Analytical Mind (500620)
Date: 20 June 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I’d like to give you a few minutes on the analytical mind, if you so desire. This is very important, although it is practically unstressed anywhere in therapy or in the book, to know something of the mechanism behind aberration as it has been observed functionally The analytical mind is a mechanism which is extremely capable and it is capable of counterfeiting or manifesting every psychosis, neurosis, compulsion or obsession or repression on the books. It’s capable of all these things. It’s capable of every insanity. Rut it’s capable of just plain coming up with it. It is the calculating machine. It is the activating machine. It is what counts in the mind.
The reactive mind—it’s about the same importance of an idly spinning phonograph record. It impinges its recordings upon the analytical mind. The reactive mind can impinge those recordings in such a way, in the absence of some portion of the analytical mind, upon the somatic mind, so that you then get a direct short circuit into psychosomatic illnesses and so on.
In other words, the analytical mind and the somatic mind are a couple. They act very, very closely together. The engrams can become impinged upon the pair. When the analytical mind is out of circuit you’re getting direct action on the somatic mind. And in view of the fact that an engram approaching to impinge itself upon the analytical mind turns it off to some degree, then you have it going rather directly into the somatic mind. So that you have automatic speech. It is straight out of the bank. Automatic speech, you get automatic action. You also get automatic fluid flow and automatic functional regulations and so on. But that is the analytical mind strata that is the activator, the capable machine, the switchboard and so forth. This thing’s a parasitic arrangement here that is moving in against a capable machine.
Now, the analytical mind is evidently so constructed that each and every thing which you will see a person doing or saying . . . [gap] . . . it’s out of the abilities of the analytical mind, but those abilities are being perverted. Those abilities can never be intensified beyond what they are, natively. They can never be intensified. But they can be so impinged by engrams that if you’re speaking in terms of a large automatic record changer, the record has come out of the slot and has moved onto the platter and now this is all it will play is just that record or that type of record. This will be in the case of a manic. A person manifesting enormous strength and so forth.
Sloppy thinking, very crude, sloppy thinking of a character that one would normally assign to the most degraded and barbaric society has been used in the past concerning the analytical mind. So we have a situation here where the credit has been going to the aberration. The aberration is the thing, oh yes. Now, the psychiatrist, psychologist and so forth was playing right into the hands of the engrams, playing right into the hands of aberration by saying and crediting aberration itself with enormous strength. They rendered it less possible for the problem to be solved or for people to be sane by saying that a neurosis is the thing which makes a genius. This remarkable mis-reasoning is second only to the remarkable assumption that all a person can remember is delusion and so on; that all insanity is without actual cause except the cause of insanity—this circular reasoning.
Now, the assignation, then, to aberration, of enormous power and strength has convinced a lot of a society as to the great value of being crazy. Well, being crazy has no value whatsoever. The analytical mind, by test, experiment and observation has been shown to work in a number of very precise ways. One of the first methods it has of learning is mimicry. If you have ever seen a little child going around mimicking his elders—he mimics maybe the dog. Like the little girl that, at the age of two or something like that, she’s going up the steps on all fours and she gets down on all fours before the door and scratches. That’s the way to get in the door. Her friend the dog says so. Up at Harvard they take a human being and put him in the cage with an ape and the little baby ape is growing along just fine, and everything went along swell. The baby ape was mimicking the human child and then the grandparents of this child that had been loaned for the experiment observed the fact the child was scratching like the ape. And they hastily removed the child from the care of the university.
So, mimicry is number one on the learning. That is to say, coordinating the body as one sees other people coordinate their bodies, A little baby in here at the age of about three months will open her mouth as she sees other people opening their mouths, and hope that some kind of sound is going to come forth that will mimic the sound that she hears from somebody else’s voice. This is observable all through. Now, that’s mimicry. The mind can mimic. Well, this is no reason whatsoever to assume that mimicry is complete aberration. It’s not! It’s a method of learning. Well, there are a lot of methods of learning like this.
The standard psychiatric reasoning has been that the personality is composed of a number of insanities, in small degree. This is like saying that an automobile runs because its valves are out of adjustment and would not run when you adjusted the valves. They completely overlook the automobile and they’re listening to nothing but the squeaks. Those aren’t harsh words, it’s just an effort to establish a reorientation with regard to this.
Now, a reorientation of it is very simple. One sees a manic-depressive. Now, a human being can get depressed; analytically get depressed. It’s a natural mechanism, for instance, to feel sad if one loses something. This doesn’t mean that the second you take out aberrations regarding loss that one no longer feels sad in any way if he loses something. But he doesn’t feel aberrationally sad. In other words, he can pick up his life at that point and go on.
If he has an engram in there, the mechanism in the analytical mind which permits him to be sad is now impinged with an engram of the subject and he can feel only sad: his depressive part of this manic. Now, he had, let us say—this particular case of a manic-depressive—he had the potentiality of being a very strong man and a very able one. He has a lot of engrams that say he is no good. There is one engram, an ally engram, that says he is some good, and that he is strong and that he is able and that he is powerful. This is his manic. And you move that forward into the machine and regard it just as nothing more than a cheap phonograph record.
That thing will move in on the machine and it will impinge and use only as much strength as is available in the analytical-somatic mind series. It can’t use any more than that. You could take a dummy, you could take a person who is a moron and with a lead pipe and other means lay in engrams to the fact that he was the most powerful person on earth, that he was a genius to end all geniuses, that he could write the greatest books in the world and so on, ad infinitum. And then key in that engram for him. And you’ve got a moron, acting on the stet data that he is a genius. And there’s nothing unhappier. He has a conviction now that he can do these things but he can’t do them. And you get some rather pathetic things.
Well, in view of the fact that he can’t do them, people are going to start breaking or stopping, by their observations, his dramatization of this manic. And the next thing you know, he’s going to be a very sick man because he’s going to fall back upon the fact that that thing was laid in with a lead pipe. All right, now he is constantly suffering with the pain of that lead pipe. Because the compulsion is to do this; if he doesn’t do this he’s going to be hit or he is hit.
There’s the reactive mind forcing its command upon the analytical mind. But the analytical mind can’t carry it out. Now, if the person happens to be able and did happen to have a good set of brains and he had that engram, sure, it would move in there but it would carry too far. The thing is constantly keyed in, let us say, and he goes off. And remember that this thing has cut down his ability to be reasonable. So now he is going forward on the idea that he’s going to be the greatest person on earth and he’s terrifically strong, that he is able. Well, he is strong and he is able. And it can’t make him any stronger or more able. But it makes him less able to have the compulsion to keep demonstrating it continually and, like a dynamo that has lost its governor, he will eventually just fly into bits over this thing.
This is your boy wonder who burns out, and other people. I have known, by the way, several boy wonders who, in a very quiet way, went right on being boy wonders, straight on through. They didn’t make the histrionic show of it perhaps, but they nevertheless were boy wonders. Such people as Thomas Edison, if you look back over his past, was dealing less with compulsions than anybody I ever want to read about. And he gave us all sorts of things.
I found out in another case that a compulsion to be very good along one particular line, which was the composition of music, had ruined a man. But he was an able musician. But he had the compulsion to be the greatest musician in the world. So at any moment that it seemed to him even for an instant—and it only took an instant—that he was not going to be the greatest musician in the world, he’d quit on any particular line of music in which he was engaged. And he’d tried all of them because the engram did not specify.
Removed this engram and the fellow settled down to composing. He had no time to pay any attention to the act of composing music. The only thing he had any time to pay any attention to was the fact that he had to. So he never got any time to compose. And you will run into many people like this.
What I’m trying to stress here is something that you will find of value to you in working with people. They will have a tendency to hold on to these manics. The reason they hold on to them is both educational and aberrational. Most of the time they have content in the engram which says they have to hold on to it. And on the educational line they have received it from the society now for decades that the reason they are great is because—and before that it was because they were temperamental—now the reason they are great is because they’re insane.
The person who has one of these mechanisms at work can be made a little more amenable by an understanding of the situation. He’ll normally look over the situation, too, and look back on his past and recognize that he has had a lot of failures along this line. And you can help, yourself: take it away from him. Because when you take it away from him then the mind can evaluate properly on the situation.
The sorriest sight in the world is a man who has a compulsion to be one thing and whose basic purpose and personality say that he must be something else. He wants to be, let us say, a good sailor. He likes the sea and so on. But the compulsion says that he must teach school. He has to be a schoolteacher. And such things would line up into a proposition where—well, there was one statement of it: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Well, you’ve got basic personality going on one route—on the other. There’s a dual purpose.
Once in a while, for instance, a person is found in an insane asylum who has the conviction that he has the power and the secret to save the world. This is very interesting. There is the fourth dynamic held in a vise and pushed right out to the front but he has nothing to go with it whatsoever. There are many religious aberrations, engrams with the content and so on which will come out and do this. But they land in the sphere of the fourth dynamic. And there they are and he has this awful compulsion to do it and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do. But this combining with other things will give him the most remarkable pattern. He has nothing to offer.
It’s a mechanism, too, and it’s used analytically along this line: “I have a great secret. Therefore you should be good to me. And I am safe as long as I have this great secret.” So therefore he’s got to act this way. And then the fellow who’s saying, I’m going to save mankind” and goes out and slaughters several million people. Hitler and . . . [gap] He believed quite sincerely that he was busy saving the world for his race. And Hitler without that confounded aberration would probably have been quite a guy. He was stuck in the third dynamic on the subject of the German people. I call attention to the days when Hitler was being gestated. I’m not sure when Hitler was born but it was back in the days when the kaiser was going to bring the world to power—Bismarck.
Male voice: At the turn of the century.
Yes. The talk of German nationalism—that was what was in the air at that time. There had to be a German nation. And you take the baby with too tight a corset out to too many speeches at the picnic grounds with the band going oom pa, oom pa, oom pa, and you . . . Sure. A little, innocent cause. How many human beings did he kill?
Male voice: I think it was about six million, something like that But that is nevertheless a natural mechanism of the analytical mind, that the fellow has something that he believes man can use, he’ll damn well put it forward; not in one of these superaberrated protective mechanisms, but he will put it forward. And if he has something which is going to help the group he will try to put that forward, too. But he won’t go around looking sly and thinking he is being followed everywhere, and that the FBI is after him and so on. He’ll just put it out. And he is more able to put it out and more able to formulate it if he doesn’t have the compulsion to do so. Because that compulsion to do so attenuates analytical power. The mind is cut down by being impinged by the engram. Therefore he’s unreasonable to some degree, therefore he has less ability to put it out. There’s another mechanism that the mind uses to save number one, the first dynamic. Now, some fellow goes out and he gets slapped in the head by a Kodiak, one of those big Alaskan brown bears, let us say. And he gets slapped in the head by one and if he is awfully smart he will lie down promptly and play dead. He will probably be cuffed for fifty feet and he may live and he may not live, but there’s a chance to live. There’s no chance to live fighting that brown bear, 1,600 pounds of the world’s largest carnivorous animal. No chance. So he plays dead.
Now, playing dead is a pretty good mechanism. You can go out on the battlefield for instance and you trip over something and fall flat and you’re in a slight depression there and the bullets are now whizzing overhead. Good mechanism. Lie there. Damn good mechanism. Unless you’ve got the third dynamic kicking in there as being a highly vital factor, the fellow will keep right on lying there, too. And certainly when we speak of battlefields there is no fourth dynamic in question here at all. That has been utterly neglected. Now, when that mechanism— which is a good solution—there are a lot of times when a person can use this solution: Be quiet and play dead. I’m not dangerous, leave me alone.” A person can live longer and sometimes win a lot of battles that way. Now all of a sudden we have a fear engram, fear paralysis engram coming through and impinging itself on that fear paralysis mechanism. And we get a catatonic. The person is playing dead for an unreasonable reason.
Well, another one: the case of the paranoia, “They’re all against me,” and that sort of thing. Well, it would be part of the analytical mind to be quite observing of those forces in its surroundings which were antagonistic toward it.
As a matter of fact, I defy anybody to solve a problem that does not take into account the forces which are going to be aligned against the solution. If he doesn’t take those into account, the solution’s no good. He can’t go out here and say, “I’m going to build a dam across this river” and completely neglect the fact that the river’s full of water. There is something that’s going to stop him—the force of that water—from building a good dam. He’d be crazy if he neglected it.
In the case of a paranoid or a paranoiac, this mechanism of taking cognizance of the things which are liable to suppress one’s activities is so thoroughly impinged and held in place that the person thinks of nothing but those forces which are going to be aligned against him. And he goes around doing nothing but worry about these things and think about these things. In other words, that power of the analytical mind has been pushed out of line so far that now we can’t really deal with the problem at all because we have no good way, no rational way to meet the natural obstacles.
Another thing about the analytical mind is that it runs on targets. It runs on obstacles. It has to imagine or pose obstacles in order to do anything. By that I mean it has to conceive of what obstacles it is going to meet, just in the process of walking from here out to the front walk. So it’s a machine which runs very, very ably on the idea of taking obstacles into account. And it has a lot of fun getting over obstacles. It actually, in its natural state, rather enjoys obstacles so long as they are known. The second the obstacles become unknown it then has to search in such a wide sphere that it becomes a little bit unsettled, it isn’t too well aligned. So it’s going up against the unknown. That is to say, there’s nothing we can align ourselves against. So all of the monitors, you might say, start idling in their search in various directions. There’s no alignment with what it has to do and it can’t find the target. So it does nothing. But give the analytical mind a target, demonstrate the fact that the target exists and it will charge it or it will attack it or it will avoid it or it will do something else with regard to it. And it may even be a good solution to succumb to the obstacle, temporarily.
Anyone who takes a job, for instance, in a large corporation is succumbing to the obstacle of food, clothing and shelter and authority.
Male voice: What about when the analytical mind is presented with a problem and finds it all unknown, no known solutions, no known progress, the reactive mind then can come into play and take command.
This could happen on a mechanical arrangement. Evidently you can hypnotize a person and tell him that when you pinch him in the hand it is not going to hurt. You have automatically lined up against that hand pinch, to come in the future, a certain number of resistive units. So when the pain comes through they file it under the heading of waiting. They don’t register it. Now they’re prepared. But when we simply pinch the person’s hand, the pain comes straight on through and it will knock out of alignment some of these items, and therefore it can come right on through.
In such a way you take a horizon of activity and the mind sees it as having no target, but full of danger of an unexplained, inexplicable source. It finds that there is real danger here. And the units start diving into the bank—into the standard banks to discover what data we have regarding this situation. And units dive this way and they dive that way and they dive the other way and they’re fanning out. There’s less and less alignment then. The alignment is just as wide as that horizon of the unknown is wide. And suddenly you get the impact of a shock, you say “Boo!” to the person.
Take a little kid out here, it’s dark, he can’t figure it out and he’s walking along, he doesn’t know you’re there and you suddenly say “Boo!” And he goes about a foot off the ground. In other words, he had nothing aligned toward a “boo.” And it came straight through and he got quite a shock on it.
Well, in this fashion, on a higher computational level, when the mind can select out no obstacles out of the field of action, it can’t find anything to attack, no targets, nothing explained, it is in a highly disorganized, you might say, state. Because it’s not aligned with anything. Of course at that moment the minutest stimuli could reactivate an engram.
Male voice: How about a boxer out on his feet?
A boxer out on his feet who is traveling 100 percent on his training pattern? Yes, I had a case of that, of a boxer who was—some doctor had the temerity to operate on him. And he did not know that this man was a trained wrestler. And so they start to put him out and as he starts out, what clicks in is the training pattern.
Well now, that training pattern is all mixed up with engrams by this time because he’s been observing, at engramic moments, other wrestlers. He is in more valences than you could count, through all the bouts he’s been through. So here all of a sudden the doctor straps him down, feeds him the—oh, he’s kind, mild, up to the moment when the analytical mind is attenuated to the level of the training pattern. And at that moment the boxer, being rather slim-hipped, came out from underneath the straps. Just any time you find yourself on your back, what you’re supposed to do in boxing is roll over on your face and get your knees under you and come on up. Which of course he proceeded to do. He slid out his hips, he rolled over and he came up with the— popping the chest strap which he had pulled loose. And proceeded to clean up the hospital. And when he woke up there were about twelve people in the room in there holding various parts of his anatomy. And he had no recollection of it but, gee, those people had black eyes and twisted wrists and everything. He had evidently put on a very intelligent exhibition, all on the basis of training pattern.
Now, there we—starting back at mimicry again, that’s where you get valences. In order to mimic somebody, you have to be able to set up a mock circuit to be that person, temporarily. Mimicry. So you can set up a valence. But the mind sets up and tears down these circuits just at a terrific rate. They can be set up, the data pattern can be stored, anything can happen that you wish. Now, during moments when the circuits themselves can’t be—intelligently, that is to say—monitored into being and monitored out of being, we get a permanent mimicry setup. And we get a valence: permanent mimicry.
When you take out all of the permanent valences out of a person, all you’re doing is taking the solder out of the circuits so that he himself, not you, but so that he himself can now shift at will through these various valences. And as a matter of fact, right at the present moment any one of you or myself could set up valences that would go right straight through on a complete parade of everybody here, so that there would be mimicry of each one of these persons. And then tear it all down.
It’s just an analytical setup. It’s very easy to do. The way you learn to shoot a bow is you’ve seen Ugh out here shooting a bow, and he stands so and so and such and such. Well, we don’t examine on an archery professional basis that one plants one foot forty-five degrees from the other foot and at a distance of 27¼ inches and that one draws back the bow with a certain flick . . . No, he just doesn’t go into this sort of thing. [gap] He sets up the other person complete and then at that moment he picks up the bow and he just shoots it. And you’ll find, incidentally, that once all of the aberration about not being able to learn, training and so forth, is out of a person, that he could just glance at another person going through a certain action and then with full confidence do the action. It’s quite remarkable. [gap] This valence proposition is quite interesting because one can get stuck in everybody’s valence. There is a setup in the reactive mind that says, “You’re just like everybody else.” “Well, I have to be like everybody else because if I wasn’t, why, everybody would be furious with me.” Well, you get some sort of an engram at work like that and this nice, precise valence mimicry mechanism goes into full bloom. And the person finds himself in the horrible situation of mimicking everybody he meets, but unable to stop it. He feels identified with everybody around him. He sees somebody doing something and he’s liable to find himself doing the same thing. In other words, you get stet, without consent, shifts into other people’s valences. And the mind sets up a valence for everybody who comes along.
Male voice: What do you mean by the word “stet”? “Stet” is a word used in typography. It means “left in place. Left as is.” Male voice: “Status quo,” isn’t it?
Yeah. “Status quo” would be it, but “stet” means “there it is, leave it there,” sort of a thing. It’s fixed that way. Well, what I was going to say is as you can see now the amount of analytical power necessary to follow out the commands of an engram which says, “You’re just like everybody else. Well, I have to be.” Male voice: What would it do?
Well, that’s an analytical position because the analytical mind has got to, for instance, “If I had that, I’d set myself up as Dick.” Male voice: You can make that a little more exaggerated by saying that the average mans engrams—you’d have to be like everything you see.
Mm-hm.
Male voice: For instance the guy went out in the pasture and saw the horses, why, he’d run around like a horse.
Mm-hm. On an engram basis. But what a complicated analytical circuit it takes to obey that engram. It would take a very complicated one. We have quite voluntary assumptions of valence in the society too. We take the days when the Prince of Wales was parading around and had nice clothes, everybody was wearing what the Prince of Wales wore. And that was perfectly agreeable, that was the style. Of course that was really a winning valence, because that’s a very top-echelon proposition, high social level.
It is an effort to find a higher plane of winning. And if a person is rather dissatisfied with being himself for some reason or other, he will assume a higher winning plane. But that’s all on an analytical basis.
Now, I’d like to just round that off on the analytical mind. Don’t ever permit yourself to be persuaded by a patient, since the research on this thing has been very subtle, that he is achieving any benefit whatsoever or any assist whatsoever from any engram. Because he definitely is not.
Knocked engrams out of people—I knocked one out of myself that had me more stalled down than anything else I know of. It had to do with very, very superfavorable comments on my writing. And after it I could barely push a pen. Because the target was set up so high, I had to do so much in order to carry out that manic that I was dissatisfied with doing anything less than that. As a consequence I did nothing. It wasn’t any very tricky sort of a thing. I mean, it was just a statement. And it was completely beyond my ability to carry out such a level of writing. Super, super artistic, fairy tale type of writing, mostly in blank verse and so forth was what this damned thing called for. I mean it was not necessarily beyond my ability, it was completely beyond my taste. It had me frantic for about a week. And here everybody was being very nice to me at the time I was out.
Well, in short, you’re going to find arguments on the part of patients and you’re going to find manics that they educationally have come to believe necessary to their livelihood. And you can’t suddenly set them up and show them without the manic they’re doing fine. Because they’ve got the manic. And you will find inevitably that they are not doing fine. But they can’t believe they are not doing fine.
Here’s a fellow that, for instance, he’s supposed to be a great runner. And he goes out and he runs. And he’s lost all kinds of races and he sits around and he grouses. And he received a lead medal at a state fair once. This thing he’s got hung up but he’s ashamed of that because that isn’t great enough and he’s in a state of high dissatisfaction. And yet you try to take this manic away from him that says he’s a great runner. “Nuh-uh.” Because he wouldn’t be a great runner. He protects the thing that’s licking him.
Male voice: Out in the world, Ron, generally, a fellow like Edison—I noticed you remarked before—are there any accidental natural Releases or even Clears?
Well, there are lots of people who have enough dynamic force so that when the dynamic is blocked a little bit by engrams, their native ability just overrides.
Male voice: Genetic . . .
Yes, genetic dynamics. And there are lots of these, by the way.
Male voice: In aberrated societies, in psychometric patient testing you know the relative average or percentages are of the total population and you take those relative values and then the relative values of a release—a released population and then a cleared population, would the dynamics or degree of IQ remain constant? You see what I mean?
Yeah, that’s an interesting question. But we’re not going to have to worry about that question for some time, however. And I would rather observe it than postulate what it might be. I can postulate this however, is I think in the wildest imaginings, you couldn’t conceive of more than 10 percent of the populace in the next fifty years being Clear. Which poses a rather unfortunate circumstance. It poses an intellectual aristocracy.
The people who have a high dynamic, who have an urge to be better, who want to keep things going and so forth have now set out and they have widened the gulf enormously. And there will be a lot of people who don’t have the force to do so, who will be dragged along with them because they have associates. But the preponderance of them will be getting there because of.
There is where Preventive Dianetics cuts in strongly. And actually to the society, I believe Preventive Dianetics really means more than therapy on a long run, on a long haul basis, because it will eventually reduce the insanity and criminality in the society without taking into account every individual in the society. It’s thrown into society on an educational level, in other words.
Mate voice: And would the interpretation of the dynamics, I mean on a conceptual plane, be the same as intelligence?
There is an equation not much covered in that book on potential value equals intelligence times dynamic to the x power. That thing, figured out for every dynamic in terms of symbolic logic, not numerical, will give you a relative final value on human beings. And you’ll find that people with a rather high dynamic force and so on can swing over the tops of their engrams and can sort of turn on their minds by brute force and take a look at something like Dianetics and they can figure it out. Then there are people who just need it because they say, “Well, this is something new,” They have engrams about it. Those people, by the way, don’t carry on very far with it, A person has to have a sort of a recognition of it. And I have found that people with relatively low dynamic may be able to recognize it but they can’t do anything about it. Intelligence is definitely entered into it. It’s not a clear-cut picture that can be delivered out on a silver platter, Male voice: That gets into survival necessity too.
Mm-hm! You bet your life, I have seen a lot of people toy around with it, I get letters all the time from somebody who is out in Keokuk and just as soon as they have seen some proof of this and that and so on, why, then they’ll be very happy to see that somebody else tests it and they go around in this circuitous way. And you can be very certain that this person doesn’t have enough dynamic to overcome enough engrams to clear up his intelligence to a point where he’s got any point of recognition.
Because the funny part about Dianetics is it doesn’t fall into the tried-but-not-true patterns of psychology, where if you set up enough experiments to prove that rats run, you’ll eventually prove that rats run. There’s a lot of recognition in it: “Does it seem this way?” and “Are these correct?” and “What is my judgment of this situation?” But it has to be a point of my judgment.
Now you get somebody coming along saying, “Well, I have to depend upon the judgment of Dr, Zilch, Dr, Zilch has been very active in the field of sorting cat fur for years and his opinion is absolutely necessary and I have to know what he thinks before I can think.” Now, doesn’t that immediately pose a situation where a man’s dynamic must be subordinate to an authoritarian dynamic? So it doesn’t say much for his dynamic, does it?
It has been my finding that people who do that, start in on therapy—where they’re doing co-auditing and they sort of run down. See, it’s a contest. You could pick up enough engrams out o{ them in order to reinforce their dynamic. But it’s somebody else has got to carry it. They’re not going to carry it. The auditor is going to have to carry it. When they’re asked to carry it as an auditor with relation to somebody else, they don’t make the grade.
I’ve been fascinated by watching this sort of a thing. It’s just like the person who is frightened to handle Dianetics. Something like the guy who’s frightened to handle an airplane. He’s frightened to handle the airplane, what’s he going to do with the airplane? He’s going to wreck it. Isn’t that right?
Male voice: Well, I don’t know. I was pretty frightened the first time I took off! But you took it up.
Male voice: Yeah.
All right. [gap] Male voice: . . . and in it I had to write “flight training” Well, I wrote, “fright training” F-r-i-g.h-t. That has been kicked around a little bit about miswriting words and mispronouncing words and the reasons for it are engramatic probably.
My instructor picked that up and he says, “Well, it may be so, but I don’t know.” (laughs) There are two reasons for anything like this. Sometimes the mind goes so fast that it telescopes words. And you get portmanteau words, which are sometimes very apt.
Male voice: Some of these . . .
Yes. The mind is racing along and the language is not keeping up and you don’t have the circuits fed in there quite solidly enough to keep a check on the run of the language. The language is lagging way behind. So all of a sudden the fellow gets tired of this and he just hauls up the last word up out of the paragraph and something out of the first one and it sounds rather odd.
Second male voice: One thing I’d like to get cleared up about succumbing and large—belonging to large corporations. Would you care to elaborate on that?
It’s a species of succumbing.
Second male voice: What are we going to do? I mean, are we going to eliminate large organizations?
No. No, this is no crusade about anything. There are five ways to handle any situation. One is to attack the situation. To attack it. To avoid it. To flee from it. To succumb to it. Or to neglect it. So we’ve got those five methods.
Second male voice: And the purpose here is income or, rather, food and shelter All right. Now let’s put it on the basis of food, clothing and shelter. Naturally one has to overcome those. He has to attack that objective. Well, in order to attack the objective he has to make compromises along the line. And so you actually get all five of them working in an economic pattern of any one individual. He is succumbing to something in order to attack something else and he is making compromises and adjustments all the way along the line . . .
Second male voice: I can see your point. I can see it.
Somebody doing something that was terribly onerous to him—utterly, crushingly, onerous. Like standing there punching a drill press. And he punches it eight thousand times a day.
Second male voice: Man on an assembly line.
Yes. He puts in one tack. His work carries to him no compensation other than food, clothing and shelter. Now, that is a hell of a price to pay for food, clothing and shelter.
Male voice: There s one other point that comes up there. Well, that particular one is onerous, but you get some other job that might appear to the general population to be rather onerous and yet you get one person there doing the job who takes a great pride in doing it well Mm-hm.
Male voice: And really enjoys doing it.
Oh, sure. This is vocational adaption. Now, you go over to New York here and you’ll find that there are girls who are filing letters from Swink & Company, and Slop & Company and they go right on down the line and they’ll just be as happy to file all those letters and they’re proud of where they are . . .
Male voice: Good thing we’ve got people like that in our current society.
Yes. Sure.
Male voice: Our garbage would really rot, wouldn’t it?
That’s absolutely correct. But this is really not a very sentient equating here of anything. It is the fact that man needs existence as an individual. He is commonly forced into very rough situations by present economic society, in order to eke out an existence. I know of too many people who, just to eke out an existence, are carrying on the most horribly boring, futureless things in the world. You know them too.
Male voice: An optimum individual wouldn’t fit very well in the general patterns of industrial . . .
Well, if he’s optimum for himself, I would feel that he would fairly well fit himself in to some degree where he belonged. He would fall into his own slot. Without it being a slot.
Male voice: He would find his own slot before he got to it.
Sure. Oh yes, he would find it first.
Male voice: Not drop himself into the first one that came along That thing of which I was speaking a moment ago had less to do with corporations than military service, which takes fifty men standing in line and just begins to tell them off on what they’re supposed to do as they pass down the line. The overcapability, the fellow who has more than the job requires, gets absolutely no benefit from it. You pull down the whole level of the organization just by assignment, assignment, assignment, assignment. This has nothing to do with what the fellow can actually do. Militaristic, regimented societies, social state, Truman-ism, that sort of thing is the curse of mankind.
Big corporations, however—I know of lots of engineers in big corporations who are just rated according to seniority, who are really hot. Good boys that want to do the job, would like to do the job, that could be of benefit. And it’s just seniority. They’re busting their hearts on the whole thing.
Male voice: I guess they haven t quite got the dynamic to go out and set up their own.
Yeah.
Second male voice: You mentioned a senator that was interested in Dianetics in one of the footnotes in the handbook. I just wondered if we have any other people in the government that are interested or are into therapy.
The Chief of Statistics of the US Public Health Service just went into therapy about four days ago.
Second male voice: Those higher echelons in there—something like that would be wonderful . . .
This guy is high enough echelon so that the mental hygiene program of the United States as formulated by the US government—he’s one of three who formulates it.
Male voice: That’s a good start Yeah, that’s pretty high.
Second male voice: Does he run easily? Or is he . . . ?
Oh, he’s a lousy case. He’s stuck in measles.
Second male voice: I was hoping he would run easily because he would, you know, move along faster No, he’s stuck in measles and his auditor isn’t too good. But he’ll get there.
Third male voice: Is it generally true, Ron, that people who direct corporations—that a lot of people get there through manics?
Not unless they’ve got it on the ball, too. You would look at a lot of people that you will suppose that a psychiatrist would be very happy to immediately say, “This is a manic. Oh, this is a bad manic,” and so on, who has gotten there on the educational level, who has disliked his surroundings and his jobs and who keeps building himself up by attacking the target. And he attacks the target more and more. He doesn’t like the kids he went to school with. He doesn’t like to live like a pig. And the first thing you know, he keeps on going upward, he begins educationally to keep raising his necessity level higher and higher and higher. He’s got a high dynamic in the first place or he wouldn’t be there.
Male voice: Analytical realization of his ability Yes, educationally. And you get something that appears to be slightly manic, but it is not manic at all.
Second male voice: Ron, someone brought up a point here about these people who don’t want to pay the fee. As far as I’m concerned personally, I don’t hold this up to any standard, but you can’t live a patient’s life for him.
That’s right.
Second male voice: You can’t tell him how to get the money or where to get the money.
That’s right.
Second male voice: Or anything else. You’ve just got to sit back there and . . .
It seems to be very wicked. I have seemed very wicked to a lot of patients on the basis of, “Well, you’re a self-determined individual. Go ahead and work it out.” Not on the basis of fees, because I never operated much on fees. But he has a problem with his daughter Elsie. And he wants me to tell him the answer. And his reply to your statement there would be, “But you don’t have as many engrams as I do. And you’re getting along fine and you can think better than I can. Now, why don’t you figure out this problem for me?” Well, he could not put you in possession of enough data to solve the problem adequately.
Male voice: What I was doing was posing problems for next year when the Washington branch starts going—we’re going to want interest from all these top people who realize they are top people and realize that they’re needed; they’re going to start playing on this business of “Well, while I’m very important, I still don’t get paid very much, and cant you reduce your rates for me since I am important?” Mm. Oh, tell him to go find an auditor. I wouldn’t worry about it because the number of people that the professional auditor will have to carry all the way through, as far as I’m concerned, is zero.
Male voice: Mm-hm.
What you should definitely do, even though the case seems to be creeping at a crawl and check runs here show that it could be lots better—you haven’t got time. You just plain don’t have time to carry a case all the way. And therefore the fee is not a fee for going straight on through. It’s a fee for being helped on through.
Don’t tie yourself up with any patients.
Male voice: No auditor has the time to carry anyone through.
That’s correct, right there.
Male voice: So therefore, any person that wants to go through should eventually be talented and have the time to want to work in . . .
Right. You’re working here on natural selection. Might as well recognize it. Natural selection is very definitely inherent in the whole thing, just as it is in society. You’re introducing an artificial—or maybe not so artificial—evolutionary step into the organism. It is being freed from certain cellular limitations. It’s an evolutionary step as you look at it. Natural selection always plays a part in that.
You will find each one of you will have to carry one person all the way through, sooner or later. It’ll work out on an average like that. Because you will be being carried all the way through. But the people you help and that you work on and so on, if you started to carry them all the way through and handle all of their problems, take care of the whole thing, you would find yourself so tied up that you couldn’t do a lot of work in the field beyond that point. That, to me, is important. We don’t have very many people—there won’t be very many people for a long time who will be real professional auditors.
That’s why I keep hammering down on the basis of, yeah, a professional auditor could go out here and Mrs. Gotbucks wants to be carried all the way through and this puts the guy out of circulation for months while he worries around with whether or not she hates Pekingese dogs.
Male voice: Charge her for it That’s right. Charge her for it. Well, that’s just dandy.
Second male voice: Well it isn’t just the charge, it’s the time.
Third male voice: But you have the third dynamic to consider and the fourth.
Definitely, definitely.
Now, we got something the other day here, a movie actor wanted an auditor flown out . . . [gap] Male voice: How much per hour?
That was not under discussion. What was under discussion was he was willing to advance $1,200 just to cover the initial expenses on it. Now, you could go out there in a movie colony and you could make yourself a pile of cash, there’s no doubt about it.
Only you can make the money just the same as with handling it the other way. The thing to do would be to take this fellow and at a very, very good fee, train him up and start him in and oversee his case. And you could make probably more money running forty movie actors than you could running one. And at the end of the time you would have forty movie actors who were cleared. Incidentally, an actor gets into bad shape. Because if he has anything that makes his valences stet, he’ll start going into his part valences and sticking there. And this definitely encumbers his acting ability.
Male voice: Wouldn’t it restimulate them?
Oh, yes. Continually. Actors are the craziest people on the face of the earth. They are, as a profession.
Male voice: When does this basic purpose start to take hold on a Release?
Oh, very early.
The fellow starts thinking more and more about something or other that he means to do. The next thing you know, why, he’s on his way Male voice: Probably something that he thought about off and on} too.
Well, sure. You look back along his track and he’ll have all kinds of training that he has added in on top of that thing. It’s very interesting, see.
Male voice: Building up the training for what he wants to do without knowing what he wants to do.
That’s right.
Male voice: What would you suggest we do with the auditors that we fix?
What do you suggest you do with them?
Male voice: Yes.
We were thinking today of putting over a double grade on the thing, on the grade of professional auditor. Professional auditor. The professional auditor would be in the position of getting material, people and so forth channeled to him by the Foundation and he would find himself pretty well top dog in an area. Whereas he would make auditors and he could certify auditors when he was satisfied that they could audit. [gap] For instance this chap who’s coming in Wednesday from the coast, we can use him as a liaison in the area. Chap calls up right after the news of this was spread around and he wants to come back. And another guy wants to come back. And gee, we would just be knee-deep in people from the coast. Well, why? Because this one man going back there will have literature, information and so on. He will be able to do his work. And he will be able to brief these people up and check run them to a point where the case will stay pretty well. And incidentally, why, one of you gentlemen may go back with him if you can be so persuaded.
Male voice: Will we meet Lana Turner?
Hm?
Male voice: Will we meet Lana Turner?
Uh-oh. Here we go. (laughs) Male voice: This is something that is a little off the subject possibly, but I sort of sensed in reading the book that the merit that an auditor—somebody who was more or less completely familiar with the techniques, might possibly be a little bit more difficult to clear because of his anticipating the auditing?
He would be more difficult to clear if worked on by a person not as fully acquainted with the subject as himself. But here we would have a case of difference of altitude, difference of training.
Male voice: That was covered, I’m sorry.
Okay.
Male voice: It was covered first thing Second male voice: In other words, you want to try and pick someone about the same altitude if possible?
Yeah, you want to get parity.
Male voice: And one other thing, is it advisable to change auditors, I mean . . . ?
You can change auditors all over the shop. You can put fifteen people auditing the same case so long as amongst those fifteen you’re not going to have somebody who is so stupid as to ball the case up. You can take person after person on a case, it doesn’t matter.
Male voice: Ron, you spoke of mistakes in there, and some time ago î actually made a mistake and you said it involved two hundred hours. Now, how is it possible . . .
Oh, all you have to do is utterly destroy a person’s sense of reality by racking him along about how he’s imagining, that he has dub-in, get angry at him a few times and plant a positive suggestion and you’ve jumped it about five hundred hours.
Here’s one more statement on this auditing which I would like to make at this time. The past figures on the time of clearing were derived from my working on people, my working on people. I have begun to realize, in all humbleness and humility, that there is a speed differential at work here. And I cannot put forward at this time what I would consider to be any kind of an accurate average for people who are co-auditing or even for you gentlemen clearing cases. I can’t do that since I have seen three auditors who were pretty smart auditors working along on cases and they have just now after all this experience gotten to a point where they will look at a case—and mind you this has been eight months—where they could look at a case and recognize exactly what to do next. They’ve gotten the feel of the thing. All these three have a feel of it.
Now, the wife of one of these gentlemen was very—mind you, all these people were hand-trained by me—and the wife of one of these gentlemen had a very, very bad case of psoriasis.
Male voice: What’s that?
It’s a skin scale, a rather wicked sort of a thing, she had it over her arms and body. She had had it nearly all of her life. It had keyed in at the time of puberty. And it had evidently derived from a number of chemical abortion attempts. And the child was born with the skin sloughing off—very bad shape.
Well now, the thing was hung up on a number of sympathy engrams and so on. He found, by tacit consent, it almost impossible to handle the case. She in addition to that was an ally of his. So there were these complications. Well, these complications were taken care of a long time ago. And he just got basic-basic out of the case three weeks ago.
Male voice: Egads.
Mm-hm. He just got basic-basic out of the case, he got all sorts of painful emotion off the upper part of the case. He fooled around with it. The case has had lots and lots of hours. I haven’t seen her tally book. Her psoriasis is just now starting to go away with a vengeance. It has done recessions back and forth and so on. They’ve just hit the center of the case, which he should have hit ages ago by my standards. Because I even pointed out the diagnosis ages ago. But he didn’t follow it straight down the line. He’s gotten basic-basic out of the case. He is coming up the line on an erasure now. And her psoriasis is going away. It is receding at a very fast rate, about an eighth of an inch a day.
Male voice: Within how many hours should a good auditor get a fairly clear picture of what he is supposed to have?
Well, by those standards I would say eight months to a year of practice.
Male voice: No, I said a good auditor who is on the ball and who has gotten a feel of it, to get a clear idea of just exactly what point he should be working on.
I should say that that would be a highly variable figure, varying from person to person. I have this fact, though. That whereas we can learn the principles, we can learn all sorts of things about Dianetics fairly rapidly, that people by reading the book can co-audit. Some of them are quite good at it right from the start. And even when they’re quite good at it right from the start, still haven’t developed it up into an automatically responsive art with themselves. So that it evidently takes quite a while for a person to do this, quite a while in working on many cases. I don’t want to bat down your enthusiasm or say that your auditing is bad But you’re not going to get, as far as I can determine, you’re not going to get anything like two-hundred-hour Clears.
Male voice: Oh.
I don’t know what you’re going to get. You’re going to have to determine that figure yourself Of course, if it took you two years to clear a human being, or to work for two years to clear yourself, you would still be beating psychoanalysis by over a year.
Male voice: By over a year!
Yes. Oh, they claim no Clears, they claim nothing. They claim that they have delivered to an individual . . . It is nothing to find a person five to seven years in psychoanalysis and still sick.
Male voice: Another highly qualifying factor though would be the number of intelligence units released in the auditor himself to give better computing ability I mean, it’s a vicious circle.
That’s right. So that the two things are there. Newer techniques, swifter techniques, are constantly becoming available.
Male voice: Now, that’s something we have to look forward to.
Yes. And on the other side of the picture, your own skill will be constantly increasing. But out of this set of variables, to postulate at this moment that you will be able to clear somebody in, as I have done, eight weeks, would be pretty darned adventurous.
Male voice: I don’t think you got the point of what I was asking. I don’t mean how long it would take me to get to a point where I can do it. I mean, take you as an example. How early in the case should you be able to know what you re driving at? [gap] . . . certainly within the first five hours. And I say if I wouldn’t have full sonic on the person in twenty hours at this time by the way I’ve been working on people, I ought to quit. [gap] You’re going to find some fellow that comes to you that is a fairly high-powered gent and who by being high-powered more or less cuts down the way ignorance stands in the road. You’ll probably capture one of these gentlemen, he’ll proceed to work with you and you’ll probably work very smoothly. Don’t expect some little person that would do at best patty-cake auditing to be able to even help you.
Male voice: Oh, what I think there is, is can you—after he’s given you a run, go over his technique with your own case, and point out different paths you think you should follow up?
Yeah. Now we’re running into something else, we’re running into something else now A person, because he is trying to avoid things, is normally a very, very bad diagnostician on his case. Usually is. But at the same time through his skill would have a far better insight into the case than somebody else, if he can make himself objective about it for a few minutes, I know I had to diagnose the final break on my case, I did. In fact had to diagnose it practically all the way through, which was very, very tough. But it can be done.
Male voice: Would you care to mention children? I’ve got a nine-year-old boy I just . . .
Working on children? Working on children is really an adventure. Because the child doesn’t have a fully developed analytical mind. And the child that gets up to nine years of age without too much in the bank can be cleared. And any child around nine by educational methods, coming back into painful emotion areas, can have enough locks taken off the case or enough done to the case in general so that they get along pretty good. But it’s a touchy situation, handling a child. You’re not dealing with a fully developed organism.
Male voice: Is there any more danger there, shall we say, through a lack of ability on the part of the auditor?
I wouldn’t say there is danger, it’s just how slow the thing is going to go and how antagonistic the child may become toward you before he gets through.
I have worked on a child four years of age. And have obtained results. Big emotional charges like losing his lollipop last Tuesday. That sort of thing. And made him feel much better, made him much more cheerful and so on, about life in general. And I’ve worked on kids of nine who didn’t have enough push to go back to yesterday. But who after a little while, could finally be coaxed back into it. Most little kids pick this up very rapidly. You’ll find them wiping out their own engrams and so on.
I still think that’s a highly humorous story, of the little girl who was switched. And she doesn’t like Dianetics, but she was switched and she went out on the back porch and she was heard muttering to herself out there. And Papa overheard her, and she was picking up the engram of the switching. She was just going through it again and again and finally got it out.
Male voice: You mentioned in the manual about corporal punishment on children. I was, up until I’d read the book, a believer in “spare the rod and spoil the child.” And I’m afraid that I probably have paddled a few engrams into my kids. So—but I was wondering there was nothing in there that I could see that was constructive as far as saying just what the hell are you going to do with . . .
Yeah, that’s right. That comes under Child Dianetics. And I don’t want to cover it at this time since it’s a pretty broad subject. But it is often of great use for the parent to furnish the obstacle. To furnish the pain and furnish the pleasure. In other words, to create an artificial situation of drives and resistances and awards in order to coax the child into doing something. But do it on an analytical level. Don’t spank and then talk. Talk quietly and then spank. And say not a word and you haven’t put much of an engram in the case. Okay.
That’s thirty. Any other questions?
All right.