DMSH 1950 Book 3 Chapter 5

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

Returning, the File Clerk and the Time Track

There is a method of “thinking” which Man did not know he had.

If you would like an illustration of this, ask a small child if she would like to go sleigh riding in memory. She will try to remember the last time she rode her sleigh. She will frown and pucker her brows perhaps. Now tell her to go back to the last time she was sleigh riding. Coaxed she will suddenly come forth with a complete experience and, unless she is badly aberrated, will be able to tell you about the snow getting down her collar and so forth. She is right back there sleigh riding, swimming or whatever you choose.

Man, when and if he thought about this at all, must have mistaken it for imagination. But it is not imagination. Anyone, unless he is very severely aberrated indeed, can be “sent back” wide awake to an experience of the past. In initial tests one should use experiences not long gone and experiences which are pleasant.

This is not memory in the way one “remembers something.” It is returning. Remembering is a far more complicated process than returning. Just why people go around seeking to remember some specific or complex datum when they can return is something of a mystery when one considers lost articles, things read, conversations had and so forth. Remembering, of course, has a very definite role and is an automatic process which provides “I” with conclusions and data in a never-ending stream. But when one wishes a very precise, specific bit of information or when one seeks a past pleasure to contemplate it, returning is more to the point.

The hypnotist, with much mumbo-jumbo and hand passes et al., has something which he calls “regression.” This is a very complicated business which requires being hypnotized. True enough, regression has research value since, by hypnosis, it by-passes occlusions which are not otherwise easy to get around. And regression served dianetics well when the author was checking his data on memory banks. But it evidently had occurred to none that regression is an artificial use of a natural process.

Undoubtedly some people use returning for some of their mental work, and these people probably think that “everybody else” does likewise, which is far from true. But even those people who return naturally seldom understand that this is a distinct process, much different from remembering.

People also relive without being hypnotized or drugged; this is a rarer thing. If a person sits in contemplation ot some past glory for a while he will begin to relive instead of simply return.

In dianetics we have had much to do with “spectrums.” The spectrum of gradations is a much better mechanism for philosophy than Aristotle’s pendulum which swung from one extreme to the other. We have the spectrum of the dynamics. We call them four dynamics, through which the command: SURVIVE! is expressed, and the four are actually a great number of gradations from the cells of “I” through “I,” through family and children, through club and city and state, through nation and race and hemisphere and finally all Mankind. That is a spectrum: gradations of something which are really the same thing but which have wider and wider scope or range.

In much the same way as the spectrum of SURVIVE! we have a spectrum of memory at work. First there is memory in its most precise, present time sense. Then there is memory of the past. Then there is more memory of the past. And so we move into a part of the spectrum which has been overlooked: part of the “I” returns into the past, then a greater part of “I” returns into the past (at which point we have return) and finally, at the extreme all of “I” is back in the past. First there is remembering. This is the furthest from exact data (except in a clear). Then there is returning in which part of the “I” is actually in the past and records appear to be perceptions he is actually experiencing. Then there is reliving where a man is so thoroughly in the past for the moment that, while he was recalling an infant experience, if startled he would react just as he would have when a baby.

There is a lot of aberrated notion in this present society about the evils of living in the past. These stem partially from an unwillingness of aberrated people to face and understand yesterday.

One of the prime sources of “bad memory” is Mother. Often enough Mother has been sufficiently panic-stricken at the thought of Junior’s recalling just what she did to Junior that a Mankind-wide aberration seems to have sprung up. The standard attempted abortion case nearly always has an infanthood and childhood full of Mama assuring him that he cannot remember anything when he was a baby. She doesn’t want him to recall how handy she was, if unsuccessful, in her efforts with various instruments. Possibly prenatal memory itself would be just ordinary memory and in full recall to the whole race if this guilty conscience in Mother had not been rolling along lo! these millennia. In the normal course of work the auditor will have his hands full of Mama screaming objections about her grown son’s or daughter’s entering into therapy because of what they might find out: Mama has been known, by auditors, to go into a complete nervous collapse at the thought of her child’s recalling prenatal incidents. Not all of this, by the way, is based on attempted abortion. Mama often has had a couple of more men than Papa that Papa never knew about; and Mama would very often rather condemn her child to illness or insanity or merely unhappiness than let a child pursue the course of the pre-clear even though Mother avowedly has no recollection whatever of anything bad ever happening to the child. Under therapy herself, she usually volunteers the truth.

Here is the source of why good memory is discouraged in a society and infant and prenatal memory overlooked, to say nothing of the ability to return and relive.

The index system of the standard bank is a wonderful thing to behold. Everything is there, filed by subject, filed by time and filed by conclusions. All perceptions are present.

With the time file system we have what is called in dianetics a time track. Going back along this track with part of “I” is returning. It is definitely present for both conscious and “unconscious” data. The time track is of vast and interesting concern to the auditor.

The mind is a well-built computer and it has various services. Auditors, backing off from Latin and complexity, call the source of one of these services, the file clerk. This is not a very dignified name and it is certainly anthropomorphic. There is no small man or woman in there with a green eye-shade. But the action which takes place is a close approximation to what would happen if such an entity did dwell within the mind.

The file clerk is the bank monitor. “He” monitors for both the reactive engram bank and the standard banks. When he is asked for a datum by the auditor or “I,” he will hand out a datum to the auditor via “I.” He is a trifle moronic when he handles the reactive engram bank, a contagion from the reactive mind, and he will at times hand out puns and crazy dreams when he should be delivering serious data.

The file clerk, if the auditor asks the pre-clear for the last time he saw a movie, will hand out the movie, the date it was seen, the age and physical being of the person, all perceptics, the plot of the movie, the weather — in short, he hands out everything that was present and connected with the movie.

In ordinary living the file clerk feeds memory to “I” at a rapid rate. A good memory gets its data in split seconds. If the file clerk has to shove the memory around various reactive occlusions, it may take minutes or days for the data to arrive.

If we had a big computing machine of the most modern design, it would have a “memory bank” of punched cards or some such thing and it would have to have a selector and feeder device to thrust out the data the machine wants. The brain has one of these — it could not operate without it. This is the bank monitor — the file clerk.

Keep in mind these two parts of the mind: the time track and the file clerk and keep in memory this mechanism of returning. These are the three things we use, with the reactive and standard banks, in the dianetic reverie.

The file clerk is a very obliging fellow. If he has been having trouble getting to the “I” around the reactive occlusions and circuits in general, he is particularly obliging. He cooperates with the auditor.

The monitor system could be considered on the basis of attention units where a man could be supposed to have a thousand. Thus a thousand possible attention units would be available to a clear’s “I.” In the aberree, probably fifty are available to “I,” five or six hundred absorbed in the reactive engrams, and the remainder variously used besides composing this mechanism we call the bank monitor, the file clerk.

It seems as if the file clerk in an aberree would rather work with the auditor than with the aberree. That may appear an astonishing fact, but it is a scientific fact. The file clerk works best, then, when he is selecting data out of a pre-clear’s banks to present to the auditor. This is an aspect of the law affinity. “I’s” file clerk and the auditor are a team: and they work very often in close harmony without enough consent from the pre-clear’s analyzer to notice.

The return is most easily effected, in the aberree, by the auditor’s addressing the file clerk, not the patient. This can actually be done with the patient wide awake. The auditor asks him for information, tells him to go back to it. “I” is suddenly in possession of the whole file. Something inside the mind, then, works in close harmony with the auditor and works better for the auditor than it does for the person in whose mind it is. That is the file clerk.

The object of the auditor is to take what the file clerk hands forth and to keep the file clerk from getting swamped by reactive data. Once the data has been given out by the file clerk, it is the business of the auditor to see that the pre-clear goes over it enough times to take the charge out of it. The mechanism of doing this is extremely simple. In order to help matters and keep the pre-clear from being distracted, the auditor goes through a routine with every session which disposes the patient to let the file clerk work.

The patient sits in a comfortable chair, with arms, or lies on a couch in a quite room where perceptic distractions are minimal. The auditor tells him to look at the ceiling. The auditor says: “When I count from one to seven your eyes will close.” The auditor then counts from one to seven and keeps counting quietly and pleasantly until the patient closes his eyes. A tremble of the lashes will be noticed in optimum reverie.

This is the entire routine. Consider it more a signal that proceedings are to begin and a means of concentrating the patient on his own concerns and the auditor than anything else. This is not hypnotism. It is vastly different. In the first place the patient knows everything which is going on around him. He is not “asleep,” and can bring himself out of it any time he likes. He is free to move about, but, because it distracts the patient, the auditor does not usually permit him to smoke.

The auditor makes very sure that the patient is not hypnotized by telling him, before he begins to count, “You will know everything which goes on. You will be able to remember everything that happens. You can exercise your own control. If you do not like what is happening, you can instantly pull out of it. Now, one, two, three, four,” etc.

To make doubly sure, for we want no hypnotism, even by accident, the auditor installs a canceller. This is an extremely important step and should not be omitted even when you may be entirely certain that he is in no way influenced by your words. The auditor may inadvertently use restimulative language which will key-in an engram: he may, when he is especially new in dianetics, use such a thing as a holder or a denyer, telling the pre-clear to “stay there” when he is returned on the track or telling him, worst of all things, to “forget it,” one of a class of phrases of the forgetter mechanism which is most severe in its aberrative effect, denying the data entirely to the analyzer. To prevent such things from happening, the canceller is vital. It is a contract with the patient that whatever the auditor says will not become literally interpreted by the patient or used by him in any way. It is installed immediately after the condition of reverie is established. A canceller is worded more or less as follows: “In the future, when I utter the word Cancelled, everything which I have said to you while you are in a therapy session will be cancelled and will have no force with you. Any suggestion I have made to you will be without force when I say the word Cancelled. Do you understand?”

The word cancelled is then said to the patient immediately before he is permitted to open his eyes at the end of the session. It is not further amplified. The single word is used.

The canceller is vital. It prevents accidental positive suggestion. The patient may be suggestible or even in a permanent light hypnotic trance (many people go through life in such a trance). An engram is actually a hypnotic suggestion. It could be said that the purpose of therapy is to awaken a person in every period of his life when he has been forced into “unconsciousness.” Dianetics wakes people up. It is not hypnotism, which puts people to sleep. Dianetic therapy wakes them up. Hypnotism puts them to sleep. Can you ask for a wider difference in polarity? Dianetic therapy removes engrams. Hypnotism installs engrams. Further, dianetics is a science, an organized body of knowledge — hypnotism is a tool and an art and is such a wild variable that Man has suspected it as a dangerous thing for centuries and centuries, use it though he did.

The auditor will inevitably get cases into his hands which will drop into a hypnotic sleep for all he can do to prevent it. Such cases have engrams which make them do this, just as others have engrams which make them stay awake. The auditor then mentions neither “sleep” nor “wake.” He takes his cases wherever they drop into their own inversion level and works them from there. Patients will plead to be drugged or put into a trance. Let them plead! The reverie has a clear at its end — drugs and hypnotism have dependency on the auditor and many other undesirable aspects. A case takes longer in amnesia trance than in reverie. The gains in reverie are certain. The patient gets more and more well. When amnesia trance or hypnotism are used instead of reverie, no matter how easily the data seems to come up, the usual run of cases so treated experience little relief until the case is nearly completed, when the patient so long uncomfortable gets suddenly well. Hypnotism carries with it transference, enormous operator responsibility, and other impedimenta with which dianetics, in long practice, has done without. Hypnotism was used for research, then abandoned.

Hence, install the canceller every time. Never neglect to install it in every session. The patient may be trancing, which is something we don’t want, but something which we cannot always avoid, and which we cannot always detect. Just install the canceller at the beginning of the session, then before you bring the patient to present time, use the canceller word.

This is a rehearsal, then, of the entire routine:

Auditor: Look at the ceiling. When I count from one to seven your eyes will close. You will remain aware of everything which goes on. You will be able to remember everything that happens here. You can pull yourself out of anything which you get into if you don’t like it. All right (slowly, soothingly): One, two, three, four, five, six, seven*. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three (patient’s eyes close and eyelids flicker), four, five, six, seven. (Auditor pauses; installs canceller.) All right, let us go back to your fifth birthday... (work continues until the auditor has worked the patient enough for the period)... Come to present time. Are you in present time? (Yes.) (Use canceller word.) When I count from five to one and snap my fingers you will feel alert. Five, four, three, two, one. (Snap.)

As it can be seen in this example, when work for the day is concluded, the pre-clear, who may have been returned into his past for two hours, must be brought back to present time and startled with a finger snap to restore his awareness of his age and condition. Sometimes he is unable easily to come back to present, for which there is quick remedy, which we will cover later, so the auditor must always assure himself that the patient feels he actually is in present time.

This is the reverie. This is all one needs to know about its actual mechanics. Experience will show him a great deal. But these are the basic processes:

1. Assure patient he will know everything that happens.
2. Count until he closes his eyes.
3. Install canceller.
4. Return him to a period in the past.
5. Work with file clerk to get data.
6. Reduce all engrams contacted so that no charge remains.
7. Bring patient to present time.
8. Be sure he is in present time.
9. Give him canceller word.
10. Restore full awareness of his surroundings.

The patient’s time track, in the lowest level of attention units, is always in excellent condition. It can be depended upon to reach any date and hour of his life and all the data in it. In the higher levels of awareness, this time track may appear to be in very foul condition. The reactive mind engram circuits stand between these lower levels — right up against the banks — and the higher levels which contain “I.” The lower levels contain only a shadow of the force of “I” and appear to be another “I” in a case of multi-valent personality.

You can draw this on a piece of scratch paper and it would be helpful if you would do so. Draw a tall rectangle (the standard banks) to the left of the page. Draw half a dozen circles up against the right side of this rectangle for a representation of the file clerk — the bank monitor units. Now draw, about the center of the sheet, a large rectangle. Black it in. This is the area of the reactive engram circuits. It is not the reactive bank. It is the circuit pattern from the reactive engram bank, which borrows from the analyzer to make demons, vocal thinking, etc. Now, to the right of the page, draw a white rectangle. This is the portion of the analyzer which is “consciousness” and “I.”

The whole task of therapy is to get that black rectangle, the reactive engram bank circuits, deleted so that from the standard bank to the left of the sheet to the analyzer portion to the right of the sheet is all analyzer. It can’t be done with a knife as some people have supposed, evaluating the situation from their own engrams, for that black area you have drawn is all analyzer rendered useless by engrams and when therapy is done, it will all be available for thinking. This increases I.Q. to an enormous extent.

Now suppose that the bottom of your picture is conception and the top is present time. The vertical route up and down, then, is the time track. In this graph it can be supposed that present time just keeps adding up higher and higher, further and further from conception in the form of new construction (an analogy). For “I” to get data from the standard banks to the left, “I” would have to work through this black rectangle, the reactive mind circuits. To a large extent “I” manages to get data from around this black area. But to a much larger extent it doesn’t.

Now suppose that we draw a vertical line at the right of the picture. This line is “awareness.” Consider that it can be moved, still vertical, to the left. As the line passes toward the left, we get deeper and deeper “trance.” As the line moves into the reactive mind area, it becomes hypnotic trance. Now as it moves even further left and into the circles we are calling “file clerk,” it becomes the amnesia trance of hypnotism. Thus, anywhere we place this line we establish a “depth of trance.” We want to work over to the right of the reactive bank, nearest the awake level, so that we can keep “I” in contact with his surroundings and keep unwanted data from coming through which will make the patient chronically uncomfortable. If the patient instantly slides from the right all the way to the left so that the attention units, the circles, of the file clerk itself are present, and does so the instant you count from one to seven, he is a hypnotic subject. He may not be aware, when he wakens, of what has taken place, for “I” was out of contact. Work him there, for he will have full sonic, etc., but be very, very careful to work very early in his prenatal area. He might not be able to recall what has taken place and a late engram which, if tapped, will not reduce, may have its full force opened up on “I” when the patient regains possession of himself. Further, you might give him positive suggestion by accident. Work by preference with trance depth well to the right of the reactive bank.

The characteristics of the units we label “file clerk” are similar in desires to those of the basic individual when he is cleared. Thus, in any patient, the basic personality can be reached for here is a sample of it. But the auditor should be content to know it is there; as the clearing goes forward, he will see more and more of it. The individual is himself, his personality does not alter, it simply becomes what he wanted it to be all the time at his optimum moments.

The units up against the standard banks can be considered the file clerk. But the file clerk has more than just the standard bank which he can tap. He also has the entire engram bank from which he can pull forth data.

The time track may have several aspects to the preclear. There is actually no track there except time and time is invisible: but the awareness, the “I,” can return along it. The track is always there, stretched out. But ideas of it continually occur and recur in the same patient. It may get all bunched up. It may be very long. It may be that he cannot get on it at all (here’s the schizophrenic — he is off his time track). But it is there. It is the filing system by time and “I” can be returned back along time by the simple request that he do so. If he does not, he is stuck in the present or an engram, which is easy to resolve. And so forth.

Now let us consider the engram bank. It was drawn as a black rectangle in the above sketch. Let us alter that a trifle and draw all this again, with the rectangles represented as triangles with all their points downwards and together but all else as before — the standard banks, the analyzer (consciousness), and “I.” This is a working model now, an analogy, of what the auditor is trying to contact. It is as if the engram bank itself existed in that black triangle. Actually it doesn’t, only its circuits, but all we need to visualize is that it does. Therefore, there is a thin point at the bottom. “I” and the file clerk can get together here. This is the bottom of the time track. This is immediately after conception. A little higher up, let’s say two-and-one-half months after conception, it is a little harder for “I” and the file clerk to achieve contact. There is more reactive circuit between them. At seven months after conception it is more difficult. And at twenty years of age it has approached impossibility in most cases without dianetic technique.

Hence, the auditor will find it expedient to work in the prenatal area and as early in that as possible. If he can clear the time from conception to birth, including birth, his task is nine- tenths complete. To clear the entire reactive bank is his goal.

The reactive bank is like a pyramid which is fairly well armored everywhere but just under the point, and which becomes unarmored when the point is contacted. This is taking the reactive bank in an exposed sector. The effort is to get into the basic area, contact early engrams, erase the basic-basic engram by recountings and then progress upwards, erasing engrams. These engrams apparently vanish. Actually it takes a hard search to discove once they are really gone. They exist as memory in the standard bank, but that memory is so unimportant, having been integrated now as experience, that it cannot aberrate. Nothing in the standard bank can aberrate. Only the contents of the reactive bank can aberrate — moments of “unconsciousness” and what was recorded within them — and locks. The auditor, in his work, considers an engram erased when it vanishes, when the pre-clear can no longer contact any part of it, but only after the pre-clear has thoroughly re-experienced it, complete with somatics.*

This inverted pyramid, in its upper reaches, is affect. In the lower reaches, it is the primary cause of aberration. The cement that holds this inverted pyramid together is physical pain and painful emotion. All the physical pain ever recorded by the organism and all the painful emotion are parts of this inverted pyramid.

The auditor first discharges the painful emotion from later life as it was displayed in “conscious moments.” He runs these periods as true engrams until the pre-clear is no longer affected by them. Then he tries to contact basic-basic, that first engram. He reduces all engrams he contacts en route to that primary goal. In every session he tries to reach basic-basic until he is certain he has it.

Basic-basic is the bottom point. Once it has been gained, an erasure is begun during which engram after engram is “re-experienced” with all somatics until it is gone. Before basic- basic had been reached, the auditor may have had to run engrams twenty times before they reduced. Later he may have found they reduced in five runs. Then he contacts and erases basic- basic. If the patient has sonic by this time — or if he has had it all along — the engrams start erasing with one or two recountings.

The file clerk is smart. The auditor who does not credit the ability of these attention units will involve the case beyond necessity and will lengthen it. The file clerk may hand things out by phrases, by somatics, by time. Whatever he hands out ordinarily will reduce on recountings. By working with, not trying to command, the file clerk, the auditor will find his case steadily improving until it is released or fully cleared. The only time the auditor disregards this is when he uses the repeater system, which will be described.

We have “I” in a reverie; we return him to a period in his life along his time track; the file clerk gives incidents forth which the pre-clear re-experiences; the auditor makes the pre- clear recount the engram until it is relieved or has “vanished”* (all engrams will eventually “vanish” after basic-basic is erased); anything new the file clerk offers, even during the recounting, is addressed by the auditor to make the pre-clear re-experience it. That is the total sum of activity in dianetics. There are, as accessories, the repeater technique and a few short- cuts. This is therapy. Amplification is needed, of course, and will be found in the ensuing pages to give the auditor all the data he needs. But this is the entire outline of dianetic therapy. * The words “vanished” or “erased,” when applied to an engram which has been treated mean that the engram has disappeared from the engram bank. It cannot be found afterwards except by search of the standard memory.