Derivation of Laws - Part I (500717)
Date: 17 July 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
So it is with the Dianeticist—he knows his laws. If he cannot think above these, and derive above these, then he is not going to get good results. We have reduced this to a point where a great deal of it is rote where it was speculation before. But because it is rote, that merely allows the auditor more time to think.
We want to see—before even we complete our chemistry research—we want to see cases coming through here on seventy-five to a hundred hours to Clear. We’re aiming toward that. I suppose in the past month we have knocked off three quarters of the time, for instance, on a dub-in.
Some very marked advances have been made, advances which require less skill of the auditor and result in less time for the preclear in therapy. Nevertheless, a person who is trying to work Dianetics without working his mind hard at the same time is not going to achieve these results. So I’m going to talk to you about derivation—derivation of laws.
Dianetics begins with the law “survive.” Therefore, as one follows along the track, he should be able to discover ways and means to derive new data. One takes survive—what is pain, what is pleasure, what is death, what is survival, what is immortality, and so on.
Of course, infinite survival would be immortality, an impossible goal perhaps. But nevertheless it’s the postulated abstract. It is the absolute, the unobtainable absolute. Death as well is not an absolute since a man goes on dying, I have heard some morticians say, for about a year after he has been pronounced dead. In other words, cellular death sets in.
Furthermore, we must not overlook the fact that there may be an immortality in form of personal identity as a spirit or a soul. We’re dealing here with a science. Just because something seems odd or incredible is no reason to believe that it is not possible. Many people for many, many centuries have believed in a personal spirit and immortality.
Dianetics takes no stand on such a thing as it’s a science. It doesn’t have opinions or beliefs. There are definite physical laws. These laws are invariable within the science. As far as we’re concerned, survive is an invariable. The definition of pleasure, the definition of pain, might be improved slightly, but they are invariables. The effort of an individual is toward survival, the best possible survival.
Now this must contain, of course, an overage, a considerable overage. It isn’t enough to grow one basket of wheat for every month in the year and then say that one has adequately provided for his survival. He could not grow enough baskets of wheat to get the optimum because his survival may not lie strictly along the lines in just solely baskets of wheat.
It is perfectly true in the field of living that pleasure—just the plain ordinary obtaining of pleasure—has to be a sufficient lure. It is there to make a person desire to survive. It is a valid commodity of survival, in other words. And furthermore, pleasure as a commodity is obtainable in various ways which, as long as they are not physically harmful and actually detractive of survival, are of course the very stuff of which survival is made.
We look along the line, we find various cults and creeds in the past that have denounced pleasure as being extremely evil. We notice also that with the emergence of this philosophy upon the face of earth, man’s survival deteriorated. The last time that happened we had the Dark Ages. Pleasure was very bad, a piece of reactive thinking.
So, we can derive these various invariables. We have the engram. Its existence is invariable; its anatomy is invariable on a functional level. We don’t know one over infinity worth that we need to know about structure at the present time. We’re trying to learn. We know too little about biochemistry. We’re trying to learn. But we know function, and functionally we know the anatomy of the engram. We know the anatomy of the grief emotion.
The anatomy of the engram is invariable. Most of those sessions which fail for an auditor fail for one reason only: he is not sufficiently conversant with his tools to recognize that he is dealing with invariables. I have watched this. One is not sure, for instance, that the somatic strip is there or goes where he wants it to go. It does, instantly.
One isn’t sure that there is a file clerk there with which to work. And yet there is. That’s invariable. There’s always a file clerk there. Perhaps he can’t get through. If he can’t get through then it is up to you to try to find out why he can’t get through and solve that problem and then let him through.
Perhaps the somatic strip won’t work. Perhaps it’s stuck somewhere on the track in a chronic engram but that doesn’t mean the somatic strip won’t move. These are invariables: The somatic strip will obey the auditor. The file clerk will cooperate with the auditor.
These are invariables. The existence of valences, the theory of valences is an invariable theory. Although it’s a theory it may even now suffer considerable alteration. But in the form in which we find it now the theory of valences is workable and is invariable. But now we take what is variable in the case and we find that the incidents, the allies—the principle of allies is not variable, but the allies in one particular case are definitely variable. The principle of the allies is an invariable, the names and numbers, you might say, and times of life that this case had allies, those things are variable. So I’m going to teach you what you can depend upon in a case, teach you to have reliance in your tools and by having that reliance, to be able to work with a quick certainty that you will find a good many of these boys in the professional class today working.
When they throw the case down and say, “assume the angle,” they talk to the case for a few minutes, they get a pretty good idea of what they’re going for next. And the case doesn’t stall around. Some of these cases which are supposed to be so difficult are difficult just because basic rules are being overlooked. Fundamentals, invariables.
There’s one case around, John. John has had a pretty rough case. I brought his case out of the woods; now it annoys me more than anything else. Every auditor who goes to work on him—because John has altitude, he’s a damn good auditor himself—every auditor who goes to work on him immediately says, “Aha! This case has something different,” because John says it has. He says, “The tools won’t work on this case. This requires something superspecial, something which, leaping full-armed out of the brain of Jove, is going to smite these engrams flat.” As a consequence, for months now, John’s case has been thoroughly bogged down. Because the second anybody starts to work on him, he says, “Let’s go over so-and-so”; they say, “Well, Christ, he must know what he’s talking about.” And so they promptly go wandering off to Grandpa’s death when he was sixteen, all occluded.
It won’t lift anyway because why? There’s demon circuitry in the case and the demon circuitry says, “You’ve got to control yourself. You mustn’t be emotional about this.” And he says, “I wonder why I have an emotional shut-off?” And he’s got these demons that are sitting around in there and they’re saying, “No emotion, Johnny! No emotion! Bad, very bad. You must be logical about this.” He lies down on the couch. The poor auditor who sits there says, “There must be something very strange about this case.” Immediately picks up his bucket of tools, throws them out the window, and John runs auto, in autotrance with somebody (quote) auditing him (unquote).
Anyway, John is a case in point but there are many of these cases. Every case you face will try to make you believe that there is something very strange unless it is a pianola case.
We have various types of cases in Dianetics. There are many things that you’re going to learn here. One is the way you measure painful emotional discharge. You measure it by the number of Kleenexes which are used up. So you have a five. Kleenex charge or a ten.Kleenex charge or a box charge.
You have the coffin case: one who is in the valence of somebody who is dead and who lies there with his hands on his chest like this. Feet straight out, motionless, running through all sorts of engrams—that persons dead. That’s the coffin case.
But, unless you have what we’re calling “the pianola case”—called because it plays itself—you can put the fellow in reverie. You say, “The file clerk will give us the next engram which we need to resolve the case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of the engram. When I count from one to five and snap my fingers, the first phrase will occur. One-two-three-four-five.” The guy says, “I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead. Oh, God Almighty, what am I going to do?” And he goes on and he runs through the engram and gets to the end.
You say, “Go back to the beginning and run it again.” And you just do that. That’s a pianola case.
What I’m going to teach you to do is make every case into a pianola case before you start. After that, it’ll run.
Now, the major cause of error, as I have said, is that one doesn’t believe one’s tools will work. But they will work. I don’t believe that an auditor ought to try to audit until he himself is convinced that these tools do work, unless he has felt inside of himself the horrifying impact of a real live off-the-couch engram. After that he has no uncertainty about it whatsoever.
I’m not here to convince you about any validities of Dianetics. But I am here to ask you to please use the tools as they are. Use them invariably, as they are invariable tools.
When you start to think about Dianetics, the first thing you must learn—do, is to set up a little piece of circuitry in your own mind, some tiny little quarter of it, that will think like an engram, that will think with horrible literalness, that will think in puns.
He rode a horse and he rowed a horse, you know, rowed a horse.
One that can say, “He must be crazy,” and you know that we are not talking about “he must be crazy” but “he must be crazy.” In other words this fellow’s got to be crazy, that’s what the phrase means. It doesn’t mean he must be crazy. The reactive bank does not differentiate in anything, much less tone, or whether a person was sarcastic or not. It’s just the literal meaning of the words, that’s all. So you have to set up this little piece of circuitry there that will think like an engram. A fellow comes along and he says, “When you hit a bouncer you must recognize a bouncer for a bouncer.” I could think of dozens of examples. For instance, a pilot turned up from American Airlines one day and an auditor took him upstairs and let him assume the angle. He wanted to know all about Dianetics and he had a lot of questions. Oh, he was skeptical as could be. The auditor took him up and threw him through a couple of engrams. He brought him down and the American Airlines pilot thought life was wonderful and he felt good and Jesus Christ, Dianetics really did work after all, and so on. But the engram that was pulled up was the reason he was a pilot. The engram said he was no earthly good.
Now, that’s the way an engram (quote) thinks (unquote). It has no reasoning power. And the principal error which people make when they’re trying to follow along with engrams is they expect them to reason. You know, they think, “Well now, let me see and because this was said then it must mean that the computation was so-and-so and so-and-so.” I’ll give you a horrible example that was done by a psychologist down in Washington. He was practicing psychoanalysis on the patient and I imagine this patient was a very unhappy patient the next day. He had him in psychoanalysis for about three years and he’d never been able to find the “hostile stranger” in this person’s case.
Naturally, for years he’s been asking this person, “Now let’s see, is that the hostile stranger, is this the hostile stranger, is that the hostile stranger?” And the person was quite well educated into looking for a hostile stranger. So he ran him back down the track and we find some late-life little mild thing that didn’t amount to that (snap) in Dianetics, of “Sister has baby by the throat.” And so the sister took the little baby in the crib by the throat, shook him, banged his head against the bars and then took his bottle away from him and the psychoanalyst said to him at that moment, “What did you think of your sister?” And of course the patient says, right sharp like that, “I thought of her as a hostile stranger,” “Come up to present time. Now there, you’re cured.” Oh yeah? Didn’t desensitize the engram or anything.
We find people using repeater technique. There are two things that you can say about new auditors: one, they talk too much and two, they use too much repeater technique. Because they’re liable to start in on any phrase they get and use it as repeater technique and wind up in some of the damnedest places where they don’t belong such as birth.
You’ve got to be very careful what you’re using repeater technique on. It’s perfectly valid. It isn’t that it’s dangerous. But you don’t work a whole case with repeater technique. Psychoanalysis at this time is having a wonderful Roman holiday with repeater technique. They say, “There are parts of Dianetics which we can use. Repeater technique is one of them,” Well now, they get somebody repeating—somebody out on the Coast, a hypnotist, who’s having people repeat “I’m a bad boy, I’m a bad boy,” or “You’re a bad boy, you’re a bad boy, you’re a bad boy,” Sooner or later they’re going to get him into a spanking and the second he gets into the spanking, why, they say, “There you are. Now, that’s why you think of yourself as a bad boy. You’re cured,” Only this is just balderdash.
He might just as well wind this person up on the eighth month of the prenatal bank in an engram which will not reduce, which contains all manner of injury, and then bring the person up to present time with all the somatics. Because “You’re a bad boy” does not necessarily appear in the engram bank postpartum. It also appears earlier if there are older children in the family and it’s there at all. So you see what I mean about using bits and pieces, of having confidence in your tools. You’re going to know when to use these tools and when not to. And you’re going to be able to think in terms of how an engram thinks, A person being choked does not think of anybody as a hostile stranger. He doesn’t think. But the engram has content. And we want the content out of the engram. And it doesn’t matter how much the person says concerning this engram. Although occasionally on a grief charge you let the person explain to you for a little while, if he doesn’t take up too much time, how it was that Uncle Oscar was so valuable to survival. Then you send them back in there and you get that engram and its word content. And that’s what you want out of the engram. That’s all you want out of the engram, is its own word content. What computations he made on this content are of no concern really. Whether or not it resolves one of his aberrations is of no concern to an auditor. So the guy feels better, he thinks he feels better, he knows he feels better. Well, that’s all right.
What he thought about it—you will take people who have been in psychoanalysis for some time and they will busily analyze every piece of wordage they get out of an engram. They’re wasting your time, because all you want is content, content, that’s all.
By the way, don’t think I’m being critical of psychoanalysis. I’m not. The number of analysts switching over to Dianetics these days should make me very pleasant toward them.
Occasionally somebody who has always felt that the machine was the ruin of man—sometimes people like that come along, but we don’t even pay any attention to those. We’re not even busy defending Dianetics these days. All we’re trying to do is answer the letters and teach people to do it.
Just had another example of a young girl who’s been in an institution for some time and she had been pretty well patched up by Dianetics; she was getting along pretty well, very shaky though as people very often are. And she was interviewed just before she left and had delusion, delusion, delusion thrown at her. And she is in a complete spin, naturally. So that case was practically ruined—very, very bad.
I want to talk to you about this derivational thinking. When you have the basic principles of a science, you can derive the information you want. You can derive it. There are pieces of information lying around inside Dianetics which have never been figured out. In fact, I would go so far as to say not 1/1000th of the data available from the basic principle of Dianetics has yet been dreamed of.
As an example, we have trouble with these, what I was calling a coffin case. We have trouble with coffin cases. We have another law that goes along there that a person will seek to occupy the winning valence of an engram. If one wins, he survives, so he will go over into the winning valence. The next valence down is less survival. And of course his own valence is the last ditch because that one probably contains the pain.
We have the theory of the winning valence, very valid. And just tonight I was busy thinking about the winning valence and suddenly stumbled onto something which I’d like some of the pros present here to try: a solution to the coffin case. What is the winning valence? It’s the dead man, of course.
Have you ever seen any little kids going around saying, “Oh-oh-oh, if you look upon my cold, dead face you would think better of this,” that sort of thing? The way they idealize a funeral, “How everybody will miss me when I am gone,” so on. What’s a coffin case? Where do little kids get this idea when they have it to a bad extent?
I took a brief survey on some of the cases I had and here was Uncle or Grandma or somebody lying out there in that box, stiff and cold and everybody saying, “I am sorry we were so mean to him. Poor old fellow. He was an awfully good guy I’m so sorry” You know, Oklahoma!, “Poor Jud Is Dead”? They’re practically singing this song over the corpse. And what’s the kid do? Wheeee! (snap) Not only from grief of loss, but Grandpa really won. I would like to have it tested and see whether or not I’m right.
Test it along in this order: We take the coffin case who was lying there with his hands crossed here, his hands crossed here, or here, and we say, “Now, let’s pretend that you’re dead and it’s your funeral. Let’s see now what people are saying to you.” And just coax him into the text of what he is saying. We go over it a few times and over into it. And let’s see whether or not he doesn’t wind up in that valence, in the death. Because the coffin case is pretty hard to spring out of a dead valence. See whether or not it’ll work out.
No direct memory. Just put the guy into reverie.
Now, here’s the pitch. What you’re going to do is run out the valence and do a valence shift on him. We’re not going to leave it midway. Here he is lying there flat, hands crossed upon his chest and so forth, and let’s just coax him into believing he is dead. But remember this guy is in another valence. So we’re going to have to coax him into this situation until he’s actually in the situation, actually is lying in the box and so on. And then whip him out of that valence as soon as he’s a little bit bored with it—intention is off of it—whip him out of that valence and shoot him into the secondary valence, whatever it is. And then in this fashion finally work him down into his own valence and run the grief charge off of that. I think we’ll get there on a coffin case quicker.
I’m just demonstrating to you as an example that there’s a terrific amount of material which you can derive in Dianetics. You’ve got to think, you’ve got to think, you’ve got to be on your feet on the subject.
We know what our tools are. If you come up against what you consider to be a sticker, derive it. It is always better to be able to compute from certain basics, which you know a right answer to a given situation, than it is to be able to go back and get visio recall on ten billion pages of research material which may not contain your answer at all but merely other answers.
There are two ways of approaching any piece of learning and one is to file in the standard bank on the pack rat principle everything and anything which one encounters in life so that he winds up as an encyclopedia, a very fine catalog. And although present education may so reward him—they graduate him and give him A’s; he’s a good catalog.
In many lines you’ll find this unfortunately true. Particularly in those lines of literature. You get somebody with a good solid visio recall. He can go over literature and over it and over it. But he can’t write it. So we get in this society BA’s who are not Bachelors of Art but who are good catalogs of art. This is nothing against BA’s, they learn a heck of a lot of other things.
Derivational thought is not stressed in the fields of the arts. One of the best reasons why an engineer . . . [gap] . . . things he could do, think the thoughts he can think, is not because he’s any brighter but because he’s trained into derivational thinking. He can do in concept and by derivation new answers continually. And by deriving these new answers continually he keeps his brain live and active. He doesn’t just go on remembering, remembering, remembering.
After a while a fellow’s data is so old that when he remembers it—for instance if I were in the field of atomic power these days—it so happened that I took the first course that was given in the United States on the subject of atomic and molecular phenomena and if I had to depend for anything I knew about atomic power upon that course, I would be in bad shape.
Because most of the data was wrong, but its fundamentals were right. The conclusions which were drawn at that time were in error. But if one has the fundamentals, he has the various equations and the mathematics which eventually developed into what they’re calling quantum mechanics and so forth—if he had these things he could develop them, he could still be active in the field. But not if he just went back and could read pages of the books he read then. It was fortunate at that time that we didn’t have any textbook. Yet some of the people who are studying in the field of atomic and molecular phenomena these days graduated from school at that time. Their data is old, they have to keep it up.
Now, those people who are able to retain everything they look at—eidetic memory people—are in much worse shape than those people who are forced by occlusion to derive everything. It is not true that a person who has no sonic and visio recall is, by reason of numbers of engrams, made in some way smarter. But he is blocked from access to his textbooks. He can’t go back and look over materials of construction, page 426, on the mixing of concrete.
He does that by memory—you’ll see engineers around who can do this, aw, they’re considered pretty good engineers—but one doesn’t go find one of those engineers if he really wants somebody to draw a picture of an atom—you couldn’t draw a picture of an atom anyway—but to do some conceptual thinking.
Because this poor guy has had to struggle through school without visio recall, his memory for facts and isolated data has been very occluded and he has had to set up a derivational circuit. And if the person who had sonic and visio recall had also been made to set up a derivational circuit, he would be right there pitching along with the fellow and doing much better than the fellow who, by occlusions, has been forced to derive everything.
You get the difference? It’s too easy for the fellow with visio. He doesn’t quite know exactly why he knows all these facts. But he has attention units right close to hand that can read his textbooks for him. And he gets those facts through just like that, good, fast. So he doesn’t have to derive anything.
You follow my point through. I’m not trying to give you anything more than just the basic importance of being able to derive.
Now in Dianetics we don’t have any vast literature. We have a handbook, we’ll have some bulletins, the university text in Dianetics is in preparation. It’s going to be a whiz-dinger. If anybody could understand it in four years of intensive work I’ll give him a medal, (laughter) But the data which you will have is very scarce. But you don’t need that data. What you need is a knowledge of fundamentals and the ability to use those fundamentals and to derive new answers from those fundamentals. So that at any time you look at a case you know the fundamentals, you derive the solution to the case just like that.
Now we’ve tried to make it very easy for you in Standard Procedure. We’ve tried hard to make it as smooth for you as we can. But we can’t think for you. And an auditor has to be able to think. He has to be awfully fast on his feet. I have seen people sitting down with a notebook on their knees (quote) auditing (unquote). It’s a ghastly thing.
There is the patient, the poor guy, running auto, jumping all over the time track, doing this, doing that, writhing here, getting thoroughly restimulated, with control mechanisms completely out of hand. And the auditor’s sitting there writing, writing, writing and never thinking. Just doing a stenography job, one might say, on the engram bank. And that’s not Dianetics.
The auditor in the first place should never have to do very much writing unless he recovers a particularly interesting engram which he would like to hand in to research, an engram which was the center of something or a new aspect of a case that he’s not noted before. Then he wants that material, not otherwise.
This practice of “stenographic auditing,” I think I will give it that name, I’ve seen it all too often lately. People think it’s important to get this stuff down on paper. It’s not. What’s important is to get all of it out of the preclear’s mind.
Now, you’ll have to be able to derive these principles. There’s only one way to learn that and that’s read your fundamentals, know them well, and then do lots and lots of auditing. Do lots of cases. A person who does only one case is liable to find himself possessed of the idea that all cases react so-and-so and so-and-so. And the second you put him on another case which offers an entirely different aspect, the same fundamentals, just changed a little bit, give it a completely different case.
Let us take the case which has a demon circuit that says, “You never can control yourself, you’re utterly impossible.” This is what this demon circuit says. And it is a declaration to an effect which produces a very definite type of case.
Well, supposing whoever was in that same engram had said, “You’ve got to control yourself, you’ve got to control yourself all the time.” All right. Here is another type of case. But they’re just exactly alike in the degree that each had a demon circuit. And they’re exactly alike in the steps one has to take to get that demon circuit out of the case in order to make the case run.
In the first case which can’t control himself at all, you’re liable to find a circuit in there interposing between you and the file clerk which just cripples the file clerk. He can’t get through at all—it’s impossible anyway, so why try? And in the other one, why, there’s an extra circuit in there which is substituting for the file clerk. So it’s really the same mechanisms there at work. The cases will look entirely different to you, present entirely different aspects. You’re working on the same principles. Standard Procedure, used, takes care of both cases.
I don’t want to pull you in over your heads here by giving you too much information right at the start. I don’t want to scare you. I do want to make you into very good auditors. Because there aren’t any to amount to anything right now. I don’t think that there are over a dozen first-class auditors in the world at this minute.
I hope in a matter of a week or so that I can say there are two dozen first-class auditors. But it’s going slow. And if we can add you to the list of being first-class auditors, why, I’ll really be a happy man.
All right. We’ve covered derivational thinking, let’s start in now on the Auditor’s Code. You know, it’s a very nice thing, the Auditor’s Code, it’s very nice, it’s pretty.
Somebody called it one time “merely a code of how to be civilized.” That was when it was in a little more complete form than it appears in the textbook. And sure enough, if everybody acted like this toward other people, it’d be a pretty smooth world. But it’s worse than that.
A violation of the Auditor’s Code can cause you as an auditor twenty, forty, sixty hours of extra work, or can close a case down on you as an auditor completely so that some other auditor has to take over. Furthermore it may throw a psychotic person into a complete spin. It may break their psychosis, that is to say, precipitate it. So the Auditor’s Code is of very definite interest to you. The most important part of the Auditor’s Code had not been sufficiently stressed in the handbook.
The first part of the Code should say: “Do not evaluate and do not invalidate any of the patient’s data no matter how invalid that data may appear to you. Never correct the patient’s data, never tell him it is wrong, false or imaginary. Never infer to him for a moment that there is such a thing in the world as delusion even if he is running something that is nothing but delusion.” This goes to the point that if a person says, “I know this is just dub-in,” do not agree with him. Don’t disagree but don’t agree. If you lean to any side, lean it toward the side of trying to convince him that some of his material is correct. Not even by saying some, just try to lead him towards the fact that he can recall accurately.
Never say, “I don’t think that fits in that engram at that place. I don’t think you are recalling that properly because I was there and I heard your uncle Bosco. You know very well that prenatals are delusions after all I don’t know whether this material is correct or not. I think it’s mostly imaginary.” Any one of these remarks, as innocent as they seem, have an enormously forceful effect upon the preclear. You destroy with this his sense of reality.
There are actually three chief social aberrations in the world. One of those is the class of statements which say, “You are wrong.” It is the principle of the analytical mind to be right.
When somebody says, “That’s just your imagination. It’s all in your imagination. You are not sick. It’s just in your mind. You know you’re wrong, that isn’t the right material,” and so on. These things riding along as social aberrations destroy one’s sense of reality.
Of course, in engrams you’ll often find the phrase is “It’s all so unreal to me.” Now that’s one chief aberration which, running through the society produces more insanity per square inch than any other of which I know.
With the issuance of Freud’s theory of “all is delusion” in 1911, the curve of promulgation of this theory throughout the civilized world began to gather a parallel curve of the number of people institutionalized. Very interesting, isn’t it?
That’s a horrible condemnation of a theory, that childhood delusion produced the insanity which came later. In other words, delusion produces delusion and there is no cause. But by branding a person’s data as delusion they were left without a cause.
It is not that I am criticizing, I am just trying to point out to you the extreme seriousness of invalidating information or permitting anybody in the field of mental healing, who is also handling one of your patients, to brand as delusion anything that patient is saying.
You know dub-in. You know imagination when you see it. It is your business to recognize it. It is your business to know what to do about it. But it is not your business or anybody’s business to say that it is delusion. [gap] Sometimes when you’re working with somebody who has engrams to the effect of “all is delusion,” that “this is so unreal,” “I’ll have to pretend I’m somebody else,” or something of the sort, “because I can’t believe this anyway,” you can actually shift this patient over into another valence where this engram exists and in that way achieve an apparent alleviation. It can be done. The mechanics of it are very simple. He is having a hard time facing reality so you tell him that what the reality is that he’s trying to face is delusion.
You say, “You don’t have to pay any attention to this sort of thing because it’s all delusory anyway and you don’t have to worry about it.” It’s like a positive suggestion, somebody with altitude there. He can actually be shifted into another valence, he can be handled in this fashion and his mind can be eased that these nightmares are merely the product of delusion, that the things he is doing that are bad are just because of delusion about it. You can produce an apparent alleviation in some cases by assuring a person that what he is thinking about and worrying about is imaginary But those cases are very few and when they come into Dianetics, so on, you’ll find out that they have to be treated with greater skill because they have to be brought back into facing reality. That’s what we’re trying to do. Don’t drive a person away from reality But the bulk of these cases, when told that something is delusory while they’re undergoing Dianetic therapy, will come close to a break. They will become more neurotic and they will become very much upset. That’s how important the Auditor’s Code is.
I saw a case here not too long ago that was proceeding very well. And then friend hubby who was auditing said to the case, “Well, you know that doesn’t fit in there.” That was all he said. Bang! He precipitated this case into a state of mind which was very bad.
Because nearly every case that you handle is going to have engrams to the effect that it is all in their imagination anyway. That is such a common social aberration that your statement, your invalidation of their information spoils for them their sense of reality. And now try to get them to run engrams. They won’t be able to run engrams very well because they’re running them on the subject of “I don’t believe this. It’s not real. It doesn’t seem real to me.” The sense of reality is terribly important.
We rehabilitate this, as you will learn later, on a straight memory circuit as much as we can. Because straight memory when it selects out a real memory validates it and says, “This was real.” And in such a way we can validate engrams and the emotional reaction toward reality.
Now, “all is delusion” is something which we leave definitely out, not because it is nice to leave it out, not because of any morals or any feeling that we ought to do something different, but because it will, if often enough repeated, destroy an intellect. That is number one in this society as an aberration.
Yes?
Male voice: I’d like to give a simple example of this to the auditor who it’s not clear to. I was running a man about a week ago and I happened to return to a half an hour ago when he first came up. So I asked him to tell me what color Mrs. Ban’s dress was as she happened to come in the room. So he told me and I believe he said it was brown. And I said, “Aha, it’s blue,” to myself—I didn’t say it to him, but I said to myself “Mm-hm, her dress is blue.” So I let him run on, “Well, what did she say,” and so forth. And later on I went in and I looked at her and her dress was green, (laughter) Second male voice: The auditor should not question the validity of the preclear. (laughter) Male voice: But if I had said that her dress was green, you go and take a look—oh, brother!
Yeah. Well, right along in this way you will have patients occasionally who become so anxious about the validity of their data that they will write home to Mama or do something else equally strange—because they’re writing home to the person that drove them nuts. And they’ve got engrams in there that say, possibly, “You have to believe everything I say, dear, because after all I have your best interests at heart and even though I am throwing you out into the cold, this is for the best,” and so forth, “and you have to mind your elders and besides I have always loved you and I didn’t try to get rid of you,” (outside of 35 AAs) “and everything is going along just fine.” So this patient has these engrams and he writes home and he says to Mama . . .
Well, here’s a case the other day I’m sure I’m at liberty to mention it. A chap did this, a member of the professional class did this. An odd thing to do, but I’d broken out of him a hypnosis, very early, which was intended to cure his stuttering.
He stopped stuttering suddenly—and he was being audited one day and a circuit, a demon circuit in his head—demon circuits don’t have to be audio but this one was completely audio—and it screams into his head, “Come up to present time.” So I tried to check over the auditors who had audited him recently. But I knew nobody had beaten him enough to install an audio demon circuit. So we went back looking for the hypnotist because that’s part of hypnotic procedure.
By the way, you should know a little bit about hypnotism so you can pull apart hypnotic procedure which has “forget it” and “go to sleep” and “you can only hear the sound of my voice,” and so forth. So here we go back to the age of question mark. I give him an age flash, he gives me six. But talking through a demon circuit, God knows what his age was. And we spring apart this thing and sure enough we find the audio circuit. We knock out the forgetter mechanisms. And we knock the case apart at that level.
He gets so intrigued by all this that he must write home to Mama and find out when the hypnotist hypnotized him. Now, it upset him. He wrote to the person who knew least about it. He knew most about it. And his auditor at that time knew much more about it because demon circuits just don’t appear out of nowhere. And the auditor who is willing to depart from reality to the extent of thinking, “Well, somehow or other this just descended from the blue, I guess, and it’s without cause,” is going to have cases fold up on him. Everything has a cause. So we blew out this circuitry, to some degree deintensified it. He came up calm but he wrote Mama. Mama writes back and says, “No, it was four when you suddenly got over your stuttering. You started stuttering when you were about two. And you were never hypnotized by anyone.” Well, that was a horrible thing. I hope, I . . . The gentleman is around, he wouldn’t object to my mentioning this. But it put him into a terrible flat spin. Well, there wasn’t any reason for it—to have written home in the first place. Now he gets back a new lock which says, “Dear, you’re just imagining things.” So Mamas who have guilty consciences are awfully careful about what the little child can remember. They will tell the child many times that it is impossible for them to remember that early. Some little kid will come in and he’ll be maybe three years of age and he’ll be saying, “I remember when we had this dog Towser.” And “Dog Towser,” Mama says, “Towser, Towser, he was only six months old when Towser ran away and we never had him after that. Jesus Christ, do you think he can remember to three months old, two months old, prenatal? Oh . . . ‘You can’t remember that, Willy. Ha-ha. You were much too young, much too young.’ “ How many cases you’re going to find this in! And then the little kid pleads with her. He says, “But I do remember it.” Because the analytical mind’s function is to be right and Mama will say, “No, it’s just your imagination. You are imagining things. All is delusion, all is delusion, all is delusion.” When you get this case in Dianetic therapy he’ll lie back there and you’ll say, “Well, all right, let’s go to the earliest moment of pain or unconsciousness.” He gets a streetcar running over him or something of the sort. And he lies there and he says, “It just must be imaginary.” He’s got somatics and so forth and “it’s just imaginary, I can’t really believe that it’s real.” So we go through this case over and over and over.
That’s your prime aberration running through the society today that reality is not reality. So don’t add to it as an auditor, because you’re clipping right into something that is pretty thoroughly messy in most of the psyches in the land. Don’t stir it up. It’s like sticking a stick in a hornet’s nest. It’ll cause a whole case to cave in.
There’s three; I stressed that one because that, of all of the clauses of the Auditor’s Code, is the most important. And it is not stressed well in the book. [gap] One day a doctor in psychology was sitting there and her husband had come in. And this fellow had been raised in Arabia. And she was very antagonistic toward Dianetics. She hadn’t read the book or anything. And as a matter of fact, a couple of days later when she’d read the book she called me up and apologized. And she says, “Gee-whiz, I’ve got to get to work on this.” But at the time she was still going on a delusion basis. Her husband who had, as I said, been born and raised in Arabia was a pretty shaky boy on his feet, mentally. He’d been in and out of offices for some time. He’d heard of Dianetics and wanted to carry through with it. So I gave him a test run. I ran him back and I found a prenatal and I found a little postnatal incident. He worked very well, so on. And I could see out of the corner of my eye this girl tensing up getting ready to shoot at him, “It’s delusion.” Because I knew he didn’t get in this shape all by himself.
Somebody had been telling him that things were delusion, that he couldn’t remember and that he was wrong. And with justice or without justice I chose the most likely candidate, his wife. So I brought him up to present time, he’s still groggy. By the way, people are slightly hypnotic and suggestible when they’re a little groggy and you’ve just brought them up to present time, if they’ve been through a lot of incidents. They’re dislocated a little bit in time.
Bring him up to present time, I said, “Well now, what do you think about those things? They seem real to you?” “Oh, yes. They seem very real.” I said, “Of course, they’re very real.” I said, “Nobody could shake your faith in the fact that they’re real, could they?” And his wife came right in on the tail end of that and she says, “Dear, you’ve told me those things as in straight memory.” And he says, “Told you what? The prenatal?” And she says, “Well, not that one, but the one there at seven years of age when your grandmother is singing to you in her Arabic.” Well, we’d covered a lot of other incidents. So she was shooting against sixteen-inch armor plate, boom, boom. Bullets flying off, bang, bang- He just sat there, his sense of reality couldn’t be shaken because it was real Now there I was dealing slightly with positive suggestion.
The other two that are bad is that aberration which runs through the society which says “Control yourself, control yourself, control yourself” Everybody is so interested in everybody else controlling himself. This is a general sort of cowardice to which this whole world today has become prone, that everybody must be controlled.
The only thing that makes a dangerous lunatic dangerous is the fact that he has control mechanisms. [gap] All manner of things have been promulgated in this society by some (quote) I (unquote) in an effort, aberrated or otherwise, to make the world safe for that (quote) I (unquote).
The extent of mans invention, placed on this subject of making people control themselves, if invested in space travel, would now have us out over the whole universe I am sure. Because as far as I can tell for the past fifty thousand years he has been trying to work hard along this line: control yourself.
A fellow gets emotional, something like that, somebody is bound to say to him, “Control yourself.” “Control your emotions, dear, don’t go all to pieces.” The thing for the person to do at that moment is to cry and to cry loud and hard. A grief charge comes off evidently partially at the moment of the receipt of grief. If tears can be shed, that charge is going to deintensify slightly. And the rest of the charge will come off during therapy; sooner or later during therapy there’s going to be tears. So just “control yourself” on the subject—control your emotions, “don’t cry.” That’s harmful enough. The next thing they do with “control yourself” is—there was a perfectly good observation made many years ago that toilet training had an awful lot to do with aberration and there’s nothing more valid than that.
By the way, if you just think for a moment the number of holders which must come in in a sequence of toilet training—”Sit here. Now, sit down. Now, you stay there until you’ve done it. Now, you stay there. Now, sit there.” And you get what is called an anal character or something of the sort. It is a fact. You look over toilet training and you will see if there’s a big “believe it” engram—”You’ve got to believe me, you’ve got to believe what you’re told,” engram underlying this toilet training. Of course Mama—everything she says goes in and it has just as good value as an engram itself. Because it’s depending on the lower engram, it locks her voice tones into the lower one. So everything she says is believed. So these are holders. But now we add into that, “Now, you’ve got to control yourself Now we’ll get that all up and down the line. So that particular sequence in life is aberrative. It is aberrative in the form of locks. But the observation that it was aberrative was very valid, quite sentient on the part of the person who made the observation.
In moments of anger people are always going around saying, “Control yourself.” “Control yourself” has many, many types of phrases. It’s a species. “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself. You mustn’t let yourself go to pieces. You’ve got to get hold of yourself.” Oh, it has an enormous variety. And it is an effort to make somebody else be very self-controlled. These things go in as demon circuits. The demon circuit is “You control yourself.” That’s the difference between a demon circuit—whereas “I” as a single aberration just tries to align itself with “I.” Psychosis seems to occur because one of these demon circuits saying to “I”—what’s left of poor “I” after a big engram charge has gotten in there and locked off part of the analyzer—“I” sometimes moves over into here. In a dramatization “I” is definitely here, where somebody is saying to somebody else, “Goddamn it, goddamn it, control yourself. I say now, you’ve got to be self-controlled, you’ve got to be logical.” You know, you’ve seen people do this, completely blowing their stacks and giving out all this good advice.
In a bar one day—I’ve studied the human animal in some remarkably strange places; I say the “human animal” because in bars it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes—down in South Main Street in Los Angeles I saw a drunk in there one day who had his buddy up against the wall and—oh, just friendly conversation, and he was banging his head against this brick wall saying, “Goddamn you, I’ll teach you to be reasonable. Be reasonable, goddamn you. Be logical like I am!” There was a demon circuit going right in right there at that moment. I stood around and watched it for a while. Well anyway, this aberration is the one which permits a person to take himself out of the auditor’s hands. There is an “I” inside the mind which busily runs “I,” another “I” is set up—a demon circuit.So, undoubtedly some of these demon circuits are going to start picking up Dianetic terminology someday and it is possible that an incipient schizophrenic who is almost ready for a break with some very stupid and careless auditing—the fellow would have probably broken anyway—but with stupid and careless auditing is going to get a demon circuit set up in there which is going to start . . .
You know, I suppose it would be on a break of an Auditor’s Code, where the auditor would be kneeling with his knee in the preclear’s chest and had him by the throat and is banging his head against the floor, a slight breach of the Code, saying to this effect, “Control yourself” and so on. “Now, goddamn it, you’ve got to go over these damned engrams. You know you can do it. And you can make yourself do it. And I’m not going to put up with any more of your nonsense. Now, goddamn it, go back to basic-basic. And I’m not kidding you, go back to it!” (laughter) This by the way is not optimum Dianetics. (laughter) And you’re going to have some schiz walking in, in whom an engram has been installed which contains a demon circuit. Nothing against Dianetics because that’s definitely off the line on Standard Procedure. But this person will be walking in and he’ll probably be saying to the psychiatrist or somebody, “Now, contact analyzer; now let’s go back to basic-basic. Now, you know you can think this. You know. You know you can think of what this is. Now go back to basic-basic. Now go over it again. Go over it again. Go over it again. Go over it again.” (laughter) The magnitude of installation there has got to be very high before this sort of thing could happen or it could be very slight but lock up on some earlier demon circuit which would then become vocal. You see, demon circuits can think. And it could become vocal with Dianetics.
Male voice: I wonder if this “control yourself” mechanism didn’t get off to a start because a baby’s cry seems to be evolved to be irritating and disturbing and to prod people into action. And any imitation of a baby’s cry . . .
I see your trend there. If you don’t mind, I think it could have gotten off on this basis: baby crying in an area way, way back some time where there were wild beasts. And baby had to shut up and he had to be quiet and he had to control himself so that he wouldn’t be hurt. It could go back. It must be of long duration. But you start to work psychotics and nothing will show up quite as clear as “control yourself.” It’s quite aberrative. The next—and incidentally any organization in the society which seeks to exert, by force, control upon members in that society, is to some degree an aberrative factor on the society.
If you don’t believe this, go back and check up totalitarianism and so on, in the history of time—those governments which worked most sharply with force—and you will find that their social order deteriorated and became, one might say, more psychotic than most social orders are.
The last one is the aberration which set itself up I don’t know how long ago, but I’m afraid within the last couple of millennia, that pleasure was evil and that one shouldn’t think about pleasure and that hard experiences were the things which were best to remember. And you will find many of the people on whom you work, that pleasure is occluded and they are very, very unhappy people.
It is a definite promoter of neurosis and psychosis, that constant hammer. So much so that many of the psychotics with whom I have worked had their reactive minds which contained the pain out in front. That was the visible mind. And the analytical mind was in the rear.
In other words there was a complete turnover of mind. So that the only thing that was visible there was pain, hard knocks, experience, tough experience. Actually, engrams aren’t experience. Engrams are things that happen at times when the analyzer isn’t there to gain experience. They go in and are unknown. Therefore, they’re not experience. But this sort of an aberration will so interpret the engram bank until you see some poor little guy who’s about maybe sixteen years of age in appearance but he’s actually about forty and he’s had the IQ of about twenty all his life. And he’s got his reactive mind turned wrong side out. And people have been hammering at him about playing. “All you want to do is play,” I found as the central circuit on one of these inverters one time. “All you want to do is play. You’ve got to work. You’ve got to think about the serious things in life. You will never learn anything from play. What you want to know is things that are hard, tough.” Also, “Experience is the great teacher.” By installing an engram? (laughter) Okay.
Male voice: You re talking to me about the only one I don’t have.
You don’t have that one?
That’s a vicious one. You will uncover it in lots of patients when you try to take them back to moments of pleasure and they don’t have any. However, what cuts the pleasure out can be detected, so on, as we will get as we go further into the lineup.
Would you like to take a short break? Get yourself a glass of water and so forth, before we take up the rest of this?