor who challenges the material given him may be practicing witchcraft or Chinese
acupuncture or shamanism or voodoo, but he is not practicing dianetics. And he will not get
results. One remark to the subject such as, “I think that you are mistaken in believing your
mother would try to abort you,” or “I feel that you are imagining it” may set your pre-clear back
fifty hours. The auditor does not criticize or judge the pre-clear, nor does he evaluate for the
pre-clear that person’s material.
Auditing is all done privately and to oneself. If the patient has just recounted his fifth
prenatal train wreck, you may be sure you have run into a lie factory in some engram. The
wrong way to go about correcting this is communicating it to the pre-clear. The right way to go
about it is to find the lie factory, an engram containing such a remark as, “Tell me anything!
Tell me anything. I don’t care so long as you say something. But for God’s sakes don’t tell me
the truth, I can’t stand it!” Or, “You can’t tell him the truth. It would hurt too much.” There are
a thousand forms of lie factory. And they are not too uncommon.
Never tell the pre-clear why you are looking for anything. If you say you want a lie
factory, the lie factory will make up a lie factory. If you say you want an emotional charge, you
will inhibit any emotional Charge from discharging. Simply make a quiet estimate of the
situation, reduce everything which seems valid and keep on trying to get the reason why the
case is not functioning as well as possible.
The test for validity of an engram is not plot. Plot is worthless. Engrams are just
collections of remarks contained in periods of “unconsciousness.” It makes no difference
whatever whether these remarks agree with the way the auditor thinks a life should be run or
the way a pre-clear should look up to his parents. Plot is something writers put in stories.
Auditors have nothing to do with it. An engram is basically illogical and irrational; don’t try to
read rationality into one! If the parents were known to be fine, upstanding members of the
community and the engrams seem to indictate that Mama nightly played the prostitute, accept
the engrams.
Validity is very simply established. Ask these questions of the engrams:
(1) Does it have a somatic?
(2) Does the somatic undulate, which is to say, undergo a running change?
(3) Does it reduce? (If it does not, the content the pre-clear is running is wrong or the
engram is way up the chain and has others before it.)
(4) Does the engramic content agree with the patient’s aberration?
(5) Does the somatic agree with psycho-somatic ills the patient is known to have had?
(6) Does it bring relief to the patient? And this last is more important than all the rest.
Because mental healers of the past have grandly said, “Oh, this does not fit with my
idea of how life is run” is no reason an auditor should run dianetics off the rails. Mental
healers of yesteryear did not get results. Dianetics gets results: and one of the most important
reasons why dianetics gets results is that it is not trying to warp life to fit dianetics but is
applying dianetics to life. Many new and startling things will come to the notice of the auditor.
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His motto, as seen on an ancient English crest where a ninety-foot raven stood upon a
castle, could read, “Be surprised at nothing.”
The Kinsey report did not begin to tell the story you, as an auditor, will get in dianetics.
Because the mother, by herself, is neither the face she showed Junior nor the face she showed
society and because mother and father, by themselves, do not conduct themselves as they might
be supposed to have done in society is insufficient reason to force a pre-clear to go on being an
aberree.
Continually in the psychiatric texts we come upon patients who tried to tell psychiatrists
about prenatal life and who were told, with droll solemnity that the incidents were imaginary.
Patients who had been given up on all fronts by all existing schools because their data was not
tailored to fit the belief of those schools have recovered fully and achieved optimum mental
condition, well above that of their former mentors, with dianetics, partially because dianetics
does not set itself above the facts of life. He not only requires the patient to face reality by
running the engrams but he also requires himself to face reality by accepting the fact that
whatever the content, if it fits any of the above conditions listed, it is valid in therapy.
Auditing means to listen; it also means to compute. Computing on a case consists of
establishing where the patient departs from optimum rationality in his conduct of life but, more
important, where physically painful and painful emotion engrams exist and how they can be
approached and reduced.
Patients discover some astonishing things about their parents and relatives when they
are in therapy. Often they discover, like one patient who had believed he had daily been beaten
by his father, that life was actually much better than it had seemed.
Pre-marital conception cases are very common, with the patient yet unborn discovering
himself at his parents’ wedding. And these cases are often very difficult to resolve since they
contain so much secrecy in their engrams.
The lie factory mechanisms will often try to give Mama extra lovers and try to make
Papa into a raving beast, but a lie factory is very easy to detect: the incidents brought forth do
not run like engrams: the second time over their content is widely changed, they do not have
somatics and their content is not aberrative.
In short, the test is whether or not one has an actual engram, not whether or not the
engram makes sense. For father could well have been a raving beast in a boudoir and mother
could well have had coitus with the boarders: and father could well have been a tame lamb for
all the reputation mother gave him post-birth and mother could well have been a frigid prude
despite the wild tales the pre-clear might have heard. The truth will come out in the reduction
but its truth is no concern of the auditor’s beyond getting up engrams.
First, last and always, get engrams, get them as early as possible for pain, later for
emotion, get them, erase them, discharge them, clear them! That they did not compute as true
data was what drove the aberree into being an aberree. Leave plot to writers: our task is
therapy.
But don’t “buy garbage”: ask for the somatic, see if it varies as the pre-clear utters the
words. Test for engrams. And devil take the plot.
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CHAPTER X
Dianetics -- Past and Future
THE HISTORY OF DIANETICS
The history of dianetics would be the history of a voyage of discovery, of an
exploration into new and nearly uncharted realms, Terra Incognita, the Human Mind, a land
which lies an inch behind your forehead.
The voyage has taken twelve years and the labor has been long, but we have charts now
and can go and return at will.
Observations of savage and civilized races in this and far climes formed the foundation
for the anthropological research: the writings of a few men in the last four thousand years
formed the scholarly pilots. The ancient Hindu writings, the work of the early Greeks and
Romans including Lucretius, the labors of Francis Bacon, the researches of Darwin and some
of the thoughts of Herbert Spencer compose the bulk of the philosophic background. Inevitable
absorption from our current culture provided much unnoticed information. The remainder has
been what the navigator calls, “off the chart.”
In 1935 some of the basic research was begun: in 1938 the primary axioms were
discovered and formulated. For the next several years these axioms were tested in the
laboratory of the world. The war interrupted the work, as wars will, being chaos, but shortly
after the cessation of actual hostilities, research was renewed. Within a year the fundamentals
of this science as they applied to the human mind had been integrated. They were tested on a
long series of random patients and each test further refined the work, but each application
brought specific results.
Five years after the initial resumption of labor, in 1950, the work was prepared for
release, all tests having brought forth the conclusion that dianetics is a science of mind, that it
does disclose hitherto unknown laws about thought and that it has worked on every type of
inorganic mental and organic psycho-somatic illness. Further, in the refinement of form
attained, it was proven possible for the work to be used easily by people not lengthily trained.
The goal we have here reached is a science which is workable and which can be worked
with success by briefly taught individuals. This goal has not hitherto been attained or even
approached.
Once one has gained a foothold on unknown lands, more things become known to him
and with each new datum his horizon further widens, including broader bodies of knowledge.
Dianetics cures, and cures without failure. And there are further goals.
Education, medicine, politics and art and, indeed, all branches of human thought, are
clarified with dianetics. And even so that is not enough.
Dianetics has, as yet, a brief history: it has a strong youth: it forecasts a better
tomorrow. Before it is much older it will have included even more within its scope. The
history of dianetics is scarce begun.
Plan A included the perfection of the science, its testing on patients of all kinds and,
finally, the dissemination of dianetics as pertaining to therapy. That plan ends with the release
of this book.
Plan B includes a further research into life force, an attempt at resolution of some of the
ills not yet embraced such as cancer and diabetes, and the perfection of techniques discovered
and their dissemination. That will end Plan B.
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Plan C includes an effort to discover a higher echelon of universal origin and
destination, if the problem is one of origin and destination, and the factors and forces involved
to the end of securing a better understanding and useful application of the knowledge so
gained, if gained, and if so gained, its dissemination.
A portion of Plan B is the organization of a foundation so that the research can be more
swiftly accomplished.
The history of dianetics has just begun. What other things begin with the origin of a
science of mind only tomorrow can tell.
JUDICIARY DIANETICS
This brief summary of Judiciary Dianetics is included in this present work as an aid to
the auditor.
JUDICIARY DIANETICS covers the field of adjudication within the society and
amongst the societies of Man. Of necessity it embraces jurisprudence and its codes and
establishes precision definitions and equations for the establishment of equity. It is the science
of judgment.
Jurisprudence and its adjudications are constructed on the cornerstones of right and
wrong, good and evil. Definition of these is inherent in dianetics: by these definitions a correct
solution can be reached with regard to any action or actions of Man.
The fundamental test of rationality is the ability to differentiate right from wrong. The
fundamental factors in establishing censure are good and evil. Without precision definition of
these four factors any structure of law or judgment is rendered forceless and becomes involved
through its introduction of arbitrary factors which seek to adjudicate by introducing errors to
nullify errors. Penal codes which will answer all needs can only be written when precision,
scientific definition exist for the four factors, and civil equity which will not lead to injustice
can only then be established and formulated.
The problems of jurisprudence and, indeed, all judgment, are inextricably interwoven
with the problems of behavior.
An ideal society would be a society of unaberrated persons, clears, conducting their
lives within an unaberrated culture: for either the person or the culture may be aberrated. The
aberrations of the culture enter into the equations of conduct as irrational factors both from the
door of education and of social customs and jurisprudence. It is not enough that an individual
be himself unaberrated, for he discovers himself within the confines of a society which itself
has compounded its culture into many unreasonable prejudices and customs.
The establishment of actual source for wrong and evil is a fundamental problem of all
jurisprudence. The actual source unfortunately lies in the irrationalities of those in past
generations who, working with limited knowledge and oppressed by their environs, sought
solutions with equations which contained false and indefinite factors. These generations, long
entombed, cannot be brought to bar. We are the heirs to all the ages of the past and that is good:
but we are heirs as well to all the irrationalities of the past and that is evil. Under such
circumstances and in the absence of broad reason, adjudication by the auditor of the pre-clear as
relates to evil or wrong actions cannot be performed with accuracy. The criminal and the
insane, the hypochondriac and the wife-beater, the merciless dictator who seeks to shake the
world and the street cleaner who only sits and weeps are all, each one, gripped and driven by
their own sources of unreason, by the world which has entered into the hidden depths of their
pain-wracked minds and which, in the form of social aberration, pounds against them from
without.
248.249
The auditor is interested in what has been done to, not done by his patient; for whatever
the patient has done is forever beyond recall and was not the source but was only the
manifestation of his griefs.
Given a society of unaberrated persons, given a culture from which has been deleted all
unreason, then and only then can Man be truly responsible for his acts, then and only then. But
we must take the shadow of the responsibility now for the fact of it. A man does not have to
surrender to his engrams.
Perhaps at some distant date only the unaberrated person will be granted civil rights
before law. Perhaps the goal will be reached at some future time when only the unaberrated
person can attain to and benefit from citizenship. These are desirable goals and would produce
a marked increase in the survival ability and happiness of Man.
Even now the codes of jurisprudence can be reformed and it can be ascertained with
precision whether the act which brought the individual before law was an aberrated act, or
stemmed from an aberration of culture, or was an act which was committed to the detriment of
another or of society. Surely the process of punishment can be refined so as to sentence the
individual not to further aberration as a prisoner or a ruined man but to a higher plane of reason
through the deletion of the aberration.
The past acts of an individual who has been cleared should be stricken from his record
even as his illnesses have been, for with the cause removed there can be no point in retribution
unless society itself is so aberrated that it desires to operate on sadistic principles.* There is
more than idealism here for it can be shown that aberration in individuals and the society rise in
progressive ratio to the amount of punishment employed.
Efforts to resolve problems of jurisprudence which yet did not embrace precision
definitions for right and wrong, good and evil, had recourse only to a principle known in
dianetics as the Introduction of an Arbitrary. Our present society is not aberrated in this
respect: the insane man is not held guilty or responsible for his acts. Lacking definition of a
precise scientific nature for insanity and failing to recognize that all irrational acts are temporary
insanity, the society has not been able to carry out its fundamental intention.
Broad, unchangeable rules were thrust into problems in an effort to resolve them and
yet each new rule further drove reason aside so that more rules were needed. An arbitrary
structure is one in which one error has been observed and an effort has been made to correct it
by introducing another error. In progressive complexity, new errors must be introduced to
nullify the evil effects old errors. A culture, to say nothing of jurisprudence, grows complex
and unwieldy in progressive ratio to the number of new evils it must introduce in an effort to
nullify old evils. At last there can be no reason; there can be but force and where there lives no
reason and yet lives force, there is naught but the maelstrom of an insane rage. Where there
dwells an insane rage, still unresolved, there must at length come apathy; and apathy,
dwindling down, inevitably reaches death.
We are here at a bridge between one state of Man and a next. We are above the chasm
which divides a lower from a higher plateau and this chasm marks an artificial evolutionary step
in the progress of Man.
The auditor is at that bridge; when cleared he will be at its higher end. He will watch
much traffic cross. He may see customs, laws, organizations and societies attempt to avoid the
bridge but, being swept along, tumble into a nothingness below.
In his attitude toward his pre-clears or toward society at large, he can gain nothing by
reprimanding and judging past error in the light of current sentience. Not only can he gain
nothing but he can inhibit progress. It is a remorseless fact that the attack upon unreason has
begun. Attack unreason, not the society or the man.
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DIANETICS AND WAR
The social organisms which we call states and nations behave and react in every respect
as though they were individual organisms. The culture has its analytical mind, the combined
sentience of its citizens in general and its artists, scientists and statesmen in particular. The
social standard memory bank is the data accumulated along the generations. And the social
organism has as well its reactive mind as represented by the prejudices and irrationalities of the
entire group. This reactive mind is served by an engram bank wherein lie past painful
experiences and which dictates reactive action on certain subjects whenever those subjects are
restimulated in the society. This, all too briefly, is an analogy used in Political Dianetics.
The social organism behaves in a manner which can be graphed on the tone scale; it has
its survival dynamic and its suppressors, its internal suppression due to engrams and its urge
toward an infinity of optimum duration. Criminals, traitors, and zealots constitute, for
instance, internal engrams which suppress the survival potential on the tone scale.
There is a precision definition for each social level as related to the tone scale. A free
society, working in complete cooperation toward common goals would be a Tone 4 society. A
society hindered by arbitrary restrictions and oppressive laws would be a Tone 2 society. A
society managed and dictated to by the whims of one man or a few men would be a Tone 1
society. A society governed by the mystery and superstition of some mystic body would be a
Tone 0 society. The potential of survival in each case can be seen anywhere in history. Any
Golden Age is a Tone 4. Oppressive practices, individual greeds and miscalculation in general
reduce the society by introducing into it dissatisfied elements. To cope with these, in the past,
further oppression has been used. The survival of the society reduced further. With more
oppression came new engrams and so down the tone scale slipped the chances of long survival.
And with this reduction of potential came pain as the lower zones were entered.
Societies rise and fall on the tone scale. But there is a danger point below which a
society cannot go without reacting as would an individual so suppressed: the society reaches a
break point and goes mad. This point is around 2.0.
The quarrel of society with society, nation with nation, has many causes, all of them
more or less irrational. There have been many times when one society was forced to crush
another less sentient than itself. But with each clash, new engrams were born both in the
international scene and within the societies themselves.
War is an international Tone 1. It is no more rational than any individual who, reaching
a general and chronic Tone 1, is placed in an institution or, temporarily Tone 1, commits some
crime and is thereafter imprisoned. But there is no jailer to societies, there is at this time only
death and so they die and so they have died.
Before this time no tool could be employed by a nation but force when faced with
another nation gone mad. By contagion of aberration, both nations then went mad. No nation
ever fully won a war. No nation ever finally triumphed by force of arms. No nation ever
averted war by posing threat or exhibiting defense.
Man is now faced, by these pyramiding hatreds, with weapons so powerful that Man
himself may vanish from the earth. There is no problem in the control of these weapons. They
explode when and where Man tells them to explode. The problem is in the control of Man.
There is no national problem in the world today which cannot be resolved by reason
alone. All factors inhibiting a solution of the problem of war and weapons are arbitrary factors
and have no more validity than the justified explanations of a thief or murderer.
The farmer of Iowa has no quarrel with the storekeeper of Stalingrad. Those who say
such quarrels exist lie.
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There are no international concerns which cannot be resolved by peaceable means, not
in the terms of supra-national government, but in the terms of reason.
Jockeying with indefinable ideologies, playing with mass ignorance, non-existent
entities like nightmares march the world in the form of the Gods of Ism.
No self-interest can be so great as to demand the slaughter of Mankind. He who would
demand it, he who would not by every rational means avert it, is insane. There is no
justification for war.
Behind the curtains of language and different customs populaces are taught to recognize
no kinship with other populaces. Taught by their own terrors and governed by their own
aberrations leaders hold up other isms as detestable things.
There is no perfect political state on earth today, there is not even a good definition of a
perfect political creed. States are the victims of internal and external aberrations.
Dianetics addresses war because there is in fact a race between the science of mind and
the atom bomb. There may be no future generation to know which won.
Rationality alone can guide Man past these threats to his extinction.
Insanity does not exist without a confusion of definitions and purpose. The solution to
the international problem does not lie in the regulation or curtailment of weapons nor yet in the
restraints of men. It lies in the definition of political theory and policy in such terms that there
can be no mistaking the clear processes; it lies in the establishment of rational goals toward
which societies can collectively and individually work; and it lies in an inter-social competition
of gains so great that none become dispensable to any other.
Man’s primary fight is not with Man -- that is insanity. Man’s primary fight is with
those elements which oppress him as a species and bar his thrust toward high goals. Man’s
fight is with the elements, with space and time, and with species which are destructive to him.
He has hardly begun his conquest. He is just now armed with tools enough and science enough
to make good his conquest of the Universe. He has no time to bicker and indulge in tantrums
and yah-yah across back fences about atom bombs.
The harnessing of atomic power puts other worlds within his reach. Why haggle for
this one? The late discoveries in the field of photo-synthesis bid fair to feed and clothe him
royally even though he number a thousand times his present two billions on earth. For what
reason can he quarrel? Why?
Two rational men will enter into a contest of gain and worth and production. Are these
mighty nations, these powerful, fearful, thundering “giants,” actually small and poorly
educated, barely sane little boys screaming insults at each other over the possession of a dead
cat? What of armies? Armies die. If might makes right, then Rome still rules the world. Who
fears now this archeological curiosity that was Rome?
There is a higher goal, a better goal, a more glorious victory than gutted towns and
radiation-burned dead. There is freedom and happiness and plenty and a whole Universe to be
won.
He who would not see it is far from worthy to rule. He who would indulge his hates is
too insane to advise.
How much can Man conquer? He loses if he conquers Man. He wins if he conquers his
own fears and conquers. then the stars.
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Attack the natural enemies of Man, attack them well, and war of Man with Man cannot
thereafter be a problem. This is rationality.
Dianetics is not interested in saving the world, it is interested only in preventing the
world from being saved. One more time would be fatal! Dianetics is not against fighting; it
defines what may be fought. Those things include the sources of Man’s travail within the
individual, within the society and the enemies of all Mankind. Man, bewildered, has not
known his enemies. They are visible now; attack!
THE FUTURE OF THERAPY
In twenty or a hundred years the therapeutic technique which is offered in this volume
will appear to be obsolete. Should this not prove to be the case, then the author’s faith in the
inventiveness of his fellow man will not have been justified. We have here something which
has not before existed, an invariably working science of Mind. The application methods cannot
but be refined.
All sciences been with the discovery of basic axioms. They progress as new data is
discovered and as the scope of the science is widened. Various tools and techniques rise up
continually, improved and re-improved. The basic axioms, the initial discoveries of dianetics
are such solid scientific truths that they will be altered but little. The data discovered by those
axioms is already large and daily expanding. The techniques of using that data as represented in
this volume will, before much more time elapses, be modified and improved. Their virtue just
now is that these techniques work and produce good, solid, scientific results.
Once upon a time somebody set up the basic principles which had to do with fire. There
had not been controlled fire before. Cooking, heating and finally metallurgy made a new
culture. The basic principles of fire are not much altered. The techniques employed in handling
fire soon after it was discovered by Man would be considered somewhat obsolete to us now.
We have matches and lighters and fuels today, but just after fire was understood and began to
be used, the bow-drill fire-maker and flint and steel would have been considered marvelous
inventions: even so Man was already using fire and had been using it with profit for some time
both as a weapon and as a household utility when the bow-drill and flint and steel were
discovered or invented.
In the case of the wheel, basic principles were laid down which have not altered to this
day. The first workable wheel must have been a rather unwieldy affair. But compared to no
wheel, it was a miracle.
Thus with dianetic therapy. The basic principles, axioms and general discoveries of
dianetics form an organization not before possessed by Man. Not unlike the first fires and the
first wheels, the therapy technique can be enormously improved. It works now; it can be used
now with safety and effectiveness.
There are two definite drawbacks to this present technique. It demands more skill of the
auditor than should be necessary and it is not as swift as it could be. The auditor should not be
required to do any computing whatever and indeed, a therapy technique could be envisioned
where no auditor at all was necessary, for he is vital at the present time. A complete clear
should take but a handful of hours. The problems here are those of improvement in terms of
less skill required and less work.
One might say that it is an imposition upon a mathematician and philosopher to require
him to resolve all the problems himself and to put forth all improvements. Indeed, it is an
imposition that he be required to develop any technique of application at all, for there should be
in any society an apportionment of labor.
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When the basic axioms and computations were finished, it was impossible to release
them for there were none to whom such research could be released for application. Thus the
work had to be carried out to its furthest extent of not only experimentation but the development
and proof of the techniques of application.
One might here use an analogy of bridge engineering. Let us suppose that two plateaus
exist, one higher than the other, with a canyon between them. An engineer sees that if the
canyon could be crossed by traffic, the hitherto unused higher plateau, being much more fertile
and pleasant, would become the scene of a new culture. He sets himself the task of building a
bridge. It has been supposed that no bridge could be built across the canyon and indeed, since
those on the lower plateau could not see the higher level, the existence of the higher plateau
itself was denied. The engineer, by evolving new principles of bridge building and discovering
new significance in his materials, manages to throw a bridge across the canyon. He himself
crosses and he inspects the plateau carefully; others cross over his bridge and examine the new
terrain with delight. Still more and more cross the bridge. The bridge is solid and, if not wide,
can yet safely be negotiated. It has not been built for heavy fast traffic. But it contains the basic
principles and axioms by which the canyon can be spanned again and again. Many people
begin to approach the canyon and look up.
What sort of an opinion would you have of the society on the lower plateau if they but
moaned and wept and argued and gave no hand at all in the matter of widening the bridge or
making new bridges?
In this handbook we have the basic axioms and a therapy which works.
For God’s sake, get busy and build a better bridge!
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APPENDIX I
The Philosophic Method
Science seems always to advance, while philosophy seems always to lose ground. Yet
this is only because philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems
not yet open to the methods of science -- problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness,
order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of
exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it
arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement. Philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of
the unknown, ... or of the inexactly known ... it is the front trench in the siege of truth.
Science is the captured territory; and behind it are those secure regions in which knowledge and
art build our imperfect and marvelous world. Philosophy seems to stand still, perplexed; but
only because she leaves the fruits of victory to her daughters the sciences, and herself passes
on, divinely discontent, to the uncertain and the unexplored.
Shall we be more technical? Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic
interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts, the organism into organs, the
obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, nor
into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation,
it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are. The scientist is as
impartial as Nature in Turgenev’s poem: he is as interested in the leg of a flea as in the creative
throes of a genius. But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact; he wishes to ascertain
its relation to experience in general, and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; he
combines things in interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that great
universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has analytically taken apart. Science tells us how
to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but
only wisdom -- desire coordinated in the light of all experience -- can tell us when to heal and
when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate
ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied
beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in
relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and
valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only
philosophy can give us wisdom.
Will Durant
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APPENDIX II
The Scientific Method
The Scientific Method is based solidly on definite rules, but is none the less, like the
American Way of Life, something that must be lived to be fully understood. The United States
has a Constitution, but the American Way of Life is far more than that; so the Scientific Method
is, while based on certain readily cited rules, far more than those rules.
For one thing, the Scientific Method implies zestfully, gleefully attacking, with every
available weapon of logic, every possible logical loophole in -- your own structure of logic and
theory. It requires that a man tear into his carefully built theory with the vim, vigor and spite of
his worst enemy. It implies that a scientist’s best friend will review his work starting with the
premise that it’s all wrong and do his best to prove it’s wrong.
For the intellectual triumph, the warm glow of victory in science, comes not from
producing a new theory -- but from producing a new theory that stands up, and is useful, even
when the most knowing make deliberate attempts to find a flaw.
The Scientific Method is behind the testing of Navy armor plate. The production of a
perfect piece of 16-inch armor plate is routine and gives no special satisfaction. But the
production of a slab of 16-inch armor plate with a 16-inch armor-piercing projectile with its
nose buried in that armor, a plate bulged, distorted, but unpierced and unbroken -- that is
triumph and satisfaction. We don’t test the 16-inch plate with machine-gun fire, or with 6-inch
projectiles. Test it with the heaviest, deadliest weapons you’ve got; then, and only then, do you
have something to be proud of.
So with a theory.
There are rules for argument that lead to the building of a theory; they can be condensed
to three key, critical points, the sense of which is clear. The problem in application is the
subtlety with which violations of those rules can creep in. The critical rules are:
1. Argument by appeal to authority is of no value whatever.
2. The observation, not the observer’s report, are the important data.
3. No theory, however well-established or long-held, can stand in the face of one relevant,
contradictory fact.
The first of those rules is the one that is most often violated, usually quite
unintentionally and without realizing it. Everybody knows that appeal to authority is no sound
way to argue a case, even if the authority happens to be right. Yet so subtle can appeal to
authority be that, it is exceedingly easy to miss noticing its insertion; the preceding sentence,
for instance, deliberately exemplifies one type of very easily missed “appeal to authority,”
actually the most common of all such appeals. “Everybody knows,” “of course,” “naturally”
and similar phrases are the slipperiest customers in that respect. “Everybody knew” the world
was flat for a long, long time, and “of course” the Sun went around the Earth, as any fool
could plainly see. And common clay and the precious ruby have nothing in common -- nothing,
that is, except the same elements in somewhat different proportions.
But even the less subtle appeal-to-authority that is stamped with the Great Name is a
source of immense amounts of trouble. It was not Aristotle’s fault that, for nearly a thousand
years, science was stopped still by consistent appeal to Aristotle; he didn’t claim he knew all the
answers -- the scholastic arguers did. Even today, in an age which has some understanding of
the scientific method, Great Name arguments show up -- except, of course, that the Great
Name himself has become a Great Name by most carefully refraining from using that method!
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The sentence, “Einstein says that nothing is faster than the speed of light; it is theoretically
impossible,” contains two arguments by appeal to authority, and sounds so learnedly scientific
that anyone might be taken in by it. Saying a thing is “theoretically impossible” is, actually,
appeal to the authority of present theories. But a theory is not a fact -- it’s an intelligent set of
opinions, and no more, as any scientist realizes. So far as the Great Name argument goes,
those are easy to spot, and their value comes into focus very quickly if you simply substitute
the arbitrary name “Joe Doakes” for the Great Name. The corrected, scientific-method sentence
above -- so far as argumentative value goes -- would read, “Joe Doakes says nothing is faster
than the speed of light; in his informed opinion it appears impossible.”
Scientifically, there is no difference whatever between the two statements, so far as
evidential value goes. The evidence-statement on the subject would read, “Einstein suggested,
and physical experiment appears to prove, that nothing is faster than the speed of light; current
physical theory, which seems to fit most of the observed data, indictates it is impossible.”
That is, admittedly, a much less solidly satisfying sort of statement. It sounds weak,
uncertain of itself or anything else. And it is the sort of statement -- the sort of thinking -- that
went from the first small scientific evidence of the atomic theory in 1800 to atomic fission in
less than a century and a half. It is the scientist -- who operates on the principle that he doesn’t
already know all the answers -- who is out looking for new and better answers. A man who
thinks in terms of “This is the answer. I know this is true. That is impossible, because it
disagrees with what I know,” does not have to do research. He already knows the answers. He
is in no danger of making new and disturbing discoveries that might upset his certainty of
mind. The scientist, on the other hand, operates with the certain knowledge that he is uncertain;
he is never disappointed, for new data is constantly being found -- he’s looking for it -- that
shows that he was, indeed, a bit mistaken.
The non-scientist, who likes to work with Truths and Certainties and think in
Absolutes, the method of uncertainties and probabilities seems stifling, an impossible method
of operation. It is so impossible that it produces, in a single century, electric light and power,
radio, television, atomics, the entire science of organic chemistry ranging from dyes to
synthetic drugs, automobiles, airplanes -- practically an entirely new civilization.
By realizing that no theory is final, complete, or perfect, a new concept is admitted: a
theory is good so long as it is useful. It is, naturally, a very pleasant thing if the theory also
happens to be true, but that (shocking though the thought may be to the layman) is not at all
necessary. The really important question is not, “Is it true?” but “Does it work?” If it works,
we can use it and pretend it’s true; if it is true, that’s an added bonus.
This reasoning, which seems to some specious and downright dishonest, is the only
method so far found that produces results. Look about you: every product that has been
touched by machines in its production is a demonstration of the observed fact that, by
provisionally assuming a theory is true, concrete, useful results can be obtained. And that by
maintaining a willingness to discard or modify that theory at the first sign of failure, progress is
made.
For if a theory is good only when it works, then the first time it fails to work -- the first
fact it encounters which does not fit -- the theory must be discarded, and a new and better one
found. Only someone who insists that a theory is Truth would hesitate to discard a theory that
didn’t work. And a scientist never insists that a theory is Truth; only that it is useful.
When an apparent contradiction appears, however, the most careful checking must be
instituted. First: check the interpretation of the theory. The basic concepts of the theory might
be right, and the application of those concepts wrong. The reinterpretation of the theory may
explain the new fact. Second, and actually simultaneously, remember that the observation, not
the observer’s report, is the datum, and repeat the observations. The observer may have been
wrong. Men can’t see beyond the violet or below the red; quinine makes a man’s ears ring, so
he hears sounds that aren’t there, and no man can hear sounds above 20,000 cycles when they
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are there. Under ultraviolet light, the human eyeball glows slightly, so that one sees a mist of
light that isn’t there, but since we can’t see ultraviolet light itself, an observer will not see the
source of ultraviolet that is there. Always check the observations; the observer may be wrong.
But actual observations, tacts, are never wrong.
One source of a lot of misunderstanding is the difference between theoretical
impossibility and factual impossibility. That is best illustrated, perhaps, by the old story of the
man who telephoned his lawyer, explained a legal contretemps, and was told, “Don’t worry
about it; they can’t put you in jail for that!” The client replied, “I’m calling from the jail.”
A slight change on that might demonstrate reverse aspect. Make the troubled caller a
circus owner; this time we’ll say the lawyer replies, “That’s serious. I’m afraid they can put
your elephant in jail for that.”
In each case, theory is in conflict with physical fact; in each case, as it invariably must
by the very nature of things, theory, not fact, breaks down.
But all of this is, in essence, a discussion of the scientific method of argument, of
thought. There is, at the root of it all, the scientific technique, the final test and proving ground
of all scientific thinking. Ideally, the scientific method follows seven steps:
1. Make a series of careful observations.
A. These observations must be repeated, and are acceptable as observations only if
many people following the prescribed techniques can duplicate the results.
B. Variations of the prescribed techniques must be tried to eliminate the possibility
that the observed results might be due to a factor other than that intended. As a
gross example, suppose it is reported that a magnet will attract objects.
Demonstration show it does attract and lift iron balls; that is Step A above.
Now variations of the experiment show that the magnet attracts iron but not
copper, silver, etc. The observed effect -- attraction -- is real. Variation of the
original experiment is needed to show the actual limits of the effect.
2. Combining all relevant data, from all relevant experiments, formulate a hypothesis.
A. The hypothesis must explain all observed data.
B. It must not demand as a consequence of its logical development, the existence of
phenomena that do not, in fact, exist.
C. But it should indictate the existence of real, hitherto unobserved facts.
3. Using the hypothesis, predict new facts.
A. A logical structure broad enough to explain all observed, relevant phenomena
will necessarily imply further phenomena that have not yet been observed. Use
this mechanism to predict the existence of something which, under previous
theories, would not exist.
4. Perform an experiment and make observations on these predictions.
5. As a result of the experiment, discard the hypothesis, or advance it now to the status of
“Theory.”
6. Make further predictions, further experiments, and collect more observational evidence
until a contradictory relevant fact is found.
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7. Discard the old theory, take the new total of observational data, and form a new
hypothesis.
8. See Step Three.
This process seems, at first glance, a completely circular, going-nowhere system. It
isn’t; the 50-passenger airliner flying by just overhead testifies to that. Notice that each time
round that cycle the new hypothesis shows how to get new data, new experimental evidence,
new information. The process is not circular; it’s an expanding spiral, and each sweep around it
covers a broader and broader field of understanding.
But the most important step of all -- the one that took men longest to make once the idea
of organized knowledge was started -- is Step Seven. “Discard the old theory ... and start all
over again.” It’s hard for men -- who are basically conventional, status-quo animals! to give up
the comfortable familiarity, the nice, easy routine, of that Old Time Theory, to embark on a
completely new system that calls for a total revision of all their thoughts. It’s so easy and
comfortable to believe that the old theory is Truth, and doesn’t and won’t ever need changing,
even if it doesn’t work all the time. Like an old pair of shoes, it is comfortable, and familiar,
even if the holes are apparent.
The true scientist is in a somewhat different position. He starts off with any theory and
finds it useful only so long as it works. If it no longer works, it should be discarded, and a
new, better one fashioned.
And that is an old, comfortable familiar theory that you can settle down into, and stick
with for life. Expect change; you can be sure you won’t be disappointed.
John W. Campbell, Jr.
Nuclear Physicist,
Author of The Atomic Story
NOTE: Formulation of this Scientific Methodology was contributed in part by the engineers of
“Ma Bell”, the Bell Telephone research laboratories -- to whom thanks are extended.
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APPENDIX III(A)
Mind Schematic
The mind schematic is a block diagram illustrating analogically the observed operation
of the mind in the organism. It may be likened to the schematic diagram of an electrical circuit,
in which the position and relationship of elements derive from the connections to them and not
from their placing on the page. The connecting lines represent paths for the transmission of
messages which control activity. In this activity we can trace three separate behavior patterns.
First is the basic cycle of automatic physical adjustment, involving only the Life
Function Regulator as it regulates the life processes of the Organism. This cycle involves the
continuous metering of body conditions, such as heart rate, temperature, digestion, with the
issue of orders through the automatic nervous system to correct untoward conditions as they
develop. Here lies control of circulation, respiration, perspiration, endocrine secretion and all
other body fluid flow, and hence control of metabolism itself for each part of the body and for
the whole. The Life Function Regulator, like the governor of an engine, balances the life
processes against each other and against the environment of the Organism, through the simple
cycle of measure and correct, measure and correct, measure and correct.
It is to be noted that the Life Function Regulator in operating to regulate the Organism
regulates the physical aspects of the Analyzer, the Standard Memory, the Reactive Mind and the
Learned Motion Pattern Responder, all of which are parts of the Organism. The functions of
these parts are described at suitable points in the development of the behavior patterns involving
them.
Second is the cycle of reasoned behavior. The phases of this cycle are the receipt of
percepts by the Analyzer, the comparison of these percepts with the contents of the Standard
Memory and the selection of relevant data, the computation of possible actions and the choice
of action to be taken, and the transmission to the Organism of orders which result in that action.
These orders are ordinarily converted from relatively simple to complex patterns in the Learned
Motion Pattern Responder, whose function is commonly attributed to the spinal cord.
Reasoned behavior is rarely recyclic, because each act changes the relationship of the Organism
to its environment, thereby changing the percepts, so that the next act differs in a progressive
pattern.
The Standard Memory, on which the Analyzer depends fur data, is a tremendous file of
recordings covering every sight, sound, smell or other perception of the individual’s life,
awake or asleep. The only exceptions are that it does not record pain and that it does not receive
data when the Gate is closed during “unconsciousness.” Such data are recorded in the Reactive
Mind, to be discussed later, and cannot be transferred automatically to the Standard Memory
after consciousness is restored, because the recordings of pain and unconsciousness with them
prevent access by the Analyzer. For the same reason they are not available for conscious recall.
The contents of the Standard Memory are complete and detailed, including shades of colors and
timbres of sounds, and are indexed accurately by time, by topic, and by value to the Organism.
The Analyzer is a calculating machine arranged to analyze each situation in the light of
available data and to determine and direct the next acts of the Organism so as best to enable the
individual, his progeny, associates, and environment to survive. Except for bias toward
survival, which is essential to the continued exercise of its faculties, the Analyzer is self-determined,
and is the seat of choice in the human being. Its ability is so highly developed that
it can handle several problems at once, involving procedures whose basic patterns are compare-select-
act or compare-select-combine. This computing is ordinarily carried on below the level of
awareness, not in language but in concepts, with only the premises and solutions appearing.
In emergencies which raise the necessity level the Analyzer not only orders the
voluntary kind of behavior but also assumes control of the Life Function Regulator in order to
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quicken the whole performance of the bodily machine. By this means it suppresses the
behavior of the Reactive Mind.
Third is the cycle of reactive behavior. This cycle compasses automatic, or stimulus-response,
behavior of such elaborateness that it is often mistakenly supposed to be volitional
and deliberate. The phases of this cycle are the receipt of percepts by the Reactive Mind, where
they stimulate reactions, the transmission of these reactions to the Organism as commands, the
physical response of the organism to these reactive commands, and new percepts arising from
the physical activity. This cycle of perceive and react, perceive and react, may occur once, may
repeat in a spiral of increasing vigor, or may develop a series of cycles progressively varied in
their nature. Each of these response patterns will contain emotion, speech, motion and psycho-somatic
disturbances in varying proportions.
The exact nature of reactive behavior will follow precisely, congruently, the content of
memories in the Reactive Mind. These memories cover only perceptions received and recorded
during “unconsciousness” and in the presence of pain. They therefore cover events or groups
of events in which the individual has been a passive participant, but include data from all the
senses.
Reactive Mind memories are restimulated, or triggered, by percepts which are at least
fragmentarily congruent with them, such as a word or group of words, a smell, a scene or a
blow. The effect of repeated or extensive restimulation is to increase the sensitivity of the
stimulus-response cells in which these memories may be conceived to be held, so that smaller
and smaller restimulations suffice to trigger reactive behavior. Conversely, in the absence of
restimulators these cells become less and less sensitive, so that strong, extensive or repeated
restimulation becomes necessary to produce reactive behavior. It is to be noted that this
threshold is lowered by illness, injury or fatigue, as we often see in when people go “all to
pieces” in a state of over-fatigue. The variation of sensitivity with degree of restimulation is
independent for each memory of an event or group of events deriving from a separate period of
“unconsciousness.” It is apparent, however, that if portions of two or more such memories are
identical, they will have common restimulators and will restimulate each other through their
dramatization in reactive behavior.
Since Reactive Mind memories contain pain and “unconsciousness,” it follows that
these will appear to some degree in the dramatizations of these memories in reactive behavior,
through action on the Life Function Regulator. The dramatization of pain, with its concomitant
life function disturbances, can interfere seriously with organic function, particularly by
affecting all kinds of body fluid flow. This mechanism is at the root of psycho-somatic illness.
The dramatization of “unconsciousness” can interfere with rational behavior by causing
temporary or partial Analyzer shutdown, with the filing of additional memories in the Reactive
Mind instead of the Standard Memory. Through this mechanism the content of the Reactive
Mind can multiply itself in the presence of chronic restimulators until the behavior of the
individual becomes mostly or entirely reactive and the person is judged insane.
The three cycles of activity described may be followed readily on the diagram, where
each forms a closed loop. The tempo of the whole is determined by the Life Force of the
individual, which manifests itself physically as tenacity in life and mentally as vigor and
persistence. This Life Force is not to be confused with physical vigor, which depends also on
health, or with “energy,” which depends in part on the content of the Reactive Mind. The Life
Force should not be looked on as the fuel for the engine, but rather as the ignition.
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APPENDIX III(B)
Analyzer Schematic
This schematic diagram is a device which enables us to resolve the Analyzer into
components with an arrangement capable of explaining analogically its observed behavior as
the conscious computing, counselling and control agency of the Organism. The schematic does
this by placing the various elements conveniently and interconnecting them with circuit
pathways to show the flow of signals and messages.
The key to understanding the Analyzer is the idea of multiple attention. It possesses a
considerable number of units of attention, perhaps a score, and can devote them to a large or a
small area of activity. Each of these units may be considered to be a separate computer circuit
capable of compare-choose-combine or compare-select-act calculations. The input, or attention,
end of each of these computers may then be considered to be one of the lines of an attention
switchboard. The incoming trunks from any area of activity to which attention is paid will carry
in all perceptions, data from the Standard Memory and, when necessary, output data from the
computers themselves.
Complementary to the attention switchboard we must postulate an action switchboard
which can direct the results of thought to the Organism as action orders, to other computers for
further thought, or to the Standard Memory for filing or for delayed action.
The diagram shows these two switchboards with the computers between them, the
incoming and outgoing trunk lines, and a group of interconnecting trunk lines which handle
information being routed back from output to input fur further use. It also shows separately a
control center and a consciousness monitor, which must be described carefully in order to
avoid errors in using such words as “awareness” and “consciousness.”
The control center monitors all circuits and orders attention and action by acting as
switchboard operator. It is thus another and more elaborate compare-select-act computer,
exercising the function of personality. The diagram shows the connections for monitoring and
control, and also the Life Force connection through which the whole Analyzer is animated. It is
important to note that the control center operates continuously (but in varying degree of
alertness), whether the individual is awake or asleep, going entirely out of operation only
during complete unconsciousness.
The consciousness monitor is that element which defines our conscious awareness, our
continuity of past, present and future, our ability to look out of our eyes and say, “This is I,
looking out of here.” While the control center is aware as a normal part of its operation cycle of
perceive, judge and act, the consciousness monitor is more than aware; it is aware of being
aware. It integrates the pattern of perception, not on a calculator basis, but on a display basis,
producing a unified outlook. It is partly like the display panel in the control room of a large
machine, which, when a button is pressed, shows in moving light the inner working of the
machine, whose processes go on whether the button is pressed or not.
The consciousness monitor, however, goes out of operation when the curtain of sleep
is drawn. And with it there go out of operation the first group of computers, all of which it
monitors. The second group of computers, which it also monitors, do not necessarily cease
operation at this time. In a light sleep the individual retains these attention units alert. As sleep
deepens, however, they go out of operation one by one until in deepest sleep only the lowest
group of computers, which are unmonitored, remain in operation.
These unmonitored computers provide the attention for a watchman function, to waken
us when peril looms. They also provide creative imagination for the solving of problems while
we sleep, and for the fabrication of airy structures in dreams. Less spectacular but equally
important is their day-labor of scanning the Standard Memory for relevant data for every daily
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computation in the moment-by-moment recalculation of the Organism’s position with respect to
survival and its next move to further that end. (Survival is here considered a spectrum, from
self at one end to all life at the other.)
One trunk is shown entering the attention switchboard which existed but was unknown
and unused save as a dream channel before dianetics. It is that from the Reactive Mind, and the
Analyzer is unable to connect to it in its normal operation. With outside help, during therapy,
however, a large number of units of attention may be directed along this trunk for the recovery
of engrams from the Reactive Mind.
D. H. Rogers
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APPENDIX IV
Advice to the Pre-clear
Certain facts should be made known to the pre-clear. It is not vital that he know
anything at all about the technique of processing or that he understand dianetics; all this is
inherent in him and he will respond and work as desired by the auditor. In short, the auditor
need not explain anything except those items listed below.
1. The pre-clear should take vitamin B1 while in therapy. It requires a certain mental
energy to carry through with therapy and B1 is intimately connected with that energy’s
generation. If he doesn’t take B1 he may have nightmares now and then. Ten to twenty
milligrams a day are sufficient.
2. The pre-clear can in no way be damaged by dianetic technique. It is not hypnotism in
any remote sense of the word; in the process he remains entirely awake and is able to
pull himself out of any situation he feels he cannot face.
3. The auditor is not interested in anything the pre-clear has himself done. The data may be
of some aid, of course, but it is not at all vital to a resolution of the case. The auditor is
interested in what has been done to not what has been done by the pre-clear. Hence
wild efforts to cover up material in the belief that the auditor will discover something
bad in the pre-clear’s life are all wasted, for the auditor doesn’t want to know about it
anyway. Further, the pre-clear can save a lot of an auditor’s time by simply going into
therapy without large preambles about guilt or sorrows. The auditor will ask for the
personal relationships he needs such as attitude toward father and mother, grandparents
and friends as well as the current environment. The auditor knows what he wants to
know and the pre-clear doesn’t. Therefore, just answer the questions. If the pre-clear is
a junior (named after a relative) or if he was raised in a family which spoke some
foreign tongue he should volunteer this information immediately. He should also tell the
auditor if he has ever had any shock treatment or brain operations. Beyond that, random
self-revelation has no use and only wastes time which could be better expended in
work.
4. If the pre-clear has had some therapy such as psycho-analysis, he may tend to carry a
“remembering” habit into dianetic process. Remaining in present time and
“remembering” does no good. Dianetics has no relationship with past mental treatment.
It is entirely mechanistic and works with engineering precision.
5. The pre-clear sometimes feels a vanity in a knowledge of some study of mental healing.
It will not be of great use to him in dianetics. Arguing about dianetics with the auditor
will not accomplish any therapy. If the pre-clear wants to know about dianetics, the
auditor can tell him where he can buy a copy of the handbook. The auditor’s time is
wasted by endless argument over whether or not this or that is a fact. Entered into actual
therapy, only then can the pre-clear understand the validity of dianetics. Without
studying or experiencing at least as much as a demonstration run on the time track, the
pre-clear can know little about dianetics. Short of knowing, the arguer has no data and
all urge to argue thus proceeds from prejudice; there is no substitute for knowledge.
6. The pre-clear should know that the total process of therapy is a complete recall of his
life and complete refiling of engrams (moments of actual “unconsciousness”) as
experience and memory. The pre-clear is not being asked to get rid of anything nor is he
being asked to believe anything.
7. The pre-clear should understand that any attitude of antagonism or skepticism or even
apathy or a “desire” to neglect his engrams is derived wholly from the engrams
themselves and that these dictate his attitudes in a large measure. If he does not like the
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auditor personally, then the auditor has some counterpart in an engram. Other auditors
can be found, but this is not a good enough excuse to shift auditors.
8. Bombarded by his engrams, the pre-clear is apt to conceive the idea that he talks and
acts only from those engrams and that he is never thinking analytically. Repeater
technique tends to give this conception. It is not a fact, however, that the pre-clear
operates only on engrams. The best and most effective portions of his life, all his
rational acts, concerns and conclusions, are analytical. During therapy he has a
tendency, at first, to believe everything must be engramic but this is not true. His
analytical mind is powerful and active and as therapy progresses he is more and more in
command of his actions and words.
9. At first, in therapy, the pre-clear is apt to introvert markedly. This is a temporary
condition, usually, but may extend for some distance into therapy. Gradually he begins
to extrovert. Finally he is no longer interested in his engrams, though he may be
interested in those of others.
10. There has long been an incorrect theory that neurosis is the source of mental vigor and
ambition. This is emphatically false. If the pre-clear believes that his engrams are of any
assistance to him let him go hit his hand hard with a hammer and then argue that he will
now be better at his profession because he has a bruised skin. No engram has any
value. The engram is a parasite, regardless of its pretension that it aids the individual.
Anything the pre-clear does with engrams he can do far better without engrams. It is
true and valid that experience plays a major role in educating a man and determining his
ambitions. Engrams are not experience; they are hidden commands. Only when they
have been processed by dianetics can their content be properly used in thought and
classified as valid experience. Knowledge of the exact content of his engrams makes a
man wiser, but until he knows what they contain they can only drive him and hound
him with pain and reduce his general health and ability to think.
11. Once he knows, in the most general sense, that he has engrams, a man can raise his
necessity level to a point which will overcome them. He does not have to obey his
engrams.
12. If the pre-clear is being audited by one who is engaging his first case and has lately
studied dianetics, no apprehension need be felt. No damage can result, even if a large
number of mistakes are made. The brain cannot be damaged by dianetic therapy.
Engrams may be restimulated which contain such a phrase as “Stop it, you are taking
my mind away, piece by piece!” or “You will be well as long as I am with you,” but
these are just engrams and their actual effect may well have been to make the individual
quite ill. Have confidence in your auditor. He will become skilled with practice and the
skills of dianetics themselves will carry you through. If he is clever and experienced,
your auditor may bring about a quicker clear and a more comfortable passage through
therapy. If he is not experienced, you and he may have some interestingly involved
times. But no damage can be done.
13. If the pre-clear finds his auditor becoming angry with him, the pre-clear should refer to
the Auditor’s Code. It is there mainly to accelerate therapy and to protect the auditor,
but it is of considerable use to the pre-clear who, by every right, should insist that it be
observed. The engrams, when the pre-clear is returned to an early place on the time
track he follows in therapy, often dictate irrational statements. The auditor should
understand this. While engrams give the pre-clear no license to abuse an auditor when
the pre-clear is not in session, in actual work the pre-clear should maintain his rights in
the code to be treated fairly no matter what he does or says.
14. The pre-clear should not expect the auditor to shoulder all his burdens. The end of
therapy is to make the pre-clear much less a “push-button” machine, pushed around at
the whim of the world which uses his aberrations. The sooner the pre-clear asserts his
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own self-determinism and exercises his power of decision in his own affairs, the faster
therapy will advance. Self-determinism comes about automatically. It can be artificially
induced by the pre-clear himself who, raising his necessity level to act with entire self-determinism,
can meet the end half-way. The auditor is there to audit, not to be an
adviser in the pre-clear’s conduct of existence.
15. If the pre-clear catches himself lying to the auditor, he should know that he is only
slowing therapy. If one has pretended war wounds never received or a glittering past,
dianetic therapy is no place to carry out the illusion. Such pretenses stem from
aberrations and a clear is not responsible for his own errors in the past once he is
cleared, though society may for some time attempt to dictate, aberratedly, otherwise.
16. If the pre-clear is being audited by a marriage partner with whom there have been many
quarrels, the way of therapy may be difficult. Either be as forbearing as possible or
persuade some one outside the home to audit. Wrangles over therapy between marriage
partners markedly slow therapy.
17. If the pre-clear is a child and is being audited by a parent, the child should be advised to
express what he feels in therapy, not argued into different or false attitudes from some
mistaken parental idea of respect. The parent is already restimulative to the child, being
contained in many of the child’s engrams; it is therefore possible for the parent to
reactivate engrams by being overbearing. The child as a pre-clear should have every
right of an adult including recourse to the Auditor’s Code.
18. It is usually worthless for the pre-clear to seek data from relatives. The data is being
sought from a source not necessarily unaberrated, with memory occlusions, and which
has a personal interest in making everything in the past as creditable as possible. Such a
relative may have great power over the pre-clear, being a part of the pre-clear’s
engrams. The seeking of data is always an effort to avoid confronting the engrams
themselves and use the relative’s account as a by-pass memory. Experience has taught
that even when such a relative knows the data and remembers it, some personal interest
may be served in delivering a distorted idea to the pre-clear. If the pre-clear wants his
data checked by mother or father, be sure that mother or father has inflicted pain on him
and is a source of much trouble in the engram bank, no matter what the pre-clear thinks.
If the pre-clear wants a confirmation, take it after therapy is completed.
19. Should the pre-clear discover that anyone is attempting to prevent him from starting or
continuing dianetic therapy, the fact should be communicated immediately to the auditor
for this is a useful datum.
Anyone attempting to stop an individual from entering therapy either has a use for the
aberrations of that individual -- on the “push-button” order -- or has something to hide.
In the former case, a fear may exist that when the individual becomes stronger he
cannot be handled easily by the complainant or that he may take revenge upon the
complainant for past acts. In this case, it is true that the clear has no puppet strings and
the fear is well-grounded. As for revenge, the clear, being free from the fears and
commands in his engrams, holds no grudges: his understanding combines with his
strength; a person is only a menace as long as he is aberrated and he poses no insane
threats when he ceases to be aberrated. When the complainant against the undertaking
of therapy fears the disclosure of information, this is the very data which the auditor
most needs and which he can obtain through standard therapy. No matter how
wonderfully logical are the arguments a wife or a relative may advance against therapy,
it has its root in either fear that their control over the patient will be slacked or fear that
data exists in the patient’s engram bank which is detrimental to them. There is a further
extension of this case: wives with children may have a fear that therapy will eventually
be applied to the children, in which case much information might come to light which
the husband or society “should never know.” In any case, the aberrations of the person
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arguing against the undertaking of therapy choose self-interest rather than the welfare of
the pre-clear. There is no altruistic motive in any attempt to stop therapy.
20. The pre-clear should not regard himself as neurotic or insane merely because he wishes
to undertake dianetic clearing. The greatest majority of those who will be processed will
be “normal” people. The end of dianetic therapy is not to relieve subnormality but to
create the optimum individual. Its concern is not with mental derangement but with the
creation of mental freedom. Should anyone infer that the pre-clear engages to be
cleared because he is “crazy” and that the critic scornfully does not need such a thing,
the pre-clear need only point out that one of the ancient tests for insanity was whether or
not the person boasted of his sanity. The average person today contains scores of major
engrams. The pre-clear need only indictate that he must be the more sane because he is
doing something about his engrams and is attempting to gain a more rational plane of
existence. Psychiatry and psycho-analysis in specializing in neurosis and psychosis
have fostered a public belief that when anyone does anything about his mind he must be
neurotic or psychotic. Education is also doing something about the mind and yet none
would declare all children in schools were neurotic and psychotic. Dianetic therapy
specializes in creating the clear and though as a matter of course it resolves mental
derangement, a clear is to a current normal person as the current normal person is to the
insane -- such are the gulfs.
21. The pre-clear may find himself begging for amnesia trance, hypnosis, drugs and other
means to “facilitate therapy.” Such yearnings are not derived from any other reason than
that the pre-clear is afraid to face his own engrams; deep trance does not resolve this
problem. It can be used but is useful mainly on the insane. Dianetic reverie keeps a
steady progress and is accompanied by a steady rise in the individual’s health and
outlook. Short-cuts have not proven practical. If they had, they would be included in
dianetic therapy.
22. It is useful to advise the pre-clear that while he may grow as angry as he please at his
relatives when he discovers what they have done to him, when he is clear he will no
longer be angry and will then have the sometimes arduous task of making friends again.
This does not excuse the relatives nor does it mean that the auditor should take umbrage
at the pre-clear’s enthusiasm for revenge when he discovers what Mama may have done
to him or what Papa said; it does mean that whenever a pre-clear has given voice to
these rancors to the offenders, he has afterwards had to patch up broken relations, for
when therapy is ended there is no reason nor desire for rage. Therapy passes up a tone
scale from apathy, through anger to cheerfulness. At the beginning of the case the pre-clear
may feel very propitiative toward offenders against him and not even know they
are offenders. Half through a case he may become incensed at the offenders and indeed,
should become angry if the case is progressing at all. At the end of the case he realizes
that he was dealing, after all, with aberrees, and he weighs their disfavors with their
favors and understands without anger. If the pre-clear is a child who has been badly
abused, the auditor may have a difficult time trying to keep him from being extremely
angry and generally impolite to his parents. The phase is, after all, only a phase. When
cleared the child can love his parents of his own free will and not out of fear and
necessity. Such cases invariably right themselves. When one parent is the auditor, he
may have upon his hands at one or another stage of the case, a very impertinent and
even caustic youngster: if the parent wants the phase to pass, he will permit the rage to
reign and vigorously follow the auditor’s code, giving the child all the dignity of his
righteous anger. After all, the child is entitled to a demonstration after keeping it in and
living with it for years. He will not recover his feeling of love if that anger is checked
and scolded.
23. The health of the pre-clear can be expected to take a roller-coaster aspect during therapy.
It will not get steadily better on an even curve of progress. It will surge upward and fall
back many times during one session of therapy and will be inconstant from day to day
as new engrams restimulate and old ones reduce. He will not become seriously ill and
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he cannot become as sick as he ordinarily was. But it is disconcerting to the pre-clear to
have a nose cold three days after his birth engram was accidentally touched before it
could be reduced; it would alarm a physician who did not know the patient was in
dianetic therapy to watch blood pressure vary and the physical tone change so rapidly
from lows to highs. Yet nothing serious happens and indeed the bulk of therapy is
spent in improved and improving physical comfort. But a pre-clear should not be
disheartened or dismayed to find himself with a flicker of “coronary trouble” on
Tuesday, the shadow of a “migraine” on Saturday and a cough on Wednesday. These
are somatics which sometimes come into restimulation before they can be reduced.
Anything so restimulated by therapy cannot reach any dangerous heights and is of
passing duration. They are the illnesses he will never have again and he should be glad
to see them go. A very clever auditor can conduct a whole case without restimulating in
the period after a session more than an occasional slight ache. But if somatics manifest
themselves after and between sessions, do not be surprised, and above all do not
interrupt therapy because of these aches and pains; they are less in any case than even a
minor illness and are at worst merely uncomfortable. The point is, do not believe, as
some patients are apt to do, that the presence of an unidentified ache or pain means
anything serious is forecast in the way of illness. In therapy sessions some mild
reproduction of past pain is felt and these may continue on a milder scale between
sessions, that is all. You won’t get sick, you are getting well.
24. The daily work of the pre-clear should never be interrupted and laid aside in the thought
that a week or two of dianetics and nothing but dianetics will solve all problems. In
grade school, high school, and college 18,000 hours are consumed making an
individual a storehouse of knowledge and skill. Many more thousands of hours are
spent gathering experience on how to apply the knowledge and develop the skill. In
dianetic therapy, a clearing of all occlusions puts the individual into possession of all he
has ever studied, heard and learned and takes away the clumsiness and errors which
may have inhibited his reaching the height where he belongs. It would be worth 10,000
additional hours of time to recover and be able to use and apply the knowledge,
experience and skills of a lifetime. One receives a bonus of increased health, happiness
and longevity, an increase in longevity which is at least a hundred to one for every hour
of therapy. Yet therapy all the way to a clear takes far, far less than 10,000 hours of
work. A case is as long as it has quality and quantity of engrams: if it takes a thousand
hours, then blame the parents, not therapy. Yet few cases should consume a thousand
hours even in unskilled hands and the bulk of them should take at most two or three
hundred hours, a paltry amount of time compared to the thousands of hours of
“forgotten” education, the tens of thousands of hours of occluded reading and
experience which will be recovered, completely in addition to health, happiness and
longevity. There is no Royal Road to Clear; it takes as long as it takes. The pre-clear
should then settle his mind on the fact that he will be in therapy for some time. He
should not hold off making decisions or hang his life on the end product of being
cleared. Of course he will be impatient. Of course he will attempt to speed the process
all he can and that is good.
But he should not forget to carry along his life nor should he abandon his diversions or
his work. It has been proven that pre-clears follow a rapidly advancing curve of
progress and that from week to week their potential rises. It has been observed that they
neglect to remember (since it is no longer important to them in any way) that aberrations
are fleeing from them at a rapid rate. In dianetics one does not “learn how to live with
his troubles.” The troubles vanish like the bubbles in a ship’s wake. One does not keep
them in mind and remember that the reason one does not like spinach was because Papa
beat him when he would not eat it. The engram, refiled, does not inhibit the eating of
spinach and Papa’s beating is no longer a source of pain. The troubles are gone.
Therefore, it sometimes appears to the pre-clear, who looks only at the engrams ahead,
that he is standing still. The auditor may have to ask him how he felt this time last
August and make the pre-clear ponder it well before the pre-clear recalls that last August
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whenever he tried to write a letter he became nervous, that he hated his children’s
racket, and that rain made him wonder about suicide. When he has compared his
existence at his present level in therapy and his level shortly after he entered therapy, the
pre-clear will agree he has made progress.
In the next breath he is asking the auditor about possible identity of the ally they have
just scented in the case. The pre-clear, in other words, recognizes no progress, since all
progress is by loss of aberration; blind to this he tends to be extremely anxious and
aggressive about getting along with therapy and does not stop being so (unless he is
near the start and is a “neglect-engram” case) until one day he finds himself cleared. On
that day he takes a glance at the fact that he is cleared and is already wading knee-deep
in the enthusiastic business of living. So do not stop looking at the exterior world or
living in it for the period of therapy. Take clearing interestedly but as routine to be
followed. Give as much time to it as can be afforded and give the rest to life. And don’t
scold the auditor because work was started Tuesday and here it is Thursday and one is
not yet cleared.
25. The pre-clear should thank the auditor after each session. And he should tell the auditor
when he feels better and that he appreciates progress whenever progress has been
made. The pre-clear introverts and forgets that the auditor deserves some courtesy. This
is more important than is readily realized. Even the best of auditors are human.
26. The pre-clear has his own responsibility in aiding his own case. He has just as active a
part in locating engrams as the auditor. The pre-clear who expects to be run through
dianetic therapy as though he were a car, with no volition of his own, slows his case
enormously.
27. The pre-clear who is being handled by an auditor less forceful than himself either from
inherent personality or aberrations is liable to dictate to the auditor where they will look
for engrams and what they will do about them. Remember that if a man knew his
engrams they would not be engrams. Only an exterior mind, the auditor, knows what is
best for the case. The pre-clear who attempts this is wasting his and the auditor’s time.
At the start of the session the pre-clear may dictate that, as he has a headache, they
should put him back to a certain accident and see if that is it and so get rid of the
headache. The headache isn’t important, ever. Getting engrams that will erase or reduce
is important. All such dictations are “dodges,” aberrated efforts to avoid engrams. The
less forceful auditor, man or woman, should recognize a “dodge” when they see one
and the pre-clear, knowing this, should abandon this avoidance technique and let the
auditor audit.
28. The pre-clear should understand that the auditor is restrained in many ways by the
Auditor’s Code. The pre-clear should know the code and, knowing it, should not
impose unreasonably upon the auditor’s time or patience, for the auditor also has a life
to live and out of courtesy and the code, may be imposed upon without being able to
prevent it. Be thoughtful.
29. There is one major motto in therapy for the pre-clear: “The only way out of it is
through it!” Remember this. When the auditor says to go through the engram, be it ever
so threatening, do not beg to come to present time for that brings the engram with it.
Two or three runs and the power of that engram is broken forever. “The only way out
of it is through it!” Remember that.
30. The pre-clear is the only one who “knows” what has been done to him. It may not be
immediately in conscious recall, it may require dozens of hours to find specific
information as to what people have done. But all the data is there, available for recall in
therapy. If the data is not there, then it is not aberrative; if the data is there, it is
aberrative. Only the pre-clear “knows” how long the case will take, only the pre-clear
“knows” how many allies he is trying to disguise. The pre-clear may not be able to
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immediately recall it, but the information is there; he “knows” it. All knowledge of his
whole lifetime is available to him via dianetic therapy. The auditor can use technique to
attain the information, but it is the pre-clear who does the work, does the recalling. He
is assisted by the auditor and by dianetics. Neither the auditor nor dianetics “knows”
what the content of the pre-clear’s engrams may be; only he knows that. The auditor
and dianetics furnish the process, the pre-clear has the information necessary to resolve
his case.
Good hunting!
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GLOSSARY
ABERRATION: Any deviation or departure from rationality. Used in dianetics to include
psychoses, neuroses, compulsions and repressions of all kinds and classifications.
ABERREE: Dianetic neologism for any aberrated individual.
ANALYTICAL MIND: That mind which computes -- the “I” and his consciousness.
AUDITOR: The individual who administers dianetic therapy. To audit means “to listen” and
also “to compute.”
BASIC: The first engram on any chain of similar engrams.
BASIC-BASIC: The first engram after conception, the basic of all chains by sole virtue of
being the first moment of pain.
BOUNCER: Any engram command which, when approached by the analytical mind on the
time track, makes the patient move back toward present time.
CHAINS: Any series of incidents in the engram bank which have similar content.
CIRCUIT: See DEMON.
CLEAR: The optimum individual; no longer possessed of any engrams. A clear is an individual
who, as a result of dianetic therapy, has neither active nor potential psycho-somatic illness or
aberration. Dictionary: Bright; unclouded, hence, serene; clean; audible; discriminating;
understanding; free from doubt; sure; innocent; net, as profit over expenses; free from debt;
free from any entanglement. V.t. To make clear, as of dirt or obstruction; to enlighten; to free
from guilt, blame, etc.; to open for passage; to disentangle. V.i. To become clear and bright.
N. A clear space or part.
DEMON: A by-pass circuit in the mind, called “demon” because it was long so interpreted.
Probably an electronic mechanism.
DENYER: Any engram command which makes a patient believe that the engram does not exist.
DIANETICS: Greek, dianoua -- thought -- or more correctly, DIA (Greek) “through,” NOUS
(Greek) “soul.”
DYNAMIC: The urge, thrust and purpose of life -- SURVIVE! -- in its four manifestations:
self, sex, group, and Mankind.
ENGRAM: Any moment of greater or lesser “unconsciousness” on the part of the analytical
mind which permits the reactive mind to record; the total content of that moment with all
perceptics.
ENGRAM BANK: The storage place in the body where engrams, with all their percepts, are
recorded and retained and from which engrams act upon the analytical mind and the body.
ENGRAM COMMAND: Any phrase contained in an engram.
ERASE: To cause an engram to “vanish” entirely by recountings, at which time it is filed as
memory and experience.
GROUPER: An engram command which makes the time track or incidents on it become
tangled in such a way that the track appears shortened.
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HOLDER: Any engram command which makes an individual remain in an engram knowingly
or unknowingly.
MEMORY: Anything which, perceived, is filed in the standard memory bank and can be
recalled by the analytical mind.
MISDIRECTOR: Any engram command which makes the patient move in a way or direction
on the track which is contrary to instructions of the auditor or the desires of the analytical mind
of the patient.
PERCEPTIC: Any sense message such as a sight, sound, smell, etc.
PRE-CLEAR: Any person who has been entered into dianetic therapy.
PRE-RELEASE: Any patient who is entered into therapy to accomplish a release from his chief
difficulties, psycho-somatic or aberrational.
PSYCHO-SOMATIC: Any physical disorder or ill generated by the mind. Psycho-somatic ills
are caused by engrams.
REACTIVE MIND: The cellular level mind which is not “unconscious” but is always
conscious -- the hidden mind, hitherto unknown.
REDUCE: To render an engram free from somatic or emotion by recountings.
RELEASE: Any person who has been advanced to a state approximating 1950 normal by
dianetic therapy, whether advanced from a psychotic or neurotic condition. The act of releasing
by therapy.
SOMATIC: Dianetic neologism for pain, any body condition experienced when contacting an
engram; the pain of a psycho-somatic illness.
SONIC: Recall by hearing a past sound with the “mind’s ear.”
STANDARD MEMORY BANK: The storage place in the mind where all consciously perceived
data (sight, sound, hearing, smell, organic sensation, kinesthesia, tactile as well as past mental
computations) are recorded and retained and from which they are relayed to the analytical mind.
Includes all data of a conscious nature from conception to “now.”
SUPPRESSOR: The exterior forces which reduce the chances of the survival of any form.
SYMBIOTE: Any entity of life or energy which assists an individual or Man in his survival.
TIME TRACK: The time span of the individual from conception to present time on which lies
the sequence of events of his life.
VISIO: Recall by seeing a past sight with the “mind’s eye.”
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