DMSH 1950 Book 2 Chapter 6

← Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950)

Emotion and the Dynamics

Emotion is a theta quantity, which is to say that it is so involved with life forces that dianetics at this stage handles it with invariable success but does not attempt to give forth more than a descriptive theory. Much research must be done on emotion; but so long as the therapy embraces it and releases it with success, further data can be dispensed with up to a point.

Emotion would have to be divided sharply into minus emotions and plus emotions. The minus emotion would be non-survival in character, the plus emotion would be pro-survival. The pleasant and pleasurable emotions are not of any great concern to us here. It is believed that all emotion is the same thing but in its aspects above Zone 1 it can be by-passed as unnecessary to explain at this time for the purpose of this book.

In Zones 1 and 0, emotion becomes very important to therapy. As has been covered earlier, Zones 1 and 0 are the anger and apathy zones respectively. From death up to the border between anger and fear is Zone 0. From this borderline to the beginning of boredom is anger, Zone 1.

It is as if the survival dynamic, in becoming contracted into Zone 1, first began to display hostility, then, on further suppression toward death, anger. On further suppression, rage began to be displayed. Then fear as the next lower level, then terror and finally, just above death, apathy.

And as the dynamic is suppressed, the cells react forcefully to the menace, it could be said, by resisting the menace. The analyzer resists down to the top border of Zone 1, but in ever decreasing control. From here on down the cells, the actual organism, do the resisting in a last ditch effort. The reactive mind is thoroughly in command from the top border of Zone 1 straight on down to death, and it is in ever increasing command of the organism as the dynamic is suppressed.

Emotion seems to be inextricably connected up with the actual force of life. That there is a life force no engineer could doubt. Man and medicine usually look at the pitcher and forget that the pitcher is only there to hold milk and that the milk is the important quantity. Life force is the helium which fills the free balloon. Out goes the helium, down comes the balloon. When this type of energy is located and isolated as itself -- if it is just an energy type -- then medicine can start moving forward in strides which will make all former steps look like those of a man in a sack race. Medicine doesn’t have any spare helium, for one thing.

How high this life force can go on the survival scale is not known. Above Zone 3 is the area of question marks. A clear goes up into a level of persistence, vigor, tenacity, rationality and happiness. Perhaps some day a clear will attain the nebulosity the author used to hear about in India which marked the man who was all soul.

How far down it can go is definitely known. A man dies. He doesn’t move or think. He dies as an organism, then he dies as cells. There are different periods of “life after death” for the cells and biologists remark that the hair and nail cells do not die for months. So here is a spectrum of death, first the organism and then, colony by colony, the cells.

That is from the bottom of Zone 0 downward. But what we are interested in is the area from Zone 1 down to the bottom of Zone 0. It could be postulated that the analytical mind has its greatest bounce against the suppressor, its highest ability to care for the organism, when it is in the third zone. As the suppressor thrusts downward against it, the analyzer, within lower Zone 3 thrusts heavily back. This is necessity at work. The necessity level can rise, in this action, to a point which keys-out all engrams!

It must be realized that the analyzer considers future suppressors and is continually engaged upon computations which pose problems of the future which the analyzer resolves -- this is one of the functions of the imagination; it must further be realized that the analyzer is engaged upon a multitude of computations about the present: for the analytical mind is dealing continually with an enormous number of factors which comprise the suppressor of the present and the suppressor of the future. It computes for instance on the alliances with friends and symbiotes and its greatest victories are achieved by taking some of the suppressor and turning it into an alliance factor.

The individual can be visualized, on the survival spectrum, as being at the tip of the survival dynamic. The suppressor thrusts down, or future suppressors threaten a thrust and the analytical mind thrusts up with solutions. The level of the individual is determined by how well these suppressors are apparently met.

We speak now of the clear and until further mention we will continue to use the clear. The clear is an unaberrated person. He is rational in that he forms the best possible solutions he can on the data he has and from his viewpoint. He obtains the maximum pleasure for the organism, present and future, as well as for the subjects along the other dynamics. The clear has no engrams which can be restimulated to throw out the correctness of computation by entering hidden and false data into it. No aberration. Hence the reason we use him here as an example.

The survival dynamic is high, more than balancing the suppressor. Take this as a first condition. This would place the dynamic in Zone 3, Tone 3.9. Now increase the suppressor. The dynamic is pushed back to Tone 3.2. Necessity surges up. The suppressor is thrust back. The dynamic is once more at Tone 3.9. This action could be termed an enthusiastic resurgence. The individual has actually gotten “angry” -- that is to say, he has called upon his being to furnish power for thought and action.

Mentally he calls upon whatever constitutes mental energy. Physically, if the suppression was physical, he would call upon his adrenalin. This is proper use of the endocrines, to use them for regaining position in relation to the suppressor. Any and all body function is under analytical (but not necessarily monitored) command.

Now let us suppose that the suppressor surges down against the dynamic and drives the dynamic to 3.0. Necessity level comes up. Action is taken. The full force of the being is thrown against the suppressor. Now let us suppose that a new factor comes into the suppressor and makes it much, much stronger. The individual still attempts to resurge against it. But the suppressor weighs heavier and heavier against him. He is beginning to exhaust his supplies of mental or physical energy (and this suppressor can be on either a mental or physical level.) Wearying, the individual drops down to a 2.5. The suppressor again increases. Resurgence is attempted once more. The last supply of available energy or data is thrown out. And another factor comes into the suppressor, increasing its weight. The individual sags down to 2.0.

At exactly this point the analyzer, having failed, finally cuts out. Here is entered the top of Zone 1. Hostility sets in. The suppressor is down, pressing down against actual cellular survival. And it drops lower. The individual goes into anger, recruiting cellularly but not sentiently, the last forces. Again the suppressor gets new weight. The individual goes into rage. Once more the suppressor drops. The individual goes into fear, Tone 0.9. Again the suppressor lowers, recruiting new factors. The individual is thrust down to 0.6 and here is in terror. Once more the suppressor drops with new force. The individual slides into fear paralysis, 0.2.

Suppose we parallel this in a very simple, dramatic example so that we do not have to consider a thousand subtle factors.

A clear, inexperienced in hunting, determines to shoot a grizzly. He has a fine rifle. The grizzly appears to be easy game. The man is at 3.9 or above. He feels good. He is going to get

that grizzly as the grizzly has been threatening the man’s stock. High enthusiasm carries him to the lair. He waits, he finally sees the grizzly. There is a cliff above the man which he could not ordinarily climb. But to get a good shot before the grizzly vanishes, the man has to climb the cliff. Seeing he was in danger of losing the game brought the man down to 3.2. Necessity sends him up the cliff. He fires but in firing falls back down the cliff. The grizzly is wounded. He starts toward the man. Necessity surges up. The man recovers the gun and shoots again. He is at 3.0 the moment he shoots. He misses. He fires again but the miss, with the grizzly charging, brought him down to 2.5. He shoots once more. The grizzly takes the ball and keeps on coming. The man shoots again but he has suddenly realized that his rifle is not going to stop this grizzly. His tone drops to 2.0. He begins to snarl and feverishly work his gun. His bullets go wild. He experiences rage at the gun, the grizzly, the world, and throws the gun away, ready to meet the grizzly, almost upon him, with bare hands. Suddenly the man knows fear. His tone is 1.2. It drops to 0.9 with a smell in his nostrils of the bear. He knows the bear will kill him. He turns and tries to claw up the cliff and get away but his efforts are frenzied. He is at Tone 0.6, stark terror. The bear strikes him and knocks him from the cliff-side. The man lies still, breathing almost halted, heart-beat slowed to nearly nothing. The bear hits him again and the man lies still. Then the bear decides he is dead and walks away. Shaken, the man eventually comes around, his tone gradually rising up to 2.0, the point where his analyzer shut off. He stirs more and gets up. His tone is back to 2.5: he is analytically afraid and cautious. He recovers his gun. He begins to leave the scene. He feels a great necessity to recoup his own self-esteem and his tone comes to 3.2. He walks away and reaches a safe area. Suddenly it occurs to him that he can borrow a friend’s Mauser. He begins to make plans to get that bear. His enthusiasm mounts. But, completely aside from the engram received when the bear knocked him out, he acts on his experience. Three days later he kills the bear and his tone rises to 4.0 for the space of contemplation and telling the tale and then his mind occupies itself with new matters.

Life is much more complicated than the business of killing grizzlies, usually a lot less dramatic but always full of situations which cause a fluctuation of the suppressor. The gaining of all pleasurable goals -- a bear killed, a woman kissed, a seat in the front row at the opera, a friend won, an apple stolen -- are sweeps through various levels of tone. And the individual is generally carrying on three or three thousand computations at once and there are thirty or thirty thousand variables in his computations. Too many unknowns, too many entrances of “didn’t know the gun was loaded” factors, all these can throw the analyzer from a direct alignment into the scattered dispersal of non-function. The analyzer can be considered to cut out when Tone 2.0 is reached. From 2.5 down the computations it makes are not very rational -- too many unknowns, too many unexpected factors, too many discoveries of miscalculations.

This is living on a “clear” basis. When our hunter was hit by the bear he received an engram. That engram, when it keyed-in, would give him a fear, an apathy attitude, in the presence of certain factors: every perceptic present -- the smell of that ground, twigs, bear- breath, etc. But he killed the bear. The chances of that engram keying-in are remote. Not because he killed the bear but because he was, after all, a grown man. And, if a clear, he could have thought back and cleared the whole thing himself.

This is a complete cycle of emotion. Enthusiasm and high pleasure are at the extreme top. Fear and paralysis are at the bottom. Feigned death, in Man, is very close to the actual thing on the tone scale. It is a valid mechanism. But it is complete apathy.

So long as the analyzer is operating, the receipt of an engram is impossible. Everything files in the standard banks. As soon as the border 2.0 is passed on the way down, “unconsciousness” can be judged to have set in and anything registered, in company with pain or painful emotion, is an engram. This is not a shift of definition. The analyzer cuts out, with surgical anaesthetic, at 2.0. The anaesthetic may depress the level of awareness further. Pain may depress it even more. But depressing the level of awareness is not necessarily depressing emotion.

How much conceived danger or sympathy is present in the environment? This is what depresses the tone scale. There can be a reactive engram which contains a Tone 4.0 or one that contains a 1.0 or another that contains a 0.1. This is not, then, quite two-dimensional, this emotion.

The level of depth of consciousness can be affected by painful emotion, poisons or other things which depress awareness. After that it is all engram and the engrams have their own tone scale which runs from 4.0 down to 0.1.

It can be seen now that two things are at work. First is the state of physical being. It is this which tunes down the analyzer. Then there is the mental state of being.

This is what tunes down the emotional tone scale.

But remember that in engrams there is another factor present: valence. Once its own analyzer is out the body will assume the evaluation or emotional condition of any other analyzer present. Here we have affinity at work in earnest. “Unconscious” in the presence of other beings, an individual picks up a valence for every other being present. Some of these valences are incidental. He will pick first that valence which is most sympathetic as a desirable future friend (or some similar person). And he will pick that valence which is the top valence (highest survival, the boss, the winner) for his dramatization. He will also take the valence of the winning entity (winning over himself or others) for emotional tone. If the winning valence is also the sympathetic valence, he has an engram which can be utilized to its fullest extent.

Let us make this an example: a man is under nitrous oxide (the most vicious anaesthetic ever invented as it is actually not anaesthetic but a hypnotic) undergoing exodontistry. As usual everybody present around the “unconscious” patient chatters and yaps about the patient, the weather, the most popular movie star, or baseball. The exodontist is a tough character, bossy to the nurse, apt to be angry about trifles; he is also very sympathetic toward the patient. The nurse is a blue-eyed blonde who is sexually aberrated. The patient, actually in agony, receiving an engram amongst engrams which may ruin his life (terrible stuff, nitrous oxide; really hands out a fancy engram as any dianeticist can attest) is unanalytical. Everything said to him or around him is taken literally. He takes the valence of the exodontist as both the top valence present and the sympathetic valence. But every phrase uttered is aberrative and will be interpreted by that happy little moron, the reactive mind, on the order of Simple Simon who was told he had to be careful how he stepped in the pies, so he stepped in them carefully. These people may be talking about somebody else but every “I” or “he” or “you” uttered is engramic and will be applied to others and himself by the patient in the most literal sense. “He can’t remember anything” says the exodontist. All right, when the engram keys-in, this patient will have an occlusion on memory in greater or lesser degree. “He can’t see or feel it”: this means an occlusion on sight, pain and tactile. If the patient has his eyes watering in agony at the moment (though completely “under”) he may get actual bad vision as well as poor visual recall from this experience.

Now they put him in the hands of this blonde nurse to let him sleep off the drug and recover. She is an aberree amongst aberrees.

She knows patients do weird things when they are still “out” so she pumps him for information about his life. And she knows they are hypnotic (yes, she sure does) so she gives him some positive suggestions. Amusing herself. She says he’ll like her. That she’ll be good to him. And stay there now for the present.

So the poor patient, who has had two wisdom teeth, impacted, taken out, has a full anger-sympathy dramatization. The general tone he takes is the tone the exodontist showed to the others in the room. The exodontist was angry at the nurse. With his recalls all messed up, the patient a few years later meets a woman similar to this nurse. The nurse has given him compulsions toward her.

The silly little moron, the reactive mind, sees in this entirely different person enough similarity to create an identity between the nurse and this new woman. So the patient divorces his wife and marries the pseudo-nurse.

Only now that he has married the pseudo-nurse the dental engram begins to key-in in earnest. Physically he gets ill: the two molars adjacent to where the wisdom teeth came out develop large cavities and begin to rot (circulation shut down, pain in the area but can’t be felt because there’s a pain recall shut-off). His memory goes to pieces. His recalls become worse. He begins to develop eye trouble and a strange conjunctivitis. Further (because the dentist leaned on his chest and stomach with a sharp elbow from time to time) he has chest and stomach pains. The nitrous oxide hurt his lungs and this pain is also in chronic restimulation. But most horrible: he believes that this pseudo-nurse will take care of him and he stops to some degree taking care of himself in any way; his energy dissipates; and analytically he knows it is all wrong and that he is not himself. For he is now fixed in the valence of the exodontist who is angry with this nurse and so he beats the pseudo-nurse because he senses that from her all evil flows. The girl he married is not and was not the nurse: she sounds something like her and is a blonde. She has her own engrams and reacts. She attempts suicide.

Then, one day, since this is one engram among many, the mental hospital gets our patient and the doctors there decide that all he needs is a good solid series of electric shocks to tear his brain up, and if that doesn’t work, a nice ice-pick into each eyeball after and during electric shock, the ice-pick sweeping a wide arc to tear the analytical mind to pieces. His wife agrees. Our patient can’t defend himself: he’s insane and the insane have no rights, you know.

Only the cavalry, in this one case, arrived in the form of dianetics and cleared the patient and the wife and they are happy today. This is an actual engram and an actual case history. It is a sympathy engram, pro-survival on the moronic reactive mind level.

This is to show the ebb and flow of emotion within this one engram. The physical being is out and in agony. The mental being is given a variety of emotional tones on a contagion principle. The actual emotional tone of the patient, his own, is beaten apathy; hence he can no longer “be himself.”

In passing it should be mentioned that only absolute silence, utter silence and tomb-like silence, should attend an operation or injury of any kind. There is nothing which can be said or given as a perceptic in any moment of “unconsciousness” which is beneficial to a patient.

Nothing! In the light of these researches and scientific findings (which can be proven in any other laboratory or group of people in very short order), speech or sound in the vicinity of an “unconscious” person should be punished criminally as, to anyone who knows these facts, such an act would be a willful effort to destroy the intellect or mental balance of an individual. If the patient is complimented, as in hypnosis or during an injury or operation, a manic is formed which will give him temporary euphoria and eventually plunge him into the depressive stage of the cycle.

The golden rule could be altered to read: If you love your brother, keep your mouth shut when he is unconscious.

Emotion can be seen then to exist in two planes, the personal plane and the extra- valence plane. It is communicable in terms of identical thinking. Rage present when a man is “unconscious” will give him a Tone 1 engram: it will contain rage. Apathy present in the vicinity of an “unconscious” person will give him a Tone 0 engram. Happiness present during an engram is not very aberrative but will give a Tone 4 engram. And so forth. In other words, the emotion of those present around an “unconscious” person is communicated into the person as part of his engram. Any mood can be so communicated.

In dramatizing an engram, the aberree always takes the winning valence and that valence is not, of course, himself. If only one other person is present and the other is talking in

terms of apathy, then the apathy is the tone value of the engram. When an apathy engram is restimulated, the individual, unless he wants to be hurt severely, is apathetic and this tone, being the nearest to death, is the most dangerous one to the individual. The rage emotion communicated to an “unconscious” person gives him a rage engram he can dramatize. This is most harmful to the society. A merely hostile tone present around an “unconscious” person gives him a merely hostile engram (covert hostility). With two people present, each having a different mood, the “unconscious” person receives an engram with two valences other than his own. When this happens he will first dramatize the winning valence with its mood and, if forced from this, will dramatize the second valence with its mood. Driven from this in a chronic engram, he goes insane.

Nothing here should be construed to mean that a person only uses or dramatizes sympathy engrams. This is very far from the case. The sympathy engram gives him the chronic psycho-somatic illness. He can dramatize any engram he has when it is restimulated.

Emotion, then, is communication and a personal condition. The cellular level evaluation of a situation depends upon any other analyzer present, even if that analyzer is thoroughly hostile to it. Lacking such evaluation, the individual takes his own tone for the moment.

There is another condition of emotion which is of extreme and useful interest to the therapist since it is the first thing with which he will have to deal in opening a case. We do not mean here to start discussing therapy but to describe a necessary part of emotion.

Great loss and other swift and severe suppressor action dams up emotion in an engram. Loss itself can be a shock to reduce analytical power. And an engram is received. If it is the loss of a sympathetic person on whom an individual has depended, it seems to the individual as if death itself stalks him. When such a suppressor effect occurs, it is as if a strong steel spring had been compressed within the engram. When it releases it comes with a terrible rush of emotion (if this discharge is, indeed, emotion, though we hardly know what other name to call it).

Life force apparently gets dammed up at these points in life. There may be enormous quantities of that life force available but some of it becomes suppressed into a loss engram. After that the person does not seem to possess as much fluid vitality as before. This may be not emotion but life force itself. The mind then has below it, as in a cyst, a great quantity of sorrow or despair. The more of these charges exist in such an encysted state, the less free are the emotions of the individual. This may be on a basis of suppression to a point from which there is no swift rising. Nothing in the person’s future seems to bring him up to any plane like those he occupied before.

The glory and color of childhood vanishes as one progresses into later years. But the strange part of it is that this glamor and beauty and sensitivity to life are not gone. They are encysted. One of the most remarkable experiences a clear has is to find, in the process of therapy, that he is recovering appreciation of the beauty in the world.

Persons, as they live forward from childhood, suffer loss after loss, and each loss takes from them a little more of this ; Ø quantity which may be, indeed, life force itself. Bound up within them, that force is denied them and indeed, reacts against them.

Only this emotional encysting can, for instance, compartment the mind of a person who is multi-valent or who cannot see or hear his past. The analytical mind, worked upon by the reactive bank, compartments and divides with loss after loss until there is no free flow left. Then a man dies.

Thus we could say that emotion, or what has been called emotion, is really in two sections: first, there is the endocrine system which, handled either by the analytical mind in the upper two zones or the reactive mind in the lower two zones, brings emotional responses of

fear, enthusiasm, apathy, etc.; second, there would be life force itself becoming compartmented by engrams and being sealed up, little by little, in the reactive bank.

It is possible that a therapy could be formulated which would spring out these various life force charges only and create thereby a full clear. Unfortunately, to date, this has not been possible.

The odd part of emotion is that it is so ordinarily based on the word content of engrams. If an engram says, “I am afraid,” then the aberree is afraid. If an engram says, “I am calm,” even if the rest of the engram gives him chattering shakes, the aberree still has to be “calm.”

The problem of emotion as endocrine balance and life force has another complication in that the physical pain in an engram is often mistaken for a particular emotion named in the engram. For instance, the engram can say with verbal content that the individual is “sexually excited” and have as a pain content an ache in the legs and have as an actual emotional content (the valence that says “I’m sexually excited”) anger. This, to the aberree dramatizing it is a complex affair. When he is “sexually excited” -- he has an idea what that means as just language -- he is also angry and has an ache in the legs. This is actually very amusing in many cases and has led to a standard set of clinical jokes, all of which begin with, “You know, I feel like everybody else.”

Dianeticists, having discovered that people evaluate the emotions, beliefs, intelligence and somatics of the world in terms of their own engramic reactions, delight in discovering new concepts of “emotion.” “You know how people feel when they’re happy. Their ears burn.” “I feel just like anybody else when I’m happy; my feet and eyes ache.” “Of course I know how people feel when they’re happy; just pin prickles going all over them.” “I wonder how people can stand to be passionate when it makes their noses hurt so.” “Of course I know how people feel when they’re excited: they have to go to the toilet.”

Probably every person on earth has his own peculiar definition for every emotional state in terms of engram command. The command plus the somatics and perceptics make what they call an “emotional state.”

Actually the problem, then, should be defined in terms of the clear, who can function without engramic orders from the reactive mind. So defined it breaks down in terms of the endocrine system and the varying level of life force free to resurge against the suppressor.

Laughter, it should be added, is not, strictly speaking, an emotion but a relief from emotion. The early Italians had a very definite idea, as represented by their folk tales, that laughter was of therapeutic value. Melancholy was the only mental illness these tales consider and laughter was its only cure. In dianetics we have a great deal to do with laughter. In therapy patients vary, in their laughter reaction, from the slight chuckle to hilarious mirth. Any engram which really releases may be expected to begin somewhere between tears and boredom and end with laughter; the nearer the engram’s tone is to tears at the first contact, the more certainly laughter will appear as it is relieved.

There is a stage of therapy often reached by the preclear when his entire past life seems to be a subject of uncontrollable mirth. This does not mean he is clear but it means that a large proportion of the encysted charges have been tapped. A pre-clear has laughed for two days almost without ceasing. Hebephrenia is not the same thing as this laughter for the relief of the pre-clear on realizing the shadowy aspect and completely knowable character of his past fears and terrors is hearty.

Laughter plays a definite role in therapy. It is quite amusing to see a pre-clear, who has been haunted by an engram which contained great emotional charge, suddenly relieve it, for the situation, no matter how gruesome it was, when relieved, is in all its aspects a subject of great mirth. The laughter fades away as he becomes disinterested in it and he can be said to be “Tone 3” about it.

Laughter is definitely the relief of painful emotion.

[The complete Tone Scale, its use in predicting the behavior of others as well as assisting in auditing, is given in the book SCIENCE OF SURVIVAL by L. Ron Hubbard, 1951, 580 pages.]