Conception-Sperm Sequence (500714)
Date: 14 July 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I want to talk to you further this morning about picking the locks on a demon circuit. This subject—evidently not as fully comprehended as it might be. I’m assuming by this time that you all know how to run an engram. That is, to get to the beginning of it and run to the end of it and run it until it’s reduced; if that one doesn’t reduce, to get the earlier one which does reduce. And go down the line until you get one that does reduce and when you get that one, reduce it.
A remarkable cross-reference went through last night on something. I suddenly found out, through reviewing quite a few cases, the most aberrative engram. It’s the sperm sequence.
I’ve only had a few people go into what was actually a very flat spin in Dianetics. It was—and I had only a few cases slump badly. I went back to check what are the missing—what did these cases have in common. They had one thing in common: sperm dream had been clipped but had not been fully run.
The sequence, then, because it would, after all, permeate the entire cellular structure and certainly the nervous system, would seem to be a rather wicked one. It seems that whatever content it may have is about twice as good as anything else.
Now a sperm dream, sequence, whatever you want to call it, does have the inability sometimes to reduce. Occasionally you get a sperm sequence, run it, run it and run it and run it and it’s not reducing. Several words will be left sticking up in the air on it. It’d still have a somatic with these words. It could still be very intense.
Now, in trying to run this, it is sometimes necessary to pick up another engram and come back to it. But don’t forget that. Come back to it! You want—let us say we have the word “come” is still sticking up in the sperm sequence. All right.
Now, if we still have this word there, this word is probably cross-filed in some weird fashion up the bank somewhere and is being repressed later. I have resolved several cases in this fashion. Normally—before we were giving it the stress that we’re giving it now, a stress which we find it very richly merits—we used to run out this sperm sequence as a matter of course. Sort of a “Ho-hum, well, it’s probably there all right. Yep. He seems to be feeling the pain and so on, so well let him run it. Content? Well, don’t think so, but we’ll let him run that anyway.” And once in a while because of this frame of mind I would go off and leave the darn thing. I would always get a case slump, invariably.
Female voice: Ron, would it be a good suggestion to call it the sperm-ovum sequence?
Yes. It would be a better one to call it the conception sequence.
Female voice: Well, yes. Or just to call it conception.
Female voice: Yes, Now, in view of the fact that the ovum is around for many days before fertilization, in view of the fact that the sperm is going through a sequence of generation which has many steps—there are many subdivisions there of cells before they finally get the sperm (which is a cell which will not subdivide—its cytoplasm is missing), they—the possibility of engrams occurring before this time is not slight.
The possibility is that you could have ten, fifteen, twenty engrams prior to conception. It’s one of these things; we’ve got to take cognizance of the fact—I’ve run out quite a few. As a matter of fact, as a point in question—rather indelicate, inelegant little incident but in one preclear I ran out a series of incidents that had to do with different women.
This sounded quite incomprehensible to me but there was a very rough somatic on the first one. A prostitute had expressed her deep chagrin with a hard kick. And the whole content immediately after that kick was in—you might say the cellular recording was turned on at that moment.
Well, I said this is very interesting and he seemed to be exhibiting some somatics on the thing so I ran them, fortunately. I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t run them. I checked back over a couple of cases here recently which were very badly held up and I found in both those cases the conception was not reduced.
In one of those cases I know that there were two preconception incidents to which no one paid any heed. Now, one can get just so credulous about this. As far as I’m concerned, conception and incidents before conception are not only possible but when discovered will be found to be the most deeply aberrative sequences in the bank.
Once in a while you’re going to find a patient who’s going to run off what he terms his last death. One boy is talking about back in 1924 when he died at the age of seventy-four. And he insists this is there. He gets a full visio on it and there he is, very, very old, all that sort of thing. Are there any somatics on that, by the way?
Female voice: No, no, there aren’t somatics. It—there s just a feeling of grief It’s that physical . . .
Yeah?
Female voice: Yeah! Uh-huh.
There is an emotional perceptic.
Female voice: Yes, there is, and there is also a lot of stuff—visio and tactile. He feels the sheet across the skin. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever known. I’m getting excited by the case, except I don’t know what to do with it. I . . .
Did you run it?
Female voice: Not that one. No. I didn’t know what to do with it.
Why didn’t you run it?
Female voice: I don’t—I—because I’m afraid, I mean . . .
Next time you get him back there, run it.
Female voice: Well . . . (laughs) We’ve got to keep an open mind about these things, (laughter) Female voice: I know, I can, but I wanted to talk to you first. That’s why I . . .
Here on the road to sanity, we very often may feel that we are losing our sanity, (laughter) Female voice: I brought him way up to conception! (laughter) Now, you must understand this little—give it a fancy word— equation. This is the computation which ran down the fact that prenatals existed. Later incidents would not lift. Late-life periods of unconsciousness would not lift. They obviously had content but they wouldn’t lift.
All right. Here we have an engram here which contains words and phrases throughout it. I’d come back to an engram here, had words and phrases in it. I’d find that the late ones as a general rule were harder to penetrate than the earlier ones. So, here would be another one, easier to lift. And another one, easier to lift.
In other words, the rule being followed was if an engram will not lift, there is something ahead of it. And this led right straight on down to what is now—that is to say, that we have to take into consideration . . . I’ve run these things out of, literally—well, in many of the releases I contacted—roughly, and wouldn’t run it out because I wasn’t going for an erasure. I realize now that I should have. They were fine; they were in good condition. But on every person who has been cleared in Dianetics, this sequence and some of them, two or three earlier sequences have been run out. I didn’t buy it, I just sat there and let it roll I thought “Well . . .” And I usually got these things on the erasure, not the first thing in the case.
With the technique which came in from the Coast: setting the person in a pleasure moment, not letting him say anything or not paying any attention to what he said, and then soon as he got the emotion of it, throwing him back early on the track, reaching that sperm sequence—makes it reachable in a lot of patients.
All right. If we reach that, and if we have this rule in mind, it leads inevitably to the fact that if a sperm sequence won’t lift, there is something earlier. That would be carrying out the computation which led initially to getting as early as we have. I’ve run out earlier material than the sperm sequence.
Lately when I’ve wanted to undo a sperm sequence, however, I thought that I was going later in the bank to reduce an engram and then clipping it early. Now I don’t know. One patient was telling me that she was first in Mama and then in Papa and then in Mama and then in Papa. And looking back on this I—it must have been, because when I finally ran out conception, I had to get a couple of other coitus and I supposed those were later. I had no time data. But she started talking immediately about being first in Mama and then in Papa. And she’d run out part of this engram in Mama and then part of this engram in Papa. All of a sudden the sperm sequence erased. At the moment it erased, her sonic came on, very clearly.
This postulates several possibilities. They need investigation. Correlated with the rest of the data we would probably find valence difficulties in the early conception sequences. Valence difficulty may appear in that area. That is something to remember, something to follow through.
I’m sorry if this is a little bit hard to track along with, but it’s actually very easy. If you get a sperm sequence that won’t lift, you can try experimentally, “Let’s go earlier.” And if you get a sperm sequence, reduce it, for God’s sake. Because checking back through these cases that have halted suddenly in their operation, slowed down, nothing has happened on them for a long time afterwards, a sperm sequence was run and it was not reduced. And there he is; it was run and not reduced.
Now, while I was down in Bethesda Naval Hospital I worked on a couple of people in the fall of 1949, and one of these gentlemen gave me the most remarkable tale I ever heard in my life. He went on back, I suppose he would have wound up as a cave man if I’d let him keep on going.
His material had no somatics on it, beside an occasional little emotional shake-up. But he was going back and he was getting killed and he was being born and he was riding it on all the way through. I left him in the Roman Republic. Fortunately the physical pain connected with this was zero—had it been true.
Now, after thinking about it later, it appeared to me very, very interesting that . . . [gap] . . . in each one of us which extends all the way back to the dawn of time. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be recordings on that protoplasm. Well, that’s very neat, very nice. The only trouble is, people keep registering death. And I am absolutely certain that in the past it has not been a practice to breed children from a dead man.
As a consequence, are we knocking on the door of the human soul? Or are we knocking on the door of delusion? Now, it’s one or the other. I’ve boiled it down; did a lot of thinking about it last night. And it seemed to me that the problem split up just like that.
If these earlier sequences are to be accepted—and many of them are as brilliantly clear as, and much clearer, some of them, than incidents that come later, then we’re working with something like transmigration, God help us. And I hope not.
Male voice: There’s sonic and visual on that stuff?
Yeah.
Male voice: Question. Does this fellow you worked on in Maryland happen to believe in reincarnation? He didn’t know anything about it?
Female voice: Would he have the knowledge to possibly dub it in because of the . . . ?
Well, the hell of this fellow in Maryland was he was not a dub-in. He was wide open, had all his recalls, everything he ran off was good. I was knocking engrams out of him just about like you’d snap your fingers. And then I said, “Let’s go all the way back to the earliest moment of pain or discomfort.” And he said, “I’m sitting here on a mule looking at a castle. It isn’t a mule, it’s a donkey.” “And what happens then?” says I. “Well, this guy in a suit comes by and he knocks me off and he kills me.” We were off to the races. (laughter) Male voice: He goes back to ancient Rome, was he talking Latin?
Well, no, he wasn’t talking Latin, but he wasn’t getting any sonic either.
Male voice: Oh.
Second male voice: Foreign language case. But there would be a foreign language case, yes. (laughter) Third male voice: Very early in the beginning of our Foundation I received a letter from Dallas, Texas, where a chap was using a similar system of reverie and he’d gotten a fellow back to 1587 and he was talking ancient French. The fellow never heard of French in his life.
Well, that’s very interesting.
Male voice: There s a fellow named Roberts out in LA, a hypnotist I talked to, and he says what he does, he gets the person in a deep trance, and the first time he says something, “Go back to your former life before this and your twentieth birthday and describe what you see in detail.” You get all this detail of what they were wearing and what was going along in the conversation and all of a sudden—he told me this and I said, “Uh-huh.” But now I don’t know, (laughter) Yeah, it’s an awfully good thing not to have a thoroughly 100 percent gnostic attitude when you’re dealing with life. What we actually know about life is very slight. As a matter of fact, what we know about the human mind could probably be encompassed in one book. But . . . (laughter) But we must have an open mind—we must be alert to things that might happen a little bit beyond it. But the point right now that I wish to make is this computation is in existence. The earlier you go, the thinner the unconsciousness. And if anything hangs up, it’s because something is earlier.
Now, if that follows out, then the—some of these early coitus incidents you may be running, you may be running those preconception without realizing that they are. And I want to make this point very definitely: you get your hands on a conception sequence, reduce it. Because on the checkover on the records last night, the failure to reduce conception was the common denominator of each case which has proven difficult in Dianetics.
Female voice: Ron, when you re going down, returning earlier to touch these engrams, are the somatics necessarily weaker? Are they stronger all the time?
No, they’re neither stronger nor weaker. They have a slight tendency to get a little bit limper because they are allover, all-through somatics. But I have really run into some . . .
Female voice: Well, I mean you—specifically with coitus when one is prior to the others, the top one is . . .
Well, this is . . .
Female voice: . . . has a lot of somatic and the one under it could—is less . . .
Yeah, that would hold in some degree. The test of this is whether or not it will lift. The liftability of the last late painful incident is less than one earlier. [marking on blackboard] And this is more easily lifted. And this is then more easily lifted and so on. As we go early they’re easier and easier to lift. If we follow this out all the way down the line—and after all, this wound us up in the prenatal and down into basic-basic area and so forth. But goddamn it, I get tired of going south in Dianetics. I have produced results in an awful lot of people that you did a full erasure of the bank and didn’t have to bother with these extensions. But in each one of these cases sooner or later in the case I would discover something odd about the early material in the case. For instance, I would think I had something like conception out of the case. Conception wouldn’t show up, let’s say, until I had run what seemed to be the first fight or something like that and I’d start coming up the bank and then I’d find myself back running conception again, occasionally finding it necessary to run an incident or two, but coitus would seem to be sitting nowhere.
They might well have been, in each case, preconception incidents. So preconception incidents—here we have observer trouble. It’s very hard to observe what you’re looking at sometimes. And on further observation it may develop that preconception incidents are not only credible but are common, You might not know when you’ve run across them. You keep asking a person for the earliest coitus on the chain. He finally gives you an earliest coitus on the chain. On one case I recall immediately the—I ran this coitus out of the individual, reduced and erased. It was gone.
I went up the track, picked up some more material, came back down the track—just checking early as you do when you’re undertaking an erasure—and I found the same coitus. But this time it had a different somatic. Well, that puzzled me for a little while until I said, “Well now, this could be postulated on the fact that we might be running first the sperm, then the ovum in the same act.” Well, I had to leave it at that. But subsequent to that—mind you, I just took a review of all this material . . .
Male voice: Did it erase on the second time through?
Oh, we erased the second one. But I said this is a hell of a thing, this coitus popping back up in my face again. I’d never seen this happen before. You have to be very late to have an incident come up and it won’t do that. You won’t have gotten rid of it in the first place. Here’s the incident gone, erased, unmistakably erased, yawns off of it, everything. And then we go back a few days and pop! there’s the incident; same incident.
Well, I was coordinating this material in my mind last night and ran across enough incidents of this kind to say, “Well, gee-whiz.” It may be that whenever this has turned up we were just running the duo. So keep your eyes open on it.
Male voice: I had the feeling when someone was running unconsciousness on me, I kept saying, “Well, earlier It’s earlier It’s earlier.” It didn’t go earlier but . . .
Did you try to go earlier, anybody?
Male voice: No.
Second male voice: When you erase this stuff that’s believed it’s preconception, do they have standard bank recall on it?
Later on?
Second male voice: Yes.
That stuff down in the early part of the track has a habit of just blowing out if you really erase it. I have searched for some of this material afterwards and located enough of it in the standard bank to where it was really recorded as memory, nonerasable, to bring me to the conclusion that it was recorded.
What is recorded in the central nervous system is recorded, you might say, in the central nervous system. Well, what is the source of the central nervous system? And what is it? Actually we don’t at this time have enough data about structure to worry too far about this. I’d rather not.
Female voice: And there is no idea of time then in the preconception area?
Well yes, they run it off on time. Sometimes time is very slow.
There are several generations of cells before the sperm finally appears in the male. And the female line on the thing is—you know it would be disastrous if that female line ran all the way back, (laughter) But it doesn’t, as far as I know. I’ve never found it doing so.
You’ll find in the—around the vicinity of conception, you’ll very often find some of the wildest dreams and hallucinations. One of them was thousands of angels flying down to attend a fish fry. (laughter) And they are getting ready to say goodbye and dispatch this baby into the world and so on. This damn thing never did resolve into a conception because nobody asked for it. There’s a hole in technique you could throw a fish fry through.
All right. What I’m advising you to do then is when you get your hands on a conception, run it. And if it won’t release, reduce (theoretically it should erase, but they don’t always erase; sometimes there’s no pain on them—one should still run them a few times) — is go earlier, see if we can pick up the earlier and then see if we can pick up a twin coitus to one we erased earlier. Let’s get some data on this.
Yes?
Female voice: Would the usual reason for no somatics be part of the sperm sequence?
The reason for no somatics?
Female voice: Yeah. Or the reason for these developed somatics—would the usual reason for them developing somatics be other than them developing as part of the sperm sequence?
Oh yes. The person, you see, would have a retroactive valence engram that he was carrying down into the conception area. So that you would have a shut-off of that. Furthermore “I can’t feel anything” would be a somatic shut-off. [gap] . . .all right, those things could be getting installed anyplace.
Male voice: Yeah, I know, but would it be a good idea, I mean, to try and find the guy’s actual first conception regardless of circuitry problems and just ignore it?
Yeah, but better find out if he’s moving on the track. Here’s—the thing that pointed this up was the chemistry called for in fertilization of the ovum may have some bearing upon the existence of or the sudden manifestation of cancer in the body.
Two types of cancer: one has to do with a catalyst for cellular division. You’d say, biochemically, because the germ cell of cancer goes on . . . Let’s say we had a cancer germ cell somewhere lost in the body and something suddenly triggers it and it begins to divide and it makes the embryo and—the asexual act—and it goes on subdividing. It’s creating embryos actually. And it’s a remarkably vicious thing. That’s one kind of cancer. The other kind of cancer is where the cells in the vicinity of the cancer cell are called upon to grow. Other production there.
Now, these two kinds would—unfortunately for my sanity—would compare immediately to the sperm units there, if you got a fertilization that would call for a certain body chemistry. If this engram was in restimulation it might still call for that body chemistry. This is just a postulate, to be abandoned at the moment it is found to be unworkable. But a cellular change might be called for by certain body chemistry, providing the conception engram came into restimulation. If conception came into restimulation, you could have, possibly, a body chemistry situation set up there again which would cause cellular division, because that’s what conception calls for.
Now, on the other one: mitosis, dividing that cell and the division of cells, sometimes cause an engram. Well now, if that engram, just following the postulate, came into restimulation, we might have there the body chemistry which catalyzes the growth of cells. This is sloppy, but following along this track I was able a few days ago to narrow down the range of cancer to two experiments which if performed should keep in or throw out current theory.
Male voice: Why, Wade Koontz was saying last night that he had gotten up to eight cells and there was pain on each division, and the pain wouldn’t erase permanently. It would erase for the time but then a couple days later it would come back again. You run it again, somatic was back again.
You mean John Koontz?
Male voice: Paul’s brother.
Yeah. Yeah. He’s having one hell of a lot of trouble with conception. I’ll have to put my hands on this case and see if we can’t go back and find somebody—Nero raping somebody in ancient Rome, (laughter) Female voice: As a point of therapy, Ron, it might be useful, Martine ran on my case the sperm sequence by asking for the sperm sequence. That’s the reason that I asked this before if it might be well to call it the sperm-ovum sequence.
Mm-hm.
Female voice: Nothing dramatic occurred other than just a vague feeling of pressure on my head. But the words were there. They wouldn’t erase. And she got the idea of asking for the ovum sequence. And the charge nearly blew me off the bed.
That just goes to show! Yeah.
Female voice: I mean that . . .
Well . . .
Female voice: . . . the literal interpretation on the part of the strip is that you ask for the sperm sequence, that’s what you get!
Yeah, that’s right.
Female voice: When you ask for the ovum sequence that was—might be what you get.
Oh, I guess we’d have to ask for the part of conception necessary to resolve the case. (laughter) All right. I know when I’m licked. (laughter) Male voice: Oh, Ron?
Yeah?
Male voice: If the conception engram does erase, no point in trying to go earlier?
I would never say that was good auditing to assume perforce, just because you had an erasure, that nothing existed earlier. The law on the thing—and let me give you the general law—is the fact that in the early part of the case there are many engrams which will erase which are not appended one after the other. All right. If that’s true then, conception could erase and you might still have a little bit of earlier data.
Well, anyway, let’s go early on this thing; find out what we get instead of—you know, it’s a possibility that some of the difficulties in reaching the early part of the track, some of the fishing one has to do and therefore some of the length of time—maybe a great deal of the time which one has to spend these days to get a Clear might be answered.
We might be dealing with a little accidental right there at the beginning of the track. Sometimes we clip it out very nicely, at which moment the case proceeds beautifully. And sometimes it’s taken out badly if at all and the case doesn’t keep on going. You also must keep in mind that there is the possibility of an accidental like this. Because some cases do go badly and some cases do go well. The bad ones will resolve but at what cost of sweat, I hate to remark.
Female voice: Does it seem that then the ovum dream is the more important for the female . . . ?
No, I wouldn’t say so. The determination of sex doesn’t seem to be lodged that way. It probably would depend on whether or not the ovum was in more pain than the sperm was during the act. Life seems to be painful in some departments.
All right. Now, I don’t want you to be upset by this. This is nothing new. This is nothing suddenly creeping up on you, but it is definitely something that may speed things up. That’s all we want. Got to have a ten-hour Clear by—at the limit, June 1, 1951. A one-shot Clear, if it goes any later than 1955, I’m going to be awful mad at myself.
Meantime, why, there are a few millions of lives to be saved. (Recording ends abruptly)