Circuitry (500714)
Date: 14 July 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I want to cover this field this morning of circuitry again. But I want to cover it on a more selective basis. You all have a good idea now of what we mean by circuitry, you know what we’re trying to get out. We’re trying to get out the suppressors, the circuits out of a case which turn off the individual’s ability to reexpress his emotions and to reexpress his somatics and to generally conduct himself as he should as a preclear.
Therefore, it is of very definite importance to you to know everything you can know about this. Because the speed of resolution of the case depends in a large measure upon your ability to pick the locks on circuits and valences. If you can pick those locks rapidly, your case is going to—I’m talking now about the more difficult cases—they’re going to resolve much more rapidly It’s very important. A man with a demon circuit which says “Control yourself, don’t lose your temper. Now, get a grip on yourself. Now, those emotions are going to run away with you; you must shut them down.” You got this in a powerful restimulated state in a case, how are you going to get painful emotion off this case? Also how are you going to get any auditor control over this character?
All the psychotics I have inspected to date had this as their worst engram. It’s just on the “control yourself” line and shut it all off and suppress it. The demon circuit suppressed them into psychosis. Now, we don’t have to go into psychosis, however, to discover severe demon circuits. We go into mild neurosis and we can have some very fine ones. And I would say that a large percentage of the people who are passing for normal in this society today have circuitry of this character.
The index of psychosis is still missing, by the way. What is the difference between a normal person, a neurotic person and a psychotic person? Is it a basic weakness of personality or mentality? Is it that variable from individual to individual? Or can we finally bracket, with a good solid observation, one factor?
With “control yourself” we’re awfully close to that factor, if not there. And the severity of this command in the case could be—I do not say that it is—but it could be a determining factor in psychosis. That requires a lot of investigation, a lot of inspection before anything definite could be said about it. But I’m just pointing it out, it has for some time been one of those little things that one had his eye on, very definitely. Ever since I’ve been watching this particular point in cases, I’ve been noticing that the psychotic, the real rough ones, had this installed, plus painful emotion, to a point where they were no longer in control of themselves but the demon circuit had substituted itself for “I.” It would explain a lot if this kept on carrying through the way it is. So, in potshooting at demon circuitry, you are hitting at the core, possibly, of psychosis. It just may be that. I’ll be willing to express a didactic opinion on the subject if this is carried out through the next five hundred psychotic cases I see.
Right now we have to use this because if we don’t use this we are going to find the problem of altitude is very severe with us. Somebody is going to use this matter of altitude on us as a patient and slow down therapy. And I don’t think we’re going to get much painful emotion off such a case and other things.
You see, the only datum that’s missing in that is the psychotic quite often has painful emotion there ready to bleed immediately. The second you ask for it, it’s there. Well, the psychotic might have a very selective mechanism which was merely “control yourself” which didn’t apply to “control your emotion.” And “I” gets transplanted over it. The picture could be a little bit complex here. So I want you to know and I wanted to tell you all I can about picking the locks on a demon circuit. You must realize that a case has numbers of people as the dramatic personnel in the engram bank and the sum of that bank . . . [gap] You must keep this in mind when you are going for circuitry. It is possible for you to do too fast a job of diagnosis; to find lying there, much too accessible, Papa saying “Control yourself.” And then to shoot for Papa saying “Control yourself” and finding nothing as a result— person just goes on controlling himself.
Well, it isn’t that the circuits and so forth were set up on some other set of words, but they’re in somebody else’s mouth, or similar phrases. In other words, you have not broken out of the case the most aberrative command that leads this person to control himself. And I want to point this out to you, that where we have Papa and Mama and the child, we also have Papa and Mama and Papa and Mama. [drawing on blackboard] And we also have Papa and Mama and Papa and Mama and Papa and Mama and Papa and Mama. All or some of these people—this person, Mama, has to be present during the prenatal area. But all the rest of these people may be present too.
Great-grandparents are not uncommon. But great-grandparents get occluded because Grandpa and Grandma’s father and mother are the allies of Papa and the allies of Mama. We’re just skipping a generation there, so that when a great-grandparent dies it leaves an occlusion here. So you ask somebody—now you ask Papa and you—this patient’s father, were his great-grandparents alive during the period of gestation and he says, “Oh no, they died years before.” That’s not good data because there might be an occlusion here. So he has been telling the child straight on through about this. He said, “Well, your great-grandparents were all dead at the time you arrived in the world; oh, long before you were even conceived they were all dead, certainly.” Oh yeah? How many patients have you tried to spot the grandparents? And how many patients have told you, “Well, died when I was four. No, not four; died when I was twelve? Uh-uh. I think they died when I was about nineteen. No, it must have been four.” Have you ever run into this in a patient?
Male voice: That’s the same thing as “about four or five,” say? “Died when I was about four or five?
Yeah. It can get much more extreme than that. So you can have a condition where Papa has an occlusion, Mama has an occlusion, the great-grandparent picture is very erroneous. So don’t just abandon great-grandparents, because they may be there.
The possibilities of this being there—age militates against it, but there is a faint possibility that you may turn these people up in a case. Now, you must realize that these people may be the ally of this person. [drawing on blackboard] These people, Grandpa and Grandma, may be the allies—this is not necessarily, by a long ways—but they may be the allies of this person, your preclear, who’s here.
There are the most likely candidates for allies when we have a history of violence of family life. These people may be very cross and mean and gruff, but they do have this: age has slowed them down. A lot of their engrams have been laid to rest by decay. The violence and red-hotness of their passions has long gone far into dust. So here we’ll find a milder scene for the child. Even though they’re quite strict with the child, they mean life and death for the child. Just because Grandpa and Grandma are your preclear’s allies is no reason to suppose that they weren’t hell on wheels with this kid. And you will find the preclear will much more easily contact the kind ambivalence (because here we have ambivalence again).
These are people, not symbols. They may have dramatizations which are despicable and which are very rough on the child. But they, on this valence, are so necessary to the child’s survival that the child accepts all of this. Now, these people, getting along in life, suddenly get the idea, “Well, I don’t have to have this kid with me. It’s no pain to me and it’s nothing out of my pocketbook. So this kid is just wonderful; the grandest kid in the world and we want to see our life go on.” Whereas they were saying to this, the parent, “Oh Christ, we don’t want any children. How are we going to get rid of this? We can’t afford it.” Makes a big difference. You must remember that these factors are present, not strange. Somebody aberrated Papa! And the aberration came from here [drawing on blackboard] and the ally computation might have come from here. And these people are ambivalent too. So the question of who aberrated Papa is a very interesting one. Who aberrated Mama? It’s the parents; most likely candidates. So when Papa’s saying, “Control yourself, you must learn to control yourself,” his word doesn’t go. Even though he’s ambivalent and the child still has some affectionate attachment to him in his kinder self, he got that “Control yourself” somewhere. And the chances were he got it from Grandpa or Grandma.
Now we come along the line and we’re looking for demon circuitry in a preclear. As a child we find Papa saying, “Control yourself,” and Mama saying, “You must get a grip on yourself, you must learn to control your emotions,” et cetera. And we say, “Aha. Now let’s shoot for it; we’ve got it now.” Only you probably don’t have it. Possibly these grandparents may have been around Mother during the prenatal period; you can check this. In the majority of cases you’ll find out that they were to some degree. They hear that Liza is pregnant and they will come all the way from Keokuk. They know all about this. And then they may find out that Liza doesn’t want this goddamn kid. And they’ll raise hell with Liza because, after all, it is no sweat or pain to them. That’s the way Liza will ordinarily sum it up, anyway. And you have an ally computation. A great big one.
When you run into that sort of thing, you’ve got a tough one, because here is the “control yourself” mechanism you’re shooting for. I’m setting this up, not that it is a standard case, because it is not, but to show you that this chain exists. If there is aberration here [drawing on blackboard] there is aberration here or here.
Let’s say there is aberration—a great deal of aberration along this line here. We got it from preclear; we trace some of it to Mama. By God, it goes here too. So we start saying, “Control yourself. Now let’s see, who taught Daddy to say ‘Control yourself’? How did this person feel toward this grandparent?” The person may tell you, by the way, “Oh, I hated my grandparents, they were no good.” And you go back and find these big ally computations with them. They were no good, but just the same he is obeying the, “control yourself” mechanism from here; an ally “control yourself” mechanism. So all the way back down the line we start in with this dramatization. But we got the dramatization. We read it off Mama, which is “Control yourself.” Now let’s find out where Mama got it. And we’re in better shape if we look over this picture carefully before we dive.
We want the center; we want the most aberrative circuit in the whole bank. And it will be found, usually, out of the mouth of an ally. Follow me? Now, in picking apart these circuits, then, it is not good enough just to find somebody saying, “Control yourself, you’ve got to get a grip on yourself.” Let’s find the most aberrative moment when this occurred.
Yes?
Male voice: Well, let’s say you get Great-grandma or Great-grandpa around when this happens, or the grandparents, and they speak a foreign language that the preclear doesn’t speak, and yet they’ve been telling Papa and Mama to “control yourself in those languages, “control yourself . . .
That’s a special case, one that you’ve got to use your head on.
Now, I’ll give you this one as a case history, a minor little case history. I used to have a dramatization after I got married of wanting to go away because nobody cared whether I lived or died. This thing used to come on about every six or eight months. And after it was over I would sit back and look at myself in horror wondering what had gone on. All kinds of smoke and foment around this thing, and often I was intrigued by the fact that why should I act this irrationally suddenly, unpredictably? Well, it wasn’t unpredictable; there were various triggers that trip it in. But in going back down the bank, who do we find? We thought we’d found such a thing with my grandfather. Oh, no. It was my greatgrandfather on his side, who was actually being kicked out by his children. And the old man was quite an old guy. He played fiddle and so forth; he was quite a fellow. And he would sit around and take care of me. And he was alive until I was eight months of age and then he died. His death was occluded in my mother and in all of her sisters; completely occluded, because he was the fellow who made much of them. He was rather a thoroughly nice guy but he did have some of these dramatizations. And he got very sorry for himself. So in hot, miserable weather down south, a little baby would have the colic, you know, and get bitten by insects and be uncomfortable and get sick and . . . (They didn’t know quite as much about food in those days—got the colic.) The old man would come around and he would tell me, besides the history of the Civil War, he would explain to me as his only confidant how nobody loved him, that he had to get out of there, he was going to go away, it wouldn’t do them any good to follow him because he was going out and get himself lost somewhere on the rims of the world. And he was explaining this and so forth to this child and I would look at him very solemnly. Well, that dramatization skipped generation, all the way across. Because he’d never been around when my mother was a little girl. That dramatization was never transplanted there.
My grandfather on my mother’s side had never taken any stock in the old man at all, and as a matter of fact was quite ordinarily cross with him. So he’d never picked up the dramatization. In order to find this thing we had to go way out on the thing. Of course, we didn’t have to work on it very hard because sooner or later the thing showed up. It was a blank period of about eight months of my life; it was gone. And we couldn’t find it and we couldn’t find it and then one day all of a sudden we cracked through by somebody playing on a fiddle. And here was an old man playing on a fiddle. We ran into an engram where I was being rescued from these horrible, vicious girls, by him. “You horrible, vicious girls, you get away from that baby.” (laughter) That shows you how far you can trace one of these things. Now, a “control yourself” demon was . . . [gap] . . . came in from my grandfather, who was my most solid ally after my great-grandfather, telling my great-grandfather to control himself over these things. But of course my grandfather’s statement about controlling yourself was picked up and echoed by my mother and it came through fairly strong. When we had all of these circuits out, we said, “Well, at last we’ll be able to run a little bit better in therapy,” and—not much better. Very, very weak. And what do we find at this time but my grandmother, who up to this time had been the angel of mercy, the Red Cross nurse on the battlefield, you might say; my dear grandmother had one of the nastiest, stinkingest dramatizations you ever heard of whereby she was saying to me continually, “Ronald, you will have to learn to control your temper. Now, control your temper. Now, you mustn’t get angry, you mustn’t get mad.” Yak, yak, yak, yak, yak. She had dozens of these things and she used them practically every day. And they’d all dropped out of sight as far as I was concerned. I’m giving you myself as a case history merely because the concatenation happens to fit the point I’m illustrating here, not because this is some pet I’m riding because I had engrams on it myself.
I want to demonstrate to you, then, that circuitry sometimes goes on out much further than you would suspect. I’m warning you to pick up the most aberrative circuit that you can get your hands on as the first run.
Male voice: Ron, will one of those circuit commands have any power on a propitiation basis rather than on an ally basis?
Mm-hm.
Male voice: That also could be highly aberrative?
Yes. Yeah, one controls himself because if he doesn’t he’ll die. That’s good and solid. But at the same time, the other sympathetic circuits, they’re really strong.
Male voice: They take about everything you say . . .
Oh yes. You’ll find “control yourself” in lots of forms. So let us say we start into a case and the first thing that comes to light in this case is a “control yourself” mechanism, “You got to keep a good grip on yourself, you mustn’t let yourself go.” This will stick a fellow all the way up and down the track. That’s a beautiful grouper, a “control yourself” mechanism, it’s a demon circuit, it’s the works. “Now, you can’t let yourself go, got to get a grip on yourself,” so forth. When we start to follow this one down—I give you a word of warning on this one. Every time you hit the thing in the bank, you’re going to stick the person in an engram.
Male voice: A holder Uh-huh! It’s a holder to beat all holders and yet it’s a demon circuit. So this “get a grip on yourself” and “get hold of yourself” and so forth are slippy. They’re hard to deal with. And you mustn’t restimulate them where they’re not restimulated. So before you dive down such a line, you be pretty sure you have the most aberrative moment, or the most aberrative voice that spoke them in sight, and then try to get the earliest moment of it as fast as possible.
It won’t do you any good, by the way, to recount one of these things five hundred times if it isn’t lifting. If it is recounted twelve times and doesn’t lift, you can be pretty sure the intention is going to stay on this one. Now, you could start going back down the bank with one of these things, you can’t take the tension out of it, you may get the person stuck in it and then try to go earlier.
Now, there is a way to solve a case which has this particular dramatization which is a “control yourself mechanism with a holder. Try to resolve, by just brute force, coaxing, persuasion—conception. Get some yawns off of this case. If you can’t get any painful emotion, get some yawns off of the case. Try to get some unconsciousness off. After you’ve done that, the case is much easier to work.
It is a good rule in shooting for circuitry to use your judgment at all times. Be careful about it. Plan your campaign very carefully. What are we going to do? What are we going to shoot for?
It isn’t enough to know that a man has a “control yourself” mechanism. One should know who are all the people who might have used this same mechanism, which one is the most likely candidate for its most aberrative effect, and, before we shoot for this, will the case resolve anything in the basic area before we try for it?
We may find that we can actually produce faster results by taking the unconsciousness off. So if you can get unconsciousness off of the case, that is your target. That is your target. It isn’t just to take circuits out of this case. The “control yourself” mechanism will not necessarily inhibit taking unconsciousness off the case. So that is why these steps are in this sequence, written up in this fashion. You get emotion off of a case, the person’s going to feel better.
Now, the next thing, if you can get into the basic area—if you can’t get emotion, try to get into the basic area and get, say, conception or some early incident out and erased. If you can do that, you’re way ahead on the thing. If you can erase one, maybe you can erase two, three, four, something like that.
Maybe the person’s out of valence, he’s got a “control yourself” mechanism, the case is just terrible, he’s got dub-in, but you’ve gotten down to the basic end of this case and you’ve erased something, unconsciousness off. Now when you shoot for circuits and start down the line, every engram all the way up the track is looser than it was and your chances of springing those commands, those circuits out, are much, much better. So when you’re going in there don’t just pull up short and say, “Oh well, hell, we’ve got a ‘control yourself mechanism in this case and we’ve probably got a valence shift and that’s just tough. We’ll have to shoot for circuitry.” That is not the moment you haul up on this. The moment you haul up is when you have made a good, solid effort to get the earliest part of that case resolved. And make that a solid effort, not just a light dab.
You get out some early moments, something like conception with lots of yawns off of it, you get an erasure on this case and it will start to resolve. I don’t care if the person had nonsonic and damn few somatics and emotional shut-off and everything else. You get some yawns off of this case. And after that it’ll resolve quick.
Finally, after you have a few of these out in the early part of the track, you will discover that the patient can hit practically any engram in the bank without severe consequences. Yes, hell get nervous and so forth but you can grind it out and you can move it on the track better. You can knock out holders, you can do a lot of things.
Some cases will absolutely refuse to go into the basic area. In spite of all of your coaxing, in spite of using this emotional restimulation like the moment of sexual pleasure, you get him into a late moment of sexual pleasure—he might not be able to find any moment of sexual pleasure. If he does, you settle him in it no matter how well, he may fall far short of conception.
If you can’t get conception out, if you can’t get early engrams out of a case, if you are then blocked at every turn—for heaven’s sakes don’t try for circuitry until you see these things, and when you can’t make that progress, then try for circuits. And be well aware of the fact that when you’re trying for circuits on a case which has no unconsciousness off the case at all, that you are handing yourself a very nice problem.
Because you’re going to have to do this problem with judgment, going to have to get the most aberrative command there, and you’re going to have to run it down with the greatest of skill. I don’t want to scare you but I want to make you careful and I want to make you thoughtful before you dive into a case which has no unconsciousness off of it in order to pull a demon circuit.
Yes?
Male voice: That’s another point, Ron, for getting the control circuits out of our own cases as soon as possible because I think you get a certain blockage there the same way you do on painful emotion. I know I have a hell of a time really getting a grasp on this stuff. And I haven t really gotten them out of my case yet. As far as control goes, there s still a lot in there. I can get the general idea but as far as specific stuff. . .
Well, I’ve noted that people blank on things that are wrong with them. But I am talking to you well knowing that these remarks made here in the morning lectures are still being recorded and that although some of the faces I look at may be very blank on the subject, that’s going to come through. And that, by the way, is one of the strongest arguments I know in favor of mutual auditing of one patient.
Female voice: In reference to that, I was wondering about the following It seems that we, becoming more and more conscious of the power of demon circuits and all that, also find it that much harder because it invalidates our sense of reality even more.
Let’s not get thrown by the fact that a demon circuit is powerful. Let’s recall this little fact here that once a computation is known to exist, it loses considerable power. Now, in tracing down such a computation, why, you should be able to reach it. How much more hopeless people have been in the past about dub-in, when there was no immediate remedy for dub-in, it was just a tough case. Now you can say “Look,” and you can lick it.
Female voice: What I want to ask you is this: in auditing other students, would it—do you think it would be practical, when they start worrying about “Oh, but that must be a dub-in, I’m sure that isn’t true,” you would just tell them, “Look, anything that comes out of you is of interest here, and we don’t care if . . .” That’s a good line, “Anything that we get from you is of interest; anything we get is of interest.” That’s a good line. You’ll find a lot of people will say, “Well, this is just dub-in, I know this is dub-in,” and they’re running a real engram.
Male voice: Question here of whether the ovum would carry the cellular memory of the mother.
No, it wouldn’t. Biologically it would not. We’re just looking for biology. However the hell of it is, is we’d swing over into transmigration and reincarnation and every other damn thing rather than cellular protoplasm. If this were going down the line on this death thing and so on, way back, on the line of cellular protoplasm so that we were getting the individual branched off at birth each time, I’d be worried. But . . .
Female voice: Why?
Why, hell, the thing would go back to the beginning of time. We would be running engrams out of people that—where they were fighting dinosaurs.
Female voice: Oh, but don’t you think that would actually—it would lose strength?
I suppose, yeah. [gap] Male voice: We’ve had that experience in Washington.
All right. You’ve had that experience in Washington because you lack in Washington this datum.
Male voice: Maybe so.
You’re running locks. You’re running the lock which is sitting here, [drawing on blackboard] Here’s the engram. Now, you take this back to Washington and kick them in the butt for not being smarter, huh? Here’s the lock. I remember saying this down in Washington. Here’s the engram. Here’s the lock. It doesn’t appear up the bank here in present time. It goes down and it lies right here.
Now, you start into that engram and you start the person recounting, and he’ll start recounting a lock. And he’s recounting a lock very busily and instead of being something horrible and something that is terrible and something that invalidates data, you must appreciate the fact that you’re running a lock and that you’re right on the ground with the actual incident. And you must say, “All right, let’s get into your own sperm sequence now.” And bang, he’ll be in it. But people would much rather run the lock. People will run each other’s engrams. I was taking this up a day or two ago with a class here. They’ll run each other’s engrams.
Why, wonderful, you don’t have to experience any pain or discomfort or anything like that. Here’s a full store of engrams, the only trouble is every engram which lies down there on the track of somebody else’s has right under it and just adjacent to it a real engram of the person.
You’ll find out on checking this that individuals do not transplant engrams uniformly. That is to say, you have five people who are working together and two of them will suddenly pick up a certain engram that one of the others has been talking about. Now we get down there, we run it.
You take people who have been auditing, you will find a lot of the engrams they have just run out of people in them. Well, that is beautiful diagnosis because wherever an engram’s stuck—that is, that was run out of somebody else—the secondhand engram’s stuck, it’s stuck on a very similar engram. And it’s beautiful diagnosis and I have used the hell out of this with people. I’ve sat around and told people of engrams and said, “Well, so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so,” looking at them very intently, noticing that they’ve gotten nervous on a certain subject. Then I tell them this engram and then that engram and then some other engram, then take them back down the track and find them. I’ll find one of these engrams.
It’s—very interesting little mechanism—we used it a long time ago, I haven’t used it for a long time—of finding whether or not Mother had a lover. Talk about Papa the brute, Papa this, and Papa fighting and coitus chain latched together and Papa fighting and then all of a sudden the lover being so worried because Papa might know about it and so on.
Go over to something else, just talking to them about the sequences, put them back down the track and see if this one stuck anyplace. And the second that stuck, to dive for the engram right under it and bang, we have Mama’s lover, if it was in the bank. If I couldn’t find the engram anywhere in the bank it didn’t completely invalidate the fact there was a lover there but it sure had a tendency to allay my suspicions. Will you tell them about that?
Male voice: I’ll tell them. We’ve had other experiences along that line also with later engrams. One case of one of our auditors had to audit out of a fellow the engram that he had just audited out of her.
Mm-hm.
Male voice: And because we were not aware of this lock formula . . .
Yeah.
Male voice: . . . why, they ran that out, and went on back to conception or something. But he just—he lost out there a beautiful piece of diagnosis because he had an engram of his own lying there which was practically parallel. These will be very close, they’ll almost be word for word. Of course if we talk about the sperm sequence, those present who have severe and as yet unerased sperm sequences may of course get this data along the line. And when running them out you will find that they may use his technical terminology to explain their own thing, or you may find the whole sequence lying there. It’s a beautiful locator. Okay? Yes?
Male voice: On that “control yourself,” if you have decided, let us say, a certain grandparent was the most aberrative person that said “control yourself,” it still is true, isn’t it, that if you get the first “control yourself” in the bank, no matter who said it, you II be taking charge off. .. ?
Oh, yes. But I’m—this problem has this ramification. You’re trying to find one series of “control yourself” mechanisms, whereas the reason the person is controlling himself comes from another mouth. So you are running down not the aberrative chain, you are running down the—just the long chain, the chronic chain.
The reason he is controlling himself is because of what the grandparent said. So after we’ve run down this long chain, we run it against this mechanism that we haven’t spotted. Whereas if we spot this mechanism in the first place, now to run down a long chain is easy.
Female voice: Do that in straight line memory?
You go down a chain in straight line memory? Oh, no.
Female voice: I mean your “control yourself,” to find out Oh, you mean diagnostically Female voice: That’s right Just diagnostically, you’ve got the person up in present time, you’re diagnosing by making him remember. By the way, this is something else: the diagnosis on straight line memory to discover the existence of such circuits and their probable wording so they can be plowed up by repeater technique. [gap] The only thing I’ve found on these is a little emotional tension, never found any pain yet, as you go back. If you were going back on a protoplasm line you could expect to find pain because that would be a pain carrier. But it postulates the possibility that emotion is something outside.
Male voice: Can he change his sex on his return?
Second male voice: Oh, sex is determined at the moment of conception.
Male voice: No, I mean his memory . . .
Oh. He’s talking about this memory. It’s always wonderful that these confounded unknowns that you just can’t put your finger on to any degree are always more fascinating than what we know. And I’m going to have to conduct a little experiment on this, find out how many dozens of these long-distance recalls I can find. Because if I start finding them in A, B, C, D, E and F and G cases, if I really look for them hard, find out if there’s some trick mechanism you have to use in order to discover them—I mean they may be mechanically occluded in some way, well, I guess there are going to be a lot of people in Los Angeles be awful happy—we’ll have contacted the human soul. [gap] Male voice: Ron? The point Joe just made, that the 48-or 47-chromosome cell—the female has 48 chromosomes, the male has 47—and those cells divide into 24- or 23-cell gametes. That may account for the cutting off of the memory of the father or mother At that point the daughter cell is not the exact equivalent of the mother cell.
He’s right.
Male voice: That is the one process in the whole sequence of human metabolism, human cellular metabolism, where the daughter cell is not a duplicate of the mother cell.
This is—considerable interest, all of this. What we’re doing is tracking back here on an anatomy of thought. We don’t know too much about what thought is. It may be an energy form, a sentient energy form which is everywhere existent, becomes localized when it can motivate matter, another type of energy. But however it is, going back—I must call to your attention—on the anatomy of thought is quite as valid as checking back on the anatomy and physiology of people. There is no reason to fall into the error of yesterday when people considered that God was thought or there was a thought and that this thought was something very supernatural and something or other and something we would never be able to contact. Because in Dianetics we’re carrying along on a different premise, the premise being that the anatomy of thought is thoroughly as valid as the anatomy of matter, you might say. And we’re going back along the line. Now, you notice how hazy the very best medical knowledge is of the basic processes. And it has its hazy spots, very definitely.
In such a way as we track back thought, we get such hazy spots as well. We do have ways to help it, just as medicine has ways to bring about fertilization.
Male voice: In teaching the functional thinking project that I was carrying on for several years before coming here, I would very often stress this very pointy the fact that thought has structure as well as function and therefore the relationship between the structure of the thought and the function should be considered in a thinking process as well as thinking of thought being merely a function which goes—must pass through a physical structure, the brain, as the pathway of relationship between function and structure.
I want to get definite on this. I bring this up just so none of you will have a hazy concept of what we’re doing here. This is a postulate. What it is worth, I don’t know; how it will resolve things, I don’t know. Got several rather complicated papers on this, I won’t burden you down with this in that way.
Let’s consider that there is a thing called life energy. Maybe this is just the élan vital of Bergson but it behaves for our purposes a little bit more usably. So here we have this life energy. Now, where it comes from, what motivates it and so forth, of that we are not aware. One of these days I intend to conduit this stuff and look at it in a microscope or something. But it has two branches. It goes out here into thought and down here it’s structure. [drawing on blackboard] The structure is a vessel of thought. Thought is what brings about and regulates structure. So that you have an interactive principle going to work here. We look at it in this simplicity, it’s not worked out because we don’t know what this is [taps blackboard]. Neither do they know what electricity is, but still use it. But there’s evidence that this thought-structure interrelationship— that is, when I’m talking about structure, I’m talking about matter now Here is an energy which in some way or other is able to enter into matter and make out of that matter something which is mobile, sentient. So it—this life energy comes along here—now, it apparently goes into these two lines of division. But . . .
Male voice: The thought line goes into two lines, the purity of thought and the structure of thought, in—we found this very effective in thinking of a thought having structure . . .
Sure.
Male voice: . . . so that there s another branch into two lines there of thought.
Well, of course this thing would go out and out, but what I’m bringing up here is that you could not possibly consider a little pile of chemicals here which would go to make up somebody, as a live, living entity. But that you couldn’t consider a live, living entity, something or other, without a little pile of chemicals as we have concourse in this society. And the two uniting together, one is driving the other and being affected back and forth.
However, if such things as these long sequences of memory back along the line keep persisting, this still doesn’t invalidate this tenet. It would say that life energy can transmit itself as a personality, which would be a strange thing, but one which we could take in stride.
Certainly we’d believe the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution from a mathematician’s point of view has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. The logic of the theory of evolution, of all evolution and so forth is utterly haywire. So this is a nice, clean, clear concept. It is. So when you start out this track, we are not sure what we are following. And it has been one of the basic errors of the past to believe a little cell had to contain in it this and that and after all it was just a cell, and therefore couldn’t because a cell . . . In other words, very sloppy thinking. We don’t know what’s attached to that cell. But a gentleman, a chap up in a university, New England, releasing some papers now concerning the electromagnetic fields which he has contacted and measured. This is this precise academic work and I haven’t read these papers, I don’t know anything about them beyond this fact, that they seem to indicate that there was an electromagnetic field existing around the cell which was the primary causative field rather than the cell putting out a field. Which makes it a very strange-looking picture.
Male voice: What about Reich’s orgone energy?
Okay. What about it?
Male voice: I mean, what about this, that he can explain all that?
Well, I’m glad Reich can; I can’t.
Second male voice: Ron, I think it’s a very interesting point too, and one that should be kept in mind, that the—thought is a thing that’s well accepted by the medical profession as a function of a neuron, of the cells of the brain. But they cannot accept it as the function of the somatic cell In other words, they will swallow a camel and strain at a gnat Yeah. Very, very interesting. The—most of the principles along this line are held in place by precedent. And precedent, after all, is merely the admission that a fellow who lived before you was smarter. And yet you have more data than he had.
Male voice: In morphological work it’s been proven time and time again that this organizing field that extends—even at Yale where doctors Burr and Northrop conducted experiments after developing this invention that could record this magnetic field around the cellular structure, they determined and their conclusion was that this organizing field was probably a dominant or prime factor in the morphological structure of the body.
Some interesting papers were released on this not long ago.
Male voice: Yes. And the morphology has been generally accepted by doctors who are open to that same . . .
What would be incredible would be to accept the postulate that there was no sentient energy anywhere in the vicinity of any cell. And it would be even worse to try to postulate, as far as nervous energy recording’s concerned, that a cell did not have a nervous system. Actually, the sperm does have a nervous system, a central nervous system, functionally speaking.
Well now, what we’re following here is—has a very definite purpose, it is trying to make the processes of Dianetics work faster, work more easily. And part of the processes and part of the success of the process depends upon your ability to follow the process or to work with it.
We work here very hard in an effort to communicate to you, for your use and the application of your skill, certain techniques and processes. We’re going to try very hard to continue that line. But if you are not getting good results, reexamine your technique in the light of Standard Procedure that now exists, find out if there’re any holes in your application of it.
I would be very happy . . . [gap] . . . bring with you a small, very brief review of your own auditing, how it seems to you. And just by reviewing it yourself through today, taking a look at what you’re doing, the results you’re getting and have been getting, you will have a better idea of any hole that may exist in it. I would like to have you bring this up in class tomorrow morning and that would conclude this week’s series of hammering away on this Standard Procedure. And I want to have those questions. Tomorrow we’ll take up nothing else but those questions.
Okay, class dismissed.