Checking Perceptics (500824)
Date: 24 August 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Here is a question from somebody who hasn’t read the book. It says: “Please explain how anaten can be a factor in the prenatal area when the analyzer has not yet been developed; and also explain the use of the phrase ‘moment of pain or unconsciousness during prenatal,’ when there is nothing but unconsciousness there.” In this matter of unconsciousness, there’s a central nervous system in the sperm, in the ovum, in the zygote, in the embryo, in the fetus, in the infant, in the child, in the youth and in the man. Each one of these has a central nervous system and each one of these—I figured after a long, hard, arduous piece of work—were a consecutive line of the same individual.
Now, having found that out it seems to have been a forgotten or an overlooked fact previously, that unconsciousness, you see, is not stored in the analyzer—that’s mistake number one here—but is, you might say, merely part of a nervous system.
Now, the sperm by the way, is a complete—as Leeuwenhoek called them—an “animalcule” and it has no cytoplasm but it has a nervous system. And the nervous system comes very, very early into play. And somebody recently discovered that the fetus had a nervous system which connected up to the analytical mind sometime in the vicinity of birth, that there was actually some sort of a nervous system connection there made around birth. You could say that the switchboard got hooked up. So that there could be recordings on one level all during that period, then recordings on the other. So the child, prenatal, is not unconscious. That’s mistake number one. One can’t say that an animalcule is conscious only when it has an analyzer. This would be a mistake. This would say that a railroad engine wouldn’t run unless it had a dispatcher. No, the unconsciousness there is unconsciousness, just like—and we get pain and unconsciousness. It’s stored in the central nervous system and in the cellular tissues— wherever it is stored, that’s a question of structure—and later on develops up. There is analytical recording going on after the fourth month after conception. This might fascinate some of you.
Now, this recent “discovery” that the nervous system suddenly became complete with myelin sheathing—this “discovery” that current could not be carried in an electric wire unless it had insulation. You know, those guys sure should have studied some electronics.
This situation, then, of whatever connects up—I don’t know . . . But I know that you take a person back down the track, take them to around four and a half months—this is in amnesia trance where you can get the last dregs of data out, study it very hard—that you’re getting things like Mama is lying down on the couch and the baby has been perfectly comfortable for days and suddenly somebody turns on the Dixieland jazz band and you get the recording of the bass notes. That’s about all you’ll get, but you’re hearing the bass notes come through.
Mama goes to a symphony orchestra and we get a recording of practically the whole thing. Particularly if she is sitting well up front and particularly if the child has been alerted by constant pain, then we get an analytical recording. He’s very alert now and paying attention and we get a recording. There seems to be a catalyst on the recording device all the way around such a thing. You get all sorts of data in the prenatal bank, unimportant or important data.
The phenomenon of extended hearing is one produced in hypnotism and it’s very easy to produce. A person has extended hearing and now he can hear such and so. And you run—this is one test. A bus started out at a certain moment, way up the street, and the hypnotized person whose hearing had been extended merely by command, was told to—I think it was about eight blocks away or something like that—this bus was to start and then it would come on down the line. And the bus driver was very inaccurate, by the way, as to when he started this bus. And so down the line, and I say, “Well now, at the moment the bus starts, the moment you hear the bus start, you will tell me.” And so he’d hear the bus start and I’d start my watch, I’d go out and take a look. Walk, trying to find—here comes the bus. I had already timed it so that I knew how long it took that bus to get down there. And he’d call off the bus starting. Only obviously, nobody could possibly have heard that. The first time I could hear the bus was when it was about a block and a quarter away. So you can extend these faculties (as a matter of fact, you can extend by hypnotic command a person’s sight), and that was merely by suggesting that he can hear something.
You can take somebody and put him in another room and around a couple of corners and have him drop a pin, on extended hearing, and he drops the pin and . . . (laughter) Now, its important to know this, that recording picks up in moments of pain. You’ll get more content in an engram than you get in the analytical bank, actually, if you want to talk in terms just of the volume that it’s recorded on. For instance, the analytical mind while a person is lying on the table, neither in pain, not unconscious, lying on the table, analytical mind is recording somebody’s voice—about like this—talking alongside of him (said very quietly). And then we put him in pain and the noise volume jumps up to about this (said very loudly). The organism, which is very super-survival of the mechanism, then jumps up in its recording action in the presence of danger, you see? So a person becomes (quote) afraid (unquote) and he’s out there in the woods and a saber-toothed tiger is around. This person by being afraid, has heightened senses and the heightened senses go so far as to observably seem to be telepathic. Obviously a person couldn’t hear what this person is saying and there may even be telepathic connections here too. But the main point being that you get this heightened sense.
Well, a child in the womb who has been injured only a few times and not hammered around very much, life is pretty well a snore. Amount of recording is down and you only get recordings like bass drums and a dropped frying pan, something like that. You’ll get that recording. But recordings don’t startle them. But after a child has been injured several times and Mama has gotten very emotional, there’s been a lot of quarreling, you will eventually get a state there of restimulation, you might say. And then you start to get analytical level recordings. If attenuation doesn’t take place, you get a recording which is actually a standard bank recording. However, it may or may not be actually in the standard bank if we’re taking the person back down along the track; we may be getting it out of the reactive bank. But it’s a recording and it’s not aberrative; and it’s in full recall and does not need to be deintensified. You’ll find this in quite a few people if you want to spend the time looking for it. As a matter of fact, you can find so many painful recordings that you would be appalled at some of them.
Somebody was asking me a few moments ago, by the way, of the order of magnitude of blocks. Now, the word is locks, not blocks. I wish he would read the book too. It is really not badly written.
There is a chap down in Kentucky, the professor of English Literature of the University of Kentucky, wrote me a very flowery letter on the subject of this book as an example of simple English. And he claimed it was a masterpiece of simple English. I’ve gotten several scathing letters, however, that said that it was derogatory to academic English. Yeah, the words weren’t quite hard enough. And it seems to be the consensus, however, that it could have been better but it’s not the worst book ever written. If these two gentlemen who asked me this question would just go read this book, I would be obliged.
All right. Let’s get back to talking about Standard Procedure. We have covered now, Step Two. I’ll go over Step Two with you again. First, we have of course inventoried the preclear by this time; and we have now put him in reverie. When we put him in reverie, we check his perceptics and see if he’s moving on the time track.
Now, there are other ways of checking perceptics. You can take a preclear before he has been put in reverie, you can check his perceptics by reading a few pages to him from a book, showing him a picture, pinching him and so forth. And then put him in reverie and see if he can pick these things up. Now, if he can do this ably and so forth, he’s full on. And the things which he can’t do, of course, are blocked. So it’s a little trick that is very good. Certainly nobody can get by, then, as a dub-in and nobody can fake sonic in an effort to disguise it. And by the way, people will sometimes do that. They will lie there and they will do almost anything. They will pretend to run off engrams. They will pretend to do almost anything. It’s very rare, but you can detect it very quickly. But this you can get around very quickly. So you put him in reverie and you see if he’s moving on the track. Now he moves on the time track, you can send him here and there on the time track and if he picks up perceptics and so forth, why, he is obviously moving on the track. And even if he’s shut off, you can tell if he’s moving on the track, even if he is a shut-off case, very easily. He will contact different somatics. If he is a somatic shut-off, he may still be able to contact something else. Like he may be able to contact the impressions of words. And he knows whether or not he is moving on the track. He gets a sort of an actual sensation of movement. I suppose it’s another perceptic which was hitherto unknown. So we have got another perceptic here to see if he is moving on the track. But now we can tune him up by running pleasure moments. The way we run those pleasure moments is very simple. We just send him back to the time when he was trying to—we try to send him back to the time he was eating something. Now we will find something very peculiar. Don’t think that a person cannot contact pleasure moments just because he can’t contact last night’s dinner. Because last night’s dinner (1) may have been unpleasant and (2) may have been eaten with his wife or (3) may have been eaten with her mother or (4) might have had some unpleasantness associated with the people there. What you re looking for is a pleasure moment.
Now, it’s an oddity that pleasure moments are to some slight degree moments of triumph. So if we really want to turn on the gas here and start her off right, well find a moment of triumph. “Now let’s go back to the time you were receiving the cup for public speaking.” “Let’s go back to the time when you were given that piece of cake for having been such a good boy.” In other words, you go back to a time when he was proud to be himself and as such it may be that he is willing to get into his own valence and perceive what goes on. The second that you can get him into doing this, you will have demonstrated to him that he can return on the track and that there is a reality in yesterday.
It has a great deal of value in starting processing to give the fellow the idea there was actually a yesterday. You see, most people were in severe doubt and are in severe doubt about yesterday. Yesterday is a sort of a handout given by a couple of press boys who sit just back of the left ear; and it says such and so happened yesterday. They accept the data because they have to have it, not because they believe it. You would be amazed at how a normal person is not quite sure of what occurred when and where.
Somebody was mentioning to me yesterday that after a couple of months he could not quite tell whether or not he had been reading this subject or seeing it in a motion picture or hearing about it. In other words, it merged after—well, that’s a delayed action engram, that’s probably in there just exactly like that. There probably is somebody saying, “You know, after a couple of months, I can’t tell whether the thing had been spoken or I have read it or I have seen it in a motion picture,” So the running of perceptics is a very important thing. We have to validate his own data for him. And nothing validates it more strongly than being able to go back to something and see it and feel it and hear it and smell it, do all these things. And you can get some remarkable incidents like this.
One chap was eating a lobster dinner. That is to say, he was returned to a moment when he was eating a lobster dinner. And his auditor told him to come up to present time and he said, “No, I want to stay here and finish this lobster.” And he did. And I have had several complaints from people, after they have been thoroughly settled into an incident, complaints from them they didn’t want to leave it.
Now, this pleasure moment, of course, has its secondary use: that when you come back up to present time, you should stop at a moment, an intermediate moment, just before pleasant—present time—pleasant time (since I got a fair release here I find myself mixing them up; it’s such a relief to find out there was a present time). So you can stop him in one of these moments, you see, and go through the thing and you turn on the perceptics in it.
There is a lot of pleasure back down anyone’s life. Of course in this society there is a primary aberration to the effect that it is somehow sinful to feel pleasure, that, “hard knocks and rough experiences are things which do a person good. Those are the things one should remember, young man.” Now, that type of engram will wipe out pleasure moments apparently. What it does actually is just give a person a spotty time track. That really gives him a spotty time track because here is his time track running back. This is back through speech, not conception. And he comes up the line here, and now he’s told that the important things are the hard knocks and his bad experiences. So he’s told that these are the things that he should remember. And this is about all he’s got left on the track. See, just a spot, here and there. Pretty lousy looking time track. That’s what that sort of thing does. Here is the way the track should look, you see, actually, consecutively. And it’s like dropping a flock of trap doors out of the track; all the pleasurable moments—and what we do is pick up all of the locks and then we make a time track exclusively out of engramic locks, and engrams and locks.
Male voice: Mr. Hubbard?
Yes?
Male voice: What happens if a patient is so fortunate as to live life free from obsessions?
Well, he doesn’t get terribly aberrated in the first place.
The sure safeguard for any society, the sure safeguard of sanity in that society is, oddly enough, an indulgence of pleasure.
Male voice: In other words, hedonism?
Yes. Of course, when pleasure’s gone off into a point where they are physically destructive and are nonsurvival, you have an aberrated type of pleasure such as the nymphomaniac has.
Male voice: I am talking about the Epicurean.
Oh, yes, a much fainter society. That’s interesting.
Of course, a society can become tremendously aberrated on the subject of the pleasure they have to have. A society could run off in the opposite direction too and these things could then all be contained in engrams and everybody would be going around in a manic. Well, that would be rather unhealthy too. But so these moments of pleasure there, when reconstructed, demonstrate some interesting material to the person: that he has had a good time in the past, that he did enjoy himself in the past and so he is now more willing to return to the past. Furthermore, it is a mission of the mind to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Therefore, when you start him into a pleasure moment and start running him through it, that pleasure moment will begin to accumulate and snatch up from painful incidents the attention units and put them into the pleasure moments. And then when you bring him back up to present time, you bring him back up with lots more attention units than he had before.
It was a very astonishing thing. I worked on one person who was terribly nervous and harassed and worried. And took this person back to a pleasure moment and ran through this pleasure moment a few times; it turned on full, all perceptics came on and so on. I didn’t have any more time at the moment, I was just saying, “Well, that’s the time track”— about all I was saying, and brought him up to present time. Changed individual with just that! There was yesterday. There had been pleasure in yesterday and the attention units had been pulled up out of just hundreds of locks and centered there. The person is now very alert, very much on the qui vive. And somebody postulated one time that just this action all by itself had rather definite therapeutic value. So we mustn’t overlook it as a technique.
Now, when you bring a person back up the track after running a number of engrams, the best way to drop out the somatics so they won’t get them in present time is to halt them on the track, backed up to a pleasure moment. You see, it recaptures the attention units that you have expended on the engram which they were running. That brings them back up, stabilizes the person, brings them back up to present time.
There is another trick in this, by the way. And some of you saw this. I’ll tell you about this in passing; it’s not terribly important, but you might find it to be of interest. Now, here we have—this is actually what a time track looks like if you want to really graph the thing. These are all perceptics. Now, there’s not a specific number there, I didn’t bother to number them. But this band I’ve been drawing here is actually a bundle; and that’s sight, sound, smell, so forth. They all track together. So there is a synchronizing effect. You could almost say that these strips get out of synch with one another. And that putting them back into synch is a necessary step. This is possibly one of the sources of shut-off that gets these things back in synch. So that actually this one—they could be out. So you see this one, this one, this one, these would all be in synch and here would be two out of phase. But by working the person—after all, all these things are coming in on communication lines and they’re being registered in, probably, various banks in the standard bank. Probably there is a smell bank coordinated with the other banks. You start to count the number of banks and the amount of data in the mind and you have to go into high-powered figures. It very greatly exceeds the number of molecules in the body. The data stored exceeds something like, in the neighborhood of about a hundred thousand to one. There’s undoubtedly more than a hundred thousand recordings for every one molecule in the body.
Male voice: Is there a limit?
There may be some kind of a weird—we are trying to explain this and it has led to some very interesting things.
Somebody postulated a continuum of time along which a person had his own recordings and that the cells themselves were possibly nothing more than small radio sets in contact with that. And that the memory storage was not in the body at all, but was back along the time stream. One theory. Because all we’ve got so far is it’s impossible for the human mind to record any of this stuff and retain it. I mean, that’s an impossibility.
The human mind, according to Claude Shannon, Doctor Shannon of Bell Labs, when he was trying to figure out protein molecule theory, I think it was something like a thousand holes in a molecule and a hundred memory units in each of these punch-protein molecules. Take a molecule and it’s got—I’ve forgotten what the figures are—they’re something like a hundred punches in each one and a thousand memory units in each punch. And he figured out that, well, that was about three months’ worth of recording. If a person recorded everything, that was three months’ worth of recording. Demonstrated to him that a person does record everything of which he thinks. Because he had gone out the other way and said, “Well, it’s obvious, then, that a person just automatically forgets everything that he has seen.” And he assumed this because just like everybody else—because when he got drunk, his nose itched. He is an engineer who was running on conceptual recall and no other recall. He could remember a fact or a conclusion or the concept of yesterday but that was about the works. So he had been computing, by the way, the whole problem of the human mind solely on his own problem of not being able to get back any data. And so here’s this bundle, you might say. Now, these things could be very grossly out of phase. [to audience member] And if you will step up here for a moment? And now if you will just stand, and lets fix your attention. Now, let’s look at—lets see—what do you want to look at there? That automobile fender? All right. Let’s look at the automobile fender. Now become aware of this automobile fender. By the way, by this method, if it were practiced, one could probably achieve a clever thing the Hindus have been trying to achieve for a long time. It’s quite variable from person to person. All right. Look at the fender.
Now, [to another audience member] would you make a noise like a buzz? All right. Just keep buzzing continually.
All right. Listen to that buzz and listen to him buzz. All right now, feel yourself standing on your feet. Hear that buzz. Do you see the fender? Standing on your own two feet, become aware of all three of them, now. All right. Simultaneously. All right. Feel your clothes on you as you stand on your feet. Listen to the buzz. And look at the fender. All right, feel that small amount of pressure here on your eyes. [to the audience member who is buzzing] Make a louder buzz.
Look at that fender. Feel yourself standing on your feet. How do you feel?
Male voice: Rigid.
You feel rigid? Do you feel dizzy? Do you feel dizzy in any way?
Male voice: Well, no. I cant say that Just kind of rigid.
Well, all right. That’s one reaction. Thank you. [Another audience member is brought to the front of the class.] All right. Now, if you will look at that sign there that says “Exit.” Yes, you look at that sign that says “Exit.” [to the audience member who was buzzing] Will you buzz some more, please?
Now look at the sign that says “Exit” and listen to that buzz. Feel yourself standing on your own two feet. All right, feel your clothes on you now. How many things are you doing? Are you scanning from one to the next, or doing all of them simultaneously?
Male voice: I seem to be doing all of them simultaneously.
All right. Now feel your clothes on you. Now feel my touching your arm. See that “Exit” sign there. Listen to the buzz. How do you feel?
Male voice: I am very aware.
All right. How are your perceptics?
Male voice: Fairly good.
They’re fairly good?
Male voice: Fairly.
Have you got sonic?
Male voice: Yes.
Good. And you have pain recall?
Male voice: Yes. And so forth. That’s interesting. Thank you.
Now, I know all of you probably expect to see a Roman candle come out of his ears or something. I was trying to persuade people to provide that action at the Shrine theater. I had some very definite things there I wanted to put out but nobody seemed to want to let me pull them off. Such is an illustrated lecture. I told you about that, didn’t I? Well, I was going to come out and do it in a big Hollywood style and have a man on a white horse going dashing across the stage. And a man in shining armor, and tap him on the shoulder and he falls apart. This is an illustrated lecture, you see. And then I would say: “And I do not intend to show you that Dianetics can do tricks.” And on the “tricks” the curtain goes aside, three lions jump through flaming hoops, “But Dianetics has power.” And Errol Flynn comes out. We finish up with three trapeze acts and a man is shot out of a cannon. This would have been much more interesting. So no Roman candles came out of his ears. I won’t waste your time by testing several people.
How are your perceptics, by the way? Pretty good?
Male voice: Oh, my recalls are not too good, except in some things.
Your color good?
Male voice: Yes.
Your sound?
Male voice: No.
Not good on sound? All right.
You noticed this tiny difference here? I am not trying to make great capital out of this difference. He said he felt rigid. And he said he felt fairly comfortable. You take a person up here who is shut off, but shut off! No sound, no sight, no recalls, no pain recall or anything, you tell him to do this and the first thing he knows, he finds himself standing. He will try to look at that, listen to that, feel this, you see, and then look at that and so on. Well, you interrupt his doing this because this is a one, two, three, four, and he can do that all right, you see. He has got these things out of phase and then—he may have an aberration, “You can’t do two things at once”—and then the next thing you know, you insist that he synchronize this sort of thing. And he starts to synchronize it and tries to do it simultaneously and the first thing you know, he will collapse.
I had a hold of one of these gentlemen. I had a hold of his arms. The very worst you will get, if you keep insisting, he will collapse. But if you just have him keep looking, the best he will get is dizzy. He will begin to reel. Because this is something that is not generally done. People are not recording across the bank. They are recording on this perceptic, they’re doing scanning. It’s very interesting that the observation of people could be that spotty. But that is the way the records are going down.
Now, if this were practiced many times and consistently and so forth, one would think right offhand that he would eventually become— you’d think with practice they could do this. And actually, they aren’t. This is not what is going to happen to them. What actually happens sometimes to a very badly shut-off case is that he goes into a screaming set of jitters and almost blows his skull. Because these things are pushed out of phase by an emotional experience, originally, which contains pain, may contain terror and the rest of it, you see. They’re pushed out of line and when you stand them up and insist that they go back into line, the second they go back into line the thing which they have been avoiding all the subsequent years is the first thing that has to come into view with them. And they go and if they would let it happen, that thing would pop into view.
Male voice: And you could run it away?
Yes, I have done that with a couple of people and they just end up screamers.
Male voice: What will eventually happen if you keep him there?
Nothing much. Your perceptics—pretty good, but eventually the whole track begins to balance a little more. I am not giving you—this isn’t something you just play with. I am just demonstrating it. No technique, this little test of looking and listening and standing. It’s just demonstrating something because I must tell you this and tell you this very fully that when you run these perceptics through a pleasure moment you will occasionally first get great reluctance on the part of the person; and then as you insist more and more on his going through the thing, not insist but coax him more and more on these things, that he will begin to get very nervous, just like—he felt, he said, rigid—if we’d kept that up, we’d have probably picked up a death or something.
There is an unknown death in your case, is there?
Male voice: I think so, I am not sure.
Yes. We probably would have picked this thing up if he’d been in reverie and we were running pleasure moments.
Trying to run this pleasure moment over and over, if we really started to turn it on full, he might, not invariably, but he might get the reaction of having this big charge turn up and find himself right in the middle of looking at Grandmas coffin or as it had happened in one case, watching the undertakers cut Grandma up. They were working in the back bedroom. And that was about the loveliest explosion anybody ever wanted to see. And that thing had really been hidden. So checking perceptics is one thing: running pleasure moments has two goals in sight that you may—three things may happen. One, actually achieve the pleasure moment and turn on the perceptics full force, after which the person will have these perceptics. He will keep them.
The next one is that you will draw a complete blank. He has an aberration about pleasure. That’s that one, he isn’t supposed to see it so you draw a blank.
Or, three, turn on a terror charge.
You can expect any one of those three things to happen when you try to run a person through a pleasure incident. It’s important for you to know because if you come that close to getting a moment of great grief or terror, fear, without running it through and without knowing what you are tackling there, not knowing that that is what it’s going toward, you will miss a very great opportunity to unaberrate this person fast. Because you’ll get a marked improvement in the case if you get that moment out. See? And you’ll get a marked alteration in perceptics. There may be several such moments in the case, so that the next time you do it you may get another quick charge. And it unfortunately, probably the third time you do it, he’s educated to keep it straight. And he may just sit there and lie to you. So this is synchronization of the perceptics. The time track is actually a bundle of perceptics, like this, and running pleasure moments synchronize those perceptics.
Now as we have gone into affinity, communication and reality here, we found out that a break in affinity would influence communication and reality. Right? So one of the first things that you can expect to start showing up when you start to tune up perceptics and so on are little breaks in affinity, or breaks in—these are breaks in communication. You’ve got the break in communication right there. The fellow isn’t communicating having eaten lobster. I mean, he’s out of phase.
Well, the least likelihood of your doing anything with a tune-up, then, would be in the vicinity of someone who has broken affinity with him. You see how that would be? So that if you have some antipathetic person at the table eating, then don’t expect this person to be able to sit there and run the perceptics through that meal. So pick out several moments and pick out moments of triumph which were also pleasurable.
You will be able, if you keep this up (and it’s worth quite a bit of effort) to do something with this. And the reason that this tune-up, this checkup of perceptics gets into bad odor occasionally is because people don’t recognize what happens on this terror charge, this fear charge or grief charge. And it makes the preclear very uncomfortable. The auditor is not quite sure what to do with this, not quite sure where to go and there you have it. And incidentally, it’s very amusing. One fellow who was tuning up these things ran back to a coffin and he was tuning them up and the word “coffin” occurred to him as he tried to tune these things up. And so his auditor told him to repeat the word “coffin.” And I quote now, “The goddamnedest biggest stone giant, in the goddamnedest biggest box, showed up in front of me, right there.” And he said after he had repeated the word “coffin” for a while there, it went away. He said, “Before this, I had been getting neat little eight by ten color still pictures of everything.” There was visio and his auditor wasn’t smart enough to grab. There was the whole thing. He was getting actual visio of being a little boy, looking at his grandfather.
He then did the next thing that he shouldn’t have done. He wrote Mama and said, “Was I around when Great-Grandpa died?” And of course, she said, “Oh, no, you were miles away.” So they never went back and looked for it till I put them back on the beam again; then they found it. Then they found it and knocked off, according to this fellow, the goddamnedest biggest pieces of plaster off the ceiling!
Anyway, now we have the data on this checking perceptics; and don’t let’s go into the case and find the person getting very nervous and very dizzy and saying, “Well, we can’t turn this person’s perceptics on. It’s no use.” Say at that moment, when he starts to get very nervous, “Now let’s taste the spinach carefully. Now you feel the chair under you.” And he gets more and more nervous and you say, “All right. Now let’s take a spoonful of soup. Now convey it to your mouth. Now can you taste it?” “Wow!!” You’ve got him right back into the incident, you see?
Now, it’s a peculiarity that a person’s color may be parked some place on the track in this way.
One chap of which I know had his color parked at a time when he was arrested; and he had a lot of prenatals about being arrested and somebody came up and gave him a traffic summons that he had avoided and violated and so forth. So they took him down to the jailhouse and booked him. But at the moment they told him to come along—was in full color, three-dimension, everything—his life stopped right there. And from that moment there on, he had no perceptic of color or dimension.
It was flat and gray and white, when he did see anything, and still nothing was moving.
There’s the valences tune-up, the command shut-off and so forth. There are a number of ways these things can go off.
All right then, the next thing is to try to obtain an emotional discharge. And I went into that, coaxed that over very carefully. You coax it out of a person. You saw me doing it to the gentleman who was up here. Was I telling him, “You can remember now,” to “Let’s go back to the incident, now. Let’s start in at the beginning of the incident, when I count from one to five’? No, that isn’t the way you get one. It’s not particularly saccharine but certainly not noisy. You cat-foot up on these things. You use minimal mechanical commands in looking for an emotional discharge; minimal mechanical commands. The somatic strip sometimes won’t go there anyway. The area is a reverse charge area and the somatic strip tries to go there and it skids off. Part of the attention units of “I” are there. It’s upsetting. So therefore you try to talk it out of him. And then sometimes, just to test the rules you say, “The somatic strip will now go to your grandmother’s death,” and we get “Wah, wah, wah!” immediately. But they sneak up on it much better.
Now we’ve got the idea of freeing on the track. A lot of you people undoubtedly will try to run cases which are thoroughly bogged down on the track without realizing they are and you’ll say it’s just perceptic turn-off.
The major part of perceptic turn-off is caused by being stuck on the track. The first thing to do then is to free them on the track. And you can free them in various ways. It’s try all the methods known. Feeding them repeater technique on holders is not good. You can feed repeater technique, like this gentleman who was up here on the demonstration the other day. Forgetters and so forth, various mechanisms which might have denied him the information. In other words, I was feeding him denyers. That’s fine, you can feed all the denyers you want to because nobody is going to latch up very badly on running denyers.
By the way, I ran into a denyer one day that was very, very good. This person was outside himself all the way up and down the track. He was getting visio of himself. He was over here, he was watching himself. Usually this shows high emotional intensity on the case. But we ran into the incident finally, which let him merge. There were two incidents. The first one, “Watch yourself” was one of his mama’s standard phrases. “Watch yourself now, watch yourself,” and of course he’d have to get back and watch himself. And we got that one out and he got a little closer to himself and then we ran into a terrific fight charge which said, “Get out of my life, stay out of my life, don’t ever come into my life again.” It intimated that someone was unhappy and wanted somebody out of his life. So we got rid of that one and the person then ran inside of himself up and down the track.
Now, I want to give you this again. We try for the painful emotion first and then we test the file clerk and somatic strip, we free him on the track if he’s not free and then we try for the basic area engrams. And if we can’t get any one of those, then we go to the third step which I will cover tomorrow, which is Straightwire.
The file clerk and somatic strip, let me repeat this again, should work in this fashion: “The file clerk will now give us the incident necessary to resolve this case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of this incident. When I count from one to five, the first phrase of the incident will flash into your mind; one-two-three-four-five.” The fellow will give you a phrase.
That’s the way a case ought to run and we keep doing things to this case until it runs. We just keep going over this, over this, over this, over this, until it runs. And of course he’ll finally bog on one of these thoroughly, send him over here to Step Three. Is that clear?
In other words, we’ve got tools, we’ve got ample and adequate tools here in order to get the file clerk and somatic strip to working on this case finally. And that’s the way we do it.
Now, sometimes they will work in a limited fashion and sometimes you can be satisfied with the file clerk’s working in a limited fashion if you are actually getting engrams and the case is proceeding. But remember that any case that is not proceeding satisfactorily, that it still can be trimmed up, dressed up, squared up, made to look pretty and run pretty; pianola. And when you have finished Standard Procedure on your preclear, you’ve finished the Standard Procedure run—he is on Guk, lets say— when you’ve finished the Standard Procedure run, you bring him up to present time; you have run and reduced every engram you have contacted, you bring him up to present time.
You will tell the somatic strip that it can continue to erase somatics in the case. And then you let him keep on running that way and we try not to restimulate an engram and go off and leave it. The somatic strip sweeping through the engram and knocking out the somatics and occasionally picking up a holder or bouncer doesn’t restimulate. But starting to halfway run an engram and then leaving it is inviting disaster. And I would advise you not to do it because if anybody blows any cases here, why, he immediately gets put back into birth. Okay?