Engrams (500621)

Date: 21 June 1950

Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard

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In tracing the moment that an engram is supposed to have occurred, which is to say, the time of life in which this engram occurred, there are many signs which an auditor can use. Lots of them. The primary one that is used, but can be overused, is age flash. The patient will very often be found to have a built-in circuit which simply gives their right age automatically, will just completely go around the engram and give the right age. Now, this can be overcome rather easily, by two or three mechanisms.

One of the mechanisms is to ask him for a number. Now, he’ll very often give you a number when he doesn’t realize that you are asking for age and the number will be the age. Of course, any of these flashes are not to be relied upon 100 percent. They are, in the main, pretty good.For instance, I was hitting at an exodontistry one time, and all the number the fellow would give me throughout the whole case was the number seven. So I figured that was an exodontistry at seven and tried like the devil to find it. The exodontistry had taken place at twenty-seven. But “twenty-seven” had nothing to do with it. Seven was the last number that he heard as he was going out. He was counting, and the nurse was saying to him, “Say seven.” He had gone up to six himself and the nurse was telling him, “Say seven.” So any time you’d ask him for a number he says “seven.” So you see there could be other ways to get this.

Another method for discovering the age of the engram—the moment when it occurred—is to give a person flash questions like “Give me yes or no on any of the following. Give me just yes or no. The first that occurs to you, yes or no. A hospital?” and you get maybe a “no.” And “Doctor’s office?” “No.” “Mother?” “Yes.” “Dentist’s office?” “No.” “Automobile?” and you may get something comes through like “accident.” And now you say, “Give me yes or no on it, automobile accident?” “Yes.” “Home?” “Yes.” So now you assemble this thing and it looks like somebody was in an automobile accident and got taken home. You’ll have then where the person happens to be at the moment on the track.

Now “stuck at present time,” as you know, is a misnomer. It was used in the understanding that a person is never stuck in present time but the point was not made clear in the handbook. The fact of the case is that a person who is “stuck in present time” may be suffering from two things: one of them is a command that will not let him return so much as a minute. That’s the rarer of the cases. And the other one, which is the most general, is that he’s latched up somewhere on the time track. Now, it so happens that if he is pushed out to the outermost limit of present time with each succeeding second, he is also in an engram. And that engram also has a specific age — two, three, four, whatever it is. So in either event actually he’s stuck on the time track. So the thing to do is to find the incident in which he is stuck and the valence in which he is stuck, the incident and the valence. Now, this can be done by diagnosis, straight memory diagnosis, trying to get him to remember this and that, what’s worrying him and so forth. You’ve already seen our technique on that. All right, that’s the way we go about it.

In all this, it is of the utmost importance to find where the engram is located. But the age at which it occurs is secondary to finding it, of course. It will help you find it. But what you want to do is find the engram, whether it’s prenatal, postnatal, what. So as a result, no amount of effort should be spared, particularly at the beginning of a case, to find the exact moment where the person is stuck on the track. That effort is seldom without very immediate beneficial results.

You can try and locate where he is and get the holder out of it. Get the holder and the call-back. Just study the thing a little bit. You may get the holder out of it, which is “stay here,” and then you bring him up to present time and he’s his proper age now, for a moment, and then you give him an age flash again, or again run through the routine, you find he’s right back in the incident again.

Well, at this moment you have uncovered a call-back, which is, “I’ll be back in a minute.” “Stay here, I’ll be back in a minute,” is the whole phrase and one didn’t get the whole thing off of it.

Male voice: If you contact a holder and you want to get him out of one—something which is pretty much of a lock and you don’t want to waste time on it, and he’s stuck at the age of five in some fairly minor incident and, I don’t know, maybe it’s not too minor either, maybe it’s a fairly painful experience, but you still don’t want to waste time on it—and you get the holder in it and you bust the holder, should you keep on running for a couple of sentences?

Oh, keep running further than that. You’re going to find that there—if there’s one holder in it, there’s probably several and probably the first holder you get in it is not the holder that’s holding it.

Male voice: Deintensify the whole rest of the . . .

Yes, get as much of it as you possibly can, as much of it as you can. That’s the main thing.

Male voice: Even if it takes the whole session to do it?

Well, mind you, if you’re just opening up this case and you find him rigorously stuck at nine years of age, you can count on the fact that he’s going to keep on getting latched up at nine years of age. Get the incident in full recall. By full recall, get it into a state where he can not only run the incident but he can remember that it actually happened. That’s important. Don’t just bleed it off on the basis of the fellow says, “Stay here, stay here, stay here.” “That’s fine, yeah now, now what incident were you in?” “I don’t know.” You haven’t done enough there to bother with.

The thing you should do is to run the thing, take him back to it and run it again and hammer it and pound it until you’ve finally got that incident into complete recall, and that is from present time. “Yes, I remember when I was a little kid at nine years of age and I had scarlet fever and they told me to do so-and-so. Sure, I remember that.” Now all of a sudden you’ve deintensified that thing to a point where it’s not going to cause you any trouble anymore. Otherwise, every time you bring him up to present time you’re liable to find him latching up on it. Because it is, after all, a lock. A pretty sturdy one.

Male voice: Well, what about the case where you seem to get a very few units going back and forth on the time track, moving fairly well but most of it seems to be in one spot That’s fairly common, isn’t it?

Yes. Fairly common. It is always profitable to try to spring as many attention units in the mind as possible. That is very profitable. As a matter of fact, extended to the outermost limit, extended all the way out, that is actually what you’re trying to do as an analogy in therapy. You’re trying to free up all the brain’s attention units. So that they can all function and none of them retarded in any way. So you can start right in at the beginning of the case and if you just work on the business of freeing attention units, you’ll get places.

You’ll run across people who have an amnesia back of yesterday quite often, and yet who are apparently functioning. They don’t know what’s happened to them in life, they just say, “Well, that’s all occluded, I don’t know anything about it” and so on. And you get quite an argument from these people about the fact that they absolutely cannot remember. Now, there’s several things you can do. They say, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Throwing repeater technique at a patient, just endless repeater technique, seldom accomplishes very much. Because he’s going to put that on a bypass circuit and he’s going to sit there comfortably and run your repeater technique. And you may or may not get the incident, may or may not do something. But you can do this with repeater technique. You can give him so many holders that you’ve restimulated a lot of new incidents and now he gets held on five, six, ten places on the track. Engrams will move on the track, and they will bunch up. So you can retard therapy by an overuse of repeater technique.

Repeater technique has that very special function of getting exactly what we’re going after. Now, that’s been formed in two ways: We catch the patient in a dramatization, a real dramatization, not just a remark like, “I don’t know.” We catch the patient saying, “Oh, go away from me, you’re bothering me. Leave me alone, leave me alone, for heaven’s sakes!” Okay. Now you can use repeater technique on that the first place that incident is restimulated and you should be able to tap it. Now, you can use repeater technique on that and very often get straight back into the incident from which it came. At which moment you advance the case.

Male voice: In other words, if, in a nice way, you can annoy him slightly to the point where he will . . .

That isn’t necessary. I never do that. Not that what I do is a criterion, but it would be dangerous to annoy him. It’s much easier to take somebody with whom that person is living and ask him what they say when they’re mad. And it’s much easier just to run the patient over one of his own dramatizations. Now, you can do either one of the two and you will find it. Now, there’s a legitimate use of repeater technique.

The other use of repeater technique that is always productive of results is watching what the patient’s doing. If the patient is sitting stone-still—he’s running an engram and all of a sudden he just sits absolutely still, you know there’s something of a “sit still” or “don’t move” or something of the sort. Well, start pitching repeater technique at him to match his current manifestation. And then you will have results from it because all of a sudden he’ll hit the thing and . . .

Male voice: I’ve got another one on that.

Hm?

Male voice: “I’ve got to be firm, I’m going to have to be firm.” Oh, yes?

Male voice: Now how about—well, supposing you move him through an incident and finally comes up to a dead standstill and cant move and you know it’s—there s a denyer in there someplace, and you re asking for it and he cant give it to you. Well, could you just poke a couple of phrases at him, “Okay. ‘Never.’ is ‘never’ in there? Repeat that please.” Try repeater technique on a couple of hunches like that, to sort of keep him moving through this incident?

Yes, you will find that you can guess at this pretty well; it’s a matter of practice. But repeater technique as I say has its dangers and limitations. It isn’t one of these overall techniques you can get the person in present time and then suddenly pick the phrase out of the air and decide you’re going to have him run that phrase. You’ve got to have some reason behind it.

Male voice: Sometimes when a person s running an engram and wont give you the next phrase, is it possible to say, “Skip that phrase and pick up the next one”?

I’d never tell him to skip a phrase, I’d just say, “Keep on going, we can pick it up next time.” Male voice: And so on with the phrase after that.

Sure. Yeah, that’s right. [gap] Dobbs was running a chap upstairs yesterday and the fellow was having a great deal of trouble getting through the engram and he was clutching his stomach. So Dobbs kept insisting on a holder for that, but instead of just pummeling the person about this, he was perfectly willing to take him back to the beginning of it and run him on through the thing again. Well, of course the number of times through—there are always phrases that will come into view. There are always phrases in a bad engram that are out of sight. And even when you have run an engram sometimes and you think it is all up, it may astonish you to come back there three or four weeks after you have uncovered another earlier engram and find that it had a phrase sitting right in the middle of it that was quite aberrative. But apparently the engram was gone. In other words, phrases duck out of sight.

In this particular case the fellow was clutching at his stomach and he seemed to be holding himself. So Dobbs gets “hold it” out of there, at which moment the fellow can move freely through the engram. He was just moving a little bit in front of it and just a little bit behind “hold it.” He has been around a cluster of “hold it” all his life. A big cluster.

What I’m bringing up here is efforts to free the person on the track but the main subject is trying to find where those incidents are located.

Now, there’s another way of going about it. And that is to use his (quote) imagination (unquote). Ask him to imagine the worst thing that could happen to a little boy. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Ask him “What is the most dangerous time of life?” You’ll get some astonishingly accurate replies.

Ask him “What is the most horrible thing you can think of?” Or ask him “What is the happiest and most cheerful thing you can think of?” And here he is stuck right in a bad engram and he’s going to resent it sometimes and start giving you gruesome details. You can very often get a patient negating against you slightly. And get some use out of that, like, “Oh, well, she’s just your grandma, after all”—trying to get her death. And “It’s just Grandma, after all, and you know, people pass away” and so on. And be very consoling about the whole thing, “But it doesn’t amount to much” and the fellow’s liable to resent this and suddenly come through and tell you that it does amount to a hell of a lot.

You can notice that. Another manifestation which you very often see—people lying on the bed with their hands crossed like this, lying there very still, lying there very quietly. They’re dead! And that’s the engram. Now, you could run a whole case with a person sitting like this and just eventually touch that engram.

Male voice: How about folding their hands in front of them?

Well, as far as this, yes, I’ve seen them fold their hands in front of them, but normally when a person has his hands fisted together and against the cheek, that’s fetal. You’ll have this person lying there straight out, laid out, everything complete but a lily. And that person is latched up in funerals.

Male voice: There s no specific position for basic area, is there?

Mm-hm. Usually a person will roll up into a ball, a very tight ball.

Now, covering that far, you can tell, then, by something of the person, by the manifestation of the body—the agitation of the body or the lack of it—about where it is. He can, by the way, be in a prenatal in somebody else’s valence, laid out straight with his hands crossed like this across his chest. He just assumes this angle. And you can get him— he’s actually in a prenatal area. If you get a man into prenatal who is running consistently laid out straight, you can be certain that he is running in somebody else’s valence and that you’re not doing a very good job, because there’s something wrong with this case, desperately wrong.

Now, another method of telling how and where a person is on the track is by the somatic. There are command somatics. We know, for instance, that the fetus does not get morning sickness. The manifestation of morning sickness on a fetus is you’ll see him crunch into himself. A person will be rather rolled up a trifle or on his side, not too tightly, but just suggests a fetal position. And you’ll get this crunch and you’ll see him kind of shudder into himself. That’s Mama vomiting. If he’s lying there then with a pain in his stomach and a choking and coughing and so forth, he’s in Mama’s valence at the time it’s being run. But we know that morning sickness didn’t occur to a man and we know that a woman will not dramatize her own morning sickness without there having been morning sickness earlier. So there is a method of telling on the thing. A person has this morning sickness.

What we get in that is a choice. The command somatic operates only when the person is in the valence of the person that’s doing the commanding. Otherwise the person is in his own valence and getting the right set of somatics. The right set of somatics . . . Yes?

Male voice: I’m just wondering about split valences. I know I’ve been in two valences with . . .

Simultaneously ?

Male voice: Mm-hm. Split Second male voice: I have too. Sort of halfway curled up in the fetal position . . .

You mean halfway in your own, halfway in somebody else’s?

Male voice: Halfway in mine. I was running through birth.

Oh yes, oh yes. Well, you’re just barely into a valence and so on. There’s that degree.

Male voice: Mm-hm. But you’re not going to find anybody in Papa’s and Mama’s valence simultaneously.

Male voice: No, but I had somatics, both command somatics and my own somatics, running at the same time.

Mm-hm. Okay. Now, here we have the problem of the zygote. A zygote is round. The only pain that a zygote could experience would be pretty well all over. It’d be an allover pain, all over the body. If a douche has been thrown in there and—you might possibly get a half of the body covered with that douche. But it is not very likely because a zygote is so tiny that it could be engulfed by a drop of something rather easily. So you get allover somatics in the basic area. Down around basic-basic, if you get basic-basic with anything but an allover somatic—a pressure or a burning or irritation or something of the sort, you should know very well that you’re not in— if you get it with anything else, you’re not in the basic area. Somebody has crossed up the lines.

Male voice: But then you have a command somatic . . .

Yes, the person could be in another valence and so on. But you should be able, in the basic area, to throw them into their own valence. There’s really nothing easier in the basic area. Throw them into their own valence and at which moment this thing will turn on.

Male voice: How early can morning sickness start?

Morning sickness can start before the discovery—the cells find out the person is pregnant before the person finds it out.

Male voice: Apparently, the next day.

Yes. It can start in rather rapidly. There is an earlier somatic than the allover somatic of basic-basic. And it’s hardly a somatic. It’s a sensation of movement and swimming. It’s the sperm or the ovum. And you’ll get all sorts of split-up ideas.

Male voice: Before conception?

At conception. At the very instant of conception a person can pick up the motions of the sperm, and ordinarily does. And you’ll have some girl, she knows nothing about Dianetics, you send her down and you say, “Let’s go back to the first moment of pain or discomfort that you can now reach,” and she’s trying to swing her feet. She will be lying out straight trying to swing her feet sideways like a fish tail. And suddenly she’s up against something and she pushes and pushes and pushes and she’s trying to get through something. Well, heavens on earth, this is the impressions—the cells are pretty disorganized—this is an impression of later engrams mixed up in conception memory, because conception itself is evidently not an engram as such. And you get all these strange manifestations. It’s as though the last moment of sentience was the moment of conception itself. And then the next impression thereafter was received after a lapse of time during which no recording was done of any kind. So it appears that the pain and the conception are simultaneous. And you—I have peeled thirty engrams off the sperm dream. Thirty engrams, one right after the other, each one a little earlier.

Male voice: Off the . . .

Each one would reduce.

Male voice: Off the sperm . . . I didn’t quite understand the phrase you used.

The sperm? I call it the sperm dream.

Male voice: Would that be a possible, I mean wouldn’t your . . . ?

Is it a possible engram?

Male voice: Yes, a possible engram . . .

Well, now.

Male voice: Well, say a stimulus . . .

That’s what I was discussing here. It is not—that is not an engram, as far as it has been investigated, which is extensively. But as I was saying, the first engram which occurs immediately after that, it gets mixed up with. So the first recordings there are often confused.

Male voice: You mean they run just one right after the other, or run into each other?

Yes, and each one of them have this slight feeling there of the sperm. And so you can peel off at least one engram off of the sperm dream. And if you recount the sperm dream a few times, why, the first thing you know you’re liable to find yourself with a full engram that has nothing to do with the sperm. You’re apt also to find all manner of odd computations being made by the patient at that moment, of being first in Papa and then in Mama and so on. These things will resolve, however, into engrams. So just keep running what you’ve got and the first thing you know the thing will fall together.

Now, in view of the fact that this point of the track is most serious from an aberrative point of view, then one must take particular care to get everything in that area. That area is the most important area in the whole time span of life. You’ve got to clear out that area. Once that area is cleared out, once you have those engrams not just reduced but erased, as far as you can tell, absolutely gone, then and only then will the case resolve completely. The earliest moment that you can do this, it should be done. That’s the first target of the auditor is down there in basic area and get basic area and basic-basic erased. After that the case will run rather easily.

Yes?

Male voice: Would this be a point, Ron, after there’s a lot of charge taken off painful emotion, a good bit of time shift and—starting from conception and working forward be of any value?

No. You can say, “Go to one hour after conception,” if you want to, and you may get one hour after conception. But usually the picture’s more complicated. You say, “Well, let’s go to conception, and now let’s go to the first moment of pain or unconsciousness, now, after conception,” and the person winds up at five months after conception. That’s the first moment you now have a recording of. Now you could tackle this engram and if you encounter one, you should tackle it. That . . .

Male voice: Is there apt to be anything in between conception and five months?

Oh, heavens on earth, there’s just literally scores and scores of engrams in between. But the first one that he thinks he can attain is at . . . [gap] . . . the somatic then of basic area is an allover somatic—allover pressure, allover irritation, allover whatever. And it isn’t localized. If you find somebody who claims he’s in the basic area and he has a pain, and in addition to this pain he has—you’ve established the fact that he’s in his own valence, you’re getting along there and—but he still has this pain in his stomach, and only in his stomach, then you know that you’re way up the line, you’re after the first missed period. You’re definitely after the first missed period. And anything after the first missed period is late.

Your main target there is the basic area, which is the area before the first missed period. It’s the first two weeks or ten days of life. That’s the first target. The material in there is the most aberrative in the whole line. Those commands and so forth are most severely impressed; at least, this has been my findings in the case, that the greatest alleviation in a case that you are just tapping was of course painful emotion. But if you were going in there to really knock out the engram bank, the only target that you want him to reach is the basic area target. Therefore you get painful emotion off of the case so that you can reach the first part of that stretch. But everything you’re doing is an attempt to reach basic-basic. So it’s very important to you to know what the somatic is in that area. And don’t let anybody ever try to sell you, “I have a pain in my foot, this is basic-basic.” All right. You can let him run “I have a pain in my foot,” you can let him tell you all about it. But that thing is going to resolve into either one, a command somatic, meaning it was Mama’s pain in the foot—right after this you will then get an allover somatic—or it will be clear up in the second month, third month, so on, because after all, the fetus had to have a foot.

Male voice: Where do the limbs start growing?

I would recommend you to give study to a book on embryology. Look it over and you will learn more in that way than anything I can tell you here using up a bit of time. You will find some strange things about it as you run engrams out of the patient. You will find his eyes being smashed together, now, sometimes. Now, smashing a person’s eyes together is of course impossible. But the eyes are clear out here on the side of the head! You will find that the mouth has some odd positions. For instance a needle or something like that could thrust straight through the eyes of the fetus, from side to side. But that’s impossible because their eyes are down here, you see. But a needle could do this. And I have run into this. And just pertinent to that, don’t be amazed at any damage whatsoever that you find in the prenatal area, because here is the organism floating in amniotic fluid—adequate supplies of amino acids and tissue-repairing facilities—the blueprint is still very much to hand and it can really repair itself most remarkably well. It’s been quite well authenticated on the data received from engrams themselves. Engrams which were aberrative, engrams which did have objective reality and so forth.

Male voice: That brings up a point in the book. Would there be any possibility of the amniotic fluid or a similar sort of a thing having any value in therapy in late life?

Oh yes, probably would have. There’s evidently a lot of healing going on here.

You’re going to find some other manifestations that are interesting in the prenatal area. One of those manifestations is the “breath cutoff.” A person obviously is beginning to suffer, he is going unconscious, let us say, for lack of air, for lack of oxygen, and yet is not registering in his lungs. And he can become extremely confused. His lungs—it isn’t because he’s not breathing and he doesn’t quite know what’s happening. The oxygen is going in through the umbilical cord and he’s suffering from anoxemia in the umbilical cord. As a result he is extremely confused.

In attempted abortions, something of the sort, it’s occasionally possible to tick the umbilical cord with a knife, something like that, and just cut it enough so that . . . So, I had one very interesting AA show up on a fellow, there was a long discussion of it. He’d been douched and pounded at for quite a while, and then Papa decided that the best way to do it was to go in there with a buttonhook and a pair of shears simultaneously and fish up the umbilical cord and cut it. And he did succeed in nicking it but not in cutting it. It evidently congealed in some fashion . . .

Male voice: Do we have to continue with this conversation? (laugh) Well, there’s nothing very bad about it. (laughs) Okay. Come up to present time.

Second male voice: Should I mark it down in his book?

Somebody put it down in his case book. Go ahead, Ray, put it down.

Male voice: Would that be an acceptable abortion if he had cut it?

Probably.

Now, when you get into the various types of somatic which can be received, just to review it quickly, the basic area and well up into the embryo is almost always allover somatics. In the basic area they’re always allover somatics, pretty well.

Male voice: Intensity?

Hm? The intensity is quite severe, the organism’s quite tender in the early periods there. Now, as one goes later up the track you start to find selective injuries, injuries various ways.

Now, one case that I recall very well is almost common in AA cases, where the fetus has been thrust with a hat pin. Pretty well developed, around three months, four months and thrust with a hat pin which goes through the back of the head and down through the brain, out through the throat and into the leg, seven, eight thrusts of this character, you see, piercing more or less this same area each time. Now, fortunately the fetus doesn’t have to depend upon its own regulation of the organism in order to survive. So vital areas of it can be touched. One coronary illness that was encountered had been caused by the heart having been just brushed by some instrument of some sort. You’ll find all combinations of instruments and somatics and everything else in AA. But if you’re hitting an AA and you believe that this is now basic area and you’re hitting this AA, you’ll be wrong. Because the AA must have taken place after they knew the baby was there. And furthermore the baby would have to be big enough in order to be touched by anything. Otherwise it would merely be bruised slightly, just touched, nudged aside.

Male voice: Sometimes a patient hasn’t got any head.

What’s that?

Male voice: I remember Saturday night, the guy said, “I haven t got any head” in that AA.

Yeah, that’s right. He’s talking about the thing. That could be very early. What he’s got there is the illusion of the trunk. The head is actually at some stage there just an extension of the trunk. You look this over in embryology texts and you get a much better idea of what’s going on, much better.

There’s no certainty that an AA is going to succeed. Even doctors will tell you that. And it is quite common knowledge in the field of medicine that a woman ordinarily can be counted on to become frantic and tamper with herself to some degree. Now, the number of ways she can tamper with herself are limited only by her own inventiveness. The unfortunate part of it is that every time she tampers with the embryo or fetus, she makes herself sick! So on top of the engram, then becomes this sickness proposition. And the whole chain makes a very nasty setup, from a standpoint of engraphy.

No limits are evidently discoverable on the ability of the fetus to heal itself. But I’ve run across a few where scissors, long surgical scissors, were used. And I imagine that if the cut of them had been just a little bit more efficient that would have been the end of it. But they didn’t quite make the grade. It’s an astonishing thing that the damage—and you’ll be astonished by the amount of damage which you will encounter from time to time and from which a patient has gotten well.

Male voice: Where there actually was a division into two parts, though . . .

I never recovered an engram where there was a division into two parts. I have recovered them where there was a limb nearly severed or something of this type.

This is all seemingly rather gruesome but if American womanhood would just find it a little more gruesome than they do currently, why, we wouldn’t be troubled quite as much.

Another thing about attempted abortion, if one person has a dramatization or a fear and attempts it once, you can count on it being attempted again. I haven’t yet run across a single attempt in a whole case, except one case that had a professional attempt and the professional was legal. And they just didn’t do a good job.

The baby was supposed to be taken because the mother had high blood pressure and the baby lived through it. It gave the person the most fantastic manic in the world, by the way. Because immediately afterwards when everybody was standing around commenting—the next day nothing had happened, the baby was evidently still alive. And everyone was standing around saying, “My God, the baby must be made out of cast iron. Boy, what a survival there. Boy, how strong that kid must be” and so on. And one of them said, “The infant triumphant” and so on. So that we get up to the birth engram—and this case manifested this strange thing—we got up to the birth engram, “Now, how do you feel as you’re coming out there?” “I feel powerful, I feel able to lick the world” and so forth. Still talking out of this holder back in the prenatal area.

An AA case is vicious, too, to the extent that ordinarily older people will be standing around or doctors who don’t like the idea of a child being killed. And the recording there is extremely interesting in that the child agrees with the fact that it shouldn’t be killed. And this makes a very strong, sturdy ally computation. Very strong. [gap] You will find in the book a list of chains taken out of one case— always willing to expand the number of chains that can be found in the prenatal area. But that list happens to be roughly representative, that was why it was chosen. There’s one that could be added to that. There are two that could be added to that. It’s the non-coitus chain that the boys have been talking about lately which is, “Get away, leave me alone, I don’t want it,” on the part of Mama or Papa. I discovered one of these one time on Papa, “Don’t bother me” and so on. And Mama was a bit on the side of a nympho. And the other is the enema chain. It actually belongs on the bowel chain but it’s a special kind of bowel chain because the heat and so forth of the enema can be transmitted through.

In all these prenatal engrams you’ll find a consistency, and that actually carries through all engrams. There is a consistency of dramatization on the part of Mama and Papa. This helps us rather than otherwise. If an aberree dramatizes something once, they’ll do it again. That’s the working rule. If Papa got angry and beat up Mama once, the possibilities are strongly in favor of his having done it twice, even though the engram may conclude with his promises never to do it again and even though the wife may be saying, “You’ve never done this to me before.” Now, that’s just her dramatization—”You’ve never been like this before. You’ve never done this to me before. Oh, what has changed you?” And yet you go back five days and here’s another beat up. And she’s saying, “You never did this to me before, what has changed you?” She’s just playing off a record.

Another thing you will discover in watching—this now is edging up into contagion of aberration—the aberrations of the parents become, by contagion, part of the aberrative pattern of the child. He may handle them in entirely different ways. He may have such genetic strength that he does not dramatize them. Various things can occur there. And the pattern of course gets altered by extraneous conversation to the dramatizations. But nevertheless the patterns are constant in the parents and they can be found.

The one thing which changes the pattern of the parents is the fact that one, by cruelty to the other, transplants, by contagion, the aberrations of one into the other. So we get somebody who is, at twenty years of age, a manic-depressive, rather clear-cut manic-depressive, and getting along fairly well and they marry a paranoiac. This person marries this paranoiac, and the paranoiac is also madly jealous and so on. And at the age of thirty we find the original manic-depressive now with a new overlaid manifestation of paranoia, which rather complicates the picture.

You will discover this when you discover a first child early in a marriage. You can actually check up on the engrams as they run up the bank in the prenatal area. And you can find first Papa being mean to Mama, let us say, Mama being rather nice. First thing you know, Mama is using some of Papa’s phrases. And then Mama is worrying about the engrams that Papa has implanted in her. For instance, one of his dramatizations is, “You never know anything. You’ve got no mind of your own at all.” And let a few weeks pass by after some of these tirades and so on and Mama will start going around saying, “I’m so worried, I don’t have any mind of my own.” Now she has taken in and doesn’t recognize the source of his beating. So that we get a complex pattern in the prenatal area in the child, very complex. Because whatever Papa says may be echoed afterwards by Mama.

Male voice: Particularly if she married a pseudoally.

Yeah, something like that. Papa beats her and then she begins to reutter what he says. Or Mama is very cruel to him and gets him very confused and the first thing you know, he’s liable to start coming forward worrying about his state of mind.

Well, worrying about the state of mind has another subdivision in that each does not only worry about his own state of mind, but after particularly an A A chain (and it doesn’t even have to be an AA chain), they start worrying about the child being feebleminded, moron, something of the sort. So we have all of this thing compounded into a superworry about the intellect, or a superworry about conduct. And it’s one of these tight spirals. First Papa has this dramatization, then Mama’s beginning to manifest his dramatization, then Papa’s beginning to pick up parts of Mama’s dramatizations and then both of them are impinging their own into the child. And you get this picture which, when they’re worried about the genetic or the AA aspect of the child, places in the child a superconcentrated worry about his mind, about himself, about his physique, about his abilities, so on. This is rather a pitiful thing to examine, when you get into one of these that’s really bad, very bad. And yet the person may be apparently quite normal, he’s got this stuff pretty well in hand.

This is one of the reasons why, when you enter the case of a child of eight, nine years of age and begin to discover a lot of this cross-aberrative side effects, when you begin to recover this material you can understand that a child of eight or nine would be absolutely incapable of experiencing a successful therapy. They simply do not have enough push to get into the stuff in the bank.

That’s part of the point we’re making here is that the amount of material that you will find in the bank is enormous, ordinarily enormous. That is given to you here so that you will never get optimistic about having discovered one engram which now resolves the whole case. You’ll have somebody coming to you say, “I have an engram.” Oh, yeah? (laugh) Male voice: What is it?

Yeah, what is your engram? The case can be crammed with material. And the only place to start it is at the beginning. Because it’s crammed with material it is a waste of time to look for a specific injury, a specific psychosomatic illness or a specific aberration, if you’re really going out to clear the case. Just get back into the earliest moment that you can get in that case and reduce the engram, get earlier and erase.

Male voice: Unless he’s stuck in an incident Well, that’s in case entrance. You make sure of it in case entrance and as the case runs, that he doesn’t get stuck on the track.

Male voice: Ron, once you get the basic area somewhat cleared out, you say that that speeds up the case very much.

Oh, yes. You break basic-basic and the case looks one way one day and the next day it looks entirely different.

That is the real change in the case.

Male voice: Do you run into cases where you break basic-basic and things go along humming for a while and then seem to bog down again?

Yeah.

Male voice: What would be the major cause of . . .?

New basic on a new chain or new painful emotion that’s shown up or the auditor hasn’t been on the ball on keeping a person free on the track. And you started to pile up the case in one spot.

I hope I’ve given you a rather rapid, comprehensive review of some of the manifestations that you’ll encounter in cases. I’d like to have any questions that you might have to ask on the subject.

Male voice: This is not a question. The other night Don was saying something very interesting he said sometimes going down the track you keep hitting one incident over and over again, and it might look innocent as hell but many times you can use it as a handle for crashing into the bank It’s very interesting that the reactive mind will occasionally leak with a little information on the track so that well, one case in particular, we kept running across Mama patting herself gently on the stomach saying, “Well, here I am pregnant, I wonder how it would feel to have a baby” The person didn’t have sonic, they just had this impression-recovered this incident every once in a while. But after a few days of handling that incident, it all of a sudden turned into Mama beating herself savagely in the stomach, saying, “Goddamn it, I’ve got to get rid of this kid.” What he was edging in toward there was that incident and because it was painful, getting a complete misinterpretation of it. And Mama in this same case was bumping herself gently against the sink, only she wasn’t bumping herself gently against the sink, she was slamming herself into the sink, slamming herself into table edges and so on. Just reviewed a case here yesterday of a girl—it’s a good diagnosis, by the way—a girl who was talking about, “Let’s take a look now at the living room of your mother and father’s place. And now what do we see?” “Oh, this furniture, the furniture with all the sharp corners, furniture with all the sharp corners.” Sure. You don’t evaluate it for her. We didn’t go back into prenatal area, but you know what was there.

Male voice: What about the case where you re first getting into it and it seems to let one significant thing after another slide out into something insignificant, maybe one prenatal that you get, maybe one phrase that baby’s the ruin. You wont get anything more and next thing you know, he’s seven years old, the next thing you know, he’s three years old, and then maybe fifteen . . .

Oh, you’re bouncing back and forth, back and forth. The auditor who’ll let a patient do this very long is doing him a great disservice, by the way. You can get everything in the case stirred up after a while. Some cases have basic area computation that “you have to run away from everything” and “you have to get away from it” and “you can only go through this once” and “you can’t get caught.” And that is, incidentally, the most common thing is, “I just can’t be caught. I just can’t let myself be caught.” Well, this would be so horrible, this would be so dreadful, a person is so leery of being caught that you get the fact that he runs away from everything.

Male voice: I ran into a command today in this patient I was running, Ron, that is one that I hadn’t ever hit before. It was a—a mother was punishing an older child, saying, “I’m going to switch you good.” Mm-hm.

Male voice: Bing!

Yeah, that’s nice. Well, in the case computations, it’s very interesting to learn in any case whether or not—just bringing up that point there—whether or not there are any older children. If there are older children, those children are going to appear in the engram bank of the child’s prenatal area. And one case on record where there had been an older child who had died. And the child was then assigned the name of the child who had died. Of course, there’s a lot of conversation in the prenatal area about—in this case the name was Joe—Joe being dead. Joe was dead all the way through the prenatal area.

Male voice: I was running John last night, and his mother was talking—she wanted to go out for an evening and John senior didn’t want to go. So she said, “I’m going to make this place so uncomfortable for you that you won’t want to stay here.” And John was running about half a dozen somatics with it. So I asked him for the computation on it He says, “Well, I guess it’s a bouncer” [gap] Male voice: . . . asked him to kind of go over it a couple of times, you know, stressed it a little. He still didn’t figure out that was what was making him so uncomfortable. He was running oh, about half a dozen different somatics.

She’s probably said this a half a dozen different times. The case has probably got a grouper, too.

Male voice: Oh, yes, there s groupers.

Yeah. “We’re going to go together.” Male voice: There was a grouper earlier, “Everything happens at once.” Yeah, he told me about this and the grouper in the case was, “We have to go together, I don’t care where we go, even if we go to the police station . . .” Male voice: Yeah. “. . . we’re going to have to go together.” Yeah. Now, there are these various complicated computations that come in on these things. One of the most complicated ones which throws the time check off in a case is where Mama has some aberrated reason to keep Papa from knowing about her pregnancy. And one case, she was protesting clear on up to six months that he should not come in her. And she knew very well she was pregnant and she was AAing on the side like mad trying to get rid of this kid. And she was still telling Papa that he must not come in her and she’d just die if she found herself pregnant and so on. She was leading a completely dual life on it. And the content of the engram bank was very badly messed up.

Now, another case is where the parents had gotten married a couple of months after the child was conceived. You’ll quite ordinarily find efforts to get rid of the child have been unavailing and they have gotten married. You may find somebody around, some relative, her papa or his papa or something, who is insisting that the marriage take place. This gets very complicated because here the parents are married and setting up their home under very unhappy circumstances, quite ordinarily And you get all this as part of the engramic content. Well, it throws the time out. It throws the time way out and it also throws out the stories which the child has been told. So he can’t compare what he has been told with what actually was. You get all manner of things happen like this.

Another complication that you’ll discover in a case is the matter of running or a discharge. “Running,” “I’m running, I keep running” and “I have a heavy discharge,” things like this. Because after a woman becomes pregnant there is quite often a discharge. And if she has a guilty conscience she may assign this to venereal disease. And you get some of the most remarkable screaming worries on the fact of having gotten venereal disease, with fights between Mama and Papa as to who brought it into the home and so on. But it isn’t venereal disease at all, it’s just a discharge occasioned by pregnancy.

Male voice: What effect does syphilis have? Is that . . .

That wouldn’t be a discharge. Syphilis would be a sebaceous cyst.

Male voice: No, I mean, does it go on to the second generation or something. Is that engramic?

What, syphilis?

Male voice: No, the effect that syphilis in the parents has on the child.

Syphilis is contagious. Very, extremely so.

Male voice: If you re discussing complications, it might be interesting to mention here too what the effect of an engramic computation has on a person s life work and life interest Yes.

Male voice: The case yesterday of the airplane pilot who had in his basic area the command, “I’m no earthly good.” That was interesting Yes, quite a boy. And he owned a garage one time and failed. No earthly good.

There’s another aspect on this. You were just speaking about this running, that is to say, a person goes out of one thing into another thing and so on. Well, running means “to run, to run away.” And if you get a heavy charge in the basic area about venereal disease you get not only running, ordinarily, but you also get, “I’ve got to go away, I will just sink deeper and deeper in the social stratas of life,” something of the sort, “and I am ruined now and I will never be any good.” Now, this computation really adds up to a severe engram. And that, however, will occur about the—well, let’s say, well after the first missed period usually.

There is a little motto that goes behind all of these computations, is: The content of the engram is ordinarily the content of some aberree’s reactive bank exterior to the person. As a consequence, the data implanted in the engram bank shouldn’t be the last word about anything because of the error. The amount of error to which an aberree is subject implants itself as error. So you very often can’t tell where the engram is occurring because it says it’s occurring someplace else. Mama has forgotten that she has missed the period before and we get her talking about, UI didn’t get the curse this month” and so on. Well, she’s already two months pregnant. She’s just loopy enough so that she has skipped a period. I’ve run into this. That makes it very confusing.

There are many other things that make it equally confusing. So that the content of the engram should not be taken by the auditor as the last word, by a long ways. You’re not suspicious of the patient who is running the engram. What you are suspicious of is the aberree that gave it to him. Well, there is no reason why one should take what Mama said, either in present time talking to the child, or when the child was on its way, as being factual. They will concoct some of the most rugged lies, that the parents to each other—the mother may have large statements about Papa, all lies, that she gives to the girlfriend. “Oh, he treats me so mean, he beats me all the time, he comes home drunk every Saturday.” The poor guy’s never taken a drink in his life, that sort of thing. She wants somebody to feel sorry for her and so she’ll go on. And the bank gets filled up with erroneous data.

Now, the principal computation that will completely spin a case is when it contains secrecy on the subject of a lover. That is a nasty one, and I suppose always will be. Mama, “I don’t dare tell Papa, I don’t dare tell Joe about this because if I did he would kill me, he would absolutely kill me” and so on.

Male voice: In a case like that you don’t want Joe as an auditor, do you?

No. You’ve got this computation going where, “If he saw us, he would just die of shame, I know.” Or “He mustn’t see anything about this,” or something of the sort, vague stuff. “He mustn’t catch us here.” And we get a great apprehension then, all up and down the bank, about being found in any engram. In short, Mama’s lover can make a lot of complications. And Mama’s lover is sometimes an ally. And there you have a real one because the baby is now going to protect the ally.

None of these computations are easy, but all of them will surrender on a relentless attack. So, we have here various things which establish the point at which the engram was received and we establish also the circumstances under which it was received. We establish as well its aberrative effect upon the individual and if these things pretty well add up together we know we’re on a definite main line.

Because there’s a test for an engram, no matter what’s being said in that engram or anything else, to find out if it was valid. Was it aberrative? Did the person manifest any part of this engram? If you’re really suspicious of a person’s computation, try that.

Another one is to put him into it halfway, bring him up to present time. If it’s a real engram, you’ll know about it. Then take him back there again. For instance, in Joe’s case here, there was a very suspicious incident showed up, highly suspicious. Here we have hypnotism in the prenatal area, early part of the prenatal area, hypnotism whereby the young gentleman hypnotizes Mama and seduces her.

Now, we would say that this was straight out of True Confessions2 or something of the sort. It couldn’t be actual, such a thing, and he was saying all the time, “Well, this isn’t true,” and “This couldn’t be,” but I’d get him back into it, “Go to sleep, go to sleep.” He was doing nothing but sleep on it. Now we start running “Go to sleep” and we’d run into this hypnotism and his case was really stalled. So I ran him halfway through it one day and brought him up to present time. And we got reaction, but quick. And then in putting him back into the incident again, he ran it once and then was unwilling to run it again. And this is another test. A patient doesn’t want to run this thing again. Well, he ran it again, and after it was run a few times it pretty well deintensified and the case went on progressing.

Male voice: What’s the reaction in a case like that? Get the somatic partway through the engram and come back to present time?

Not only that, but you get a reaction from the aberrative content, too. What was your reaction when you came up to present time then?

Male voice: Utter confusion . . .

Mm-hm.

Male voice: Semiterror and the words, “You shouldn’t have done that” Mm-hm.

Male voice: Which probably also came out of the engram bank.

Well, here we have in any hypnotism, for instance—that’s an incredible incident and yet it happened to be actual. You see the test of its actuality. We haven’t got time to hunt up Mama and we wouldn’t in any event.

That would be a silly way of going about it. An excellent way of going about it is to test it, bring it up to present time. Do a minimum of that, by the way. But a hypnotic incident is another computation that is wonderful. It’s “Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep. Now your eyes are going to close, you won’t be able to open them. Now as you go to sleep, sinking into this deep, dreamless sleep, you can only hear the sound of my voice, only the sound of my voice. You will not be able to hear anything but the sound of my voice. Now you can only do what I tell you to do, only do what I tell you to do.” And we put in one of these nice demon circuits. And then it goes along and what happens, happens and at the end of it, “Now you’re going to forget, you’re going to forget everything I have said to you. You’re not going to know anything about it.” So that every time someone says, “Forget this,” all the way up the person’s life, he does.

The baby can accidentally get hypnotized by Papa just telling Mama to “go to sleep” in a quiet tone of voice. And later on somebody may try to hypnotize this person and it latches on to that early “go to sleep” business.

The computations that you’ll run into are unlimited. I’m just giving you some examples here, some ways and means of trying to validate them and wade through them. You find anybody who is very much on guard and who doesn’t like Papa, who is very fond of Mama but hates Papa violently, it isn’t because Mama said Papa was no good. Papa didn’t want that kid. Papa may have tried something about it. You’ll get a sly one where he walks up to Mama and all of a sudden hits her with all his—the force of his fist in the belly in order to produce a spontaneous miscarriage, things like this. [gap] Male voice: Sometimes running through an engram, you stir up a few others and get to pick up somatics from them. You can’t get engrams which may come out Now . . .

You’ll find that engrams do get tangled with each other. Male voice: I’ve heard that you can ask the person to leave his somatics behind when he comes to present time . . .

Mm-hm.

Male voice: . . . and that this will sometimes work Mm-hm. But when you’re trying to run one engram in which many other somatics seem to be occurring, by running one engram off of that you ordinarily get the others to drop out. And they will go back to their proper places.

Male voice: In other words, you . . .

You’re busting up a bundle.

Male voice: . . . you re trying to persuade the person to keep in that one incident Yes. Don’t let him get out of one of those now.

Male voice: Would that indicate a grouper, too, on it?

Well, that indicates a grouper. “We’ll go together.” But they can become mechanically tied up by—in every coitus incident Mama says, “I’m coming now.” And we get “I’m coming now” all across. So that “I’m coming now” stays more or less together. And as we try to run these things, it’s like running down the spokes of a wheel. In the center of the wheel we find “I’m coming now.” But running one of them will pretty well straighten out the whole bundle. But stay on one. Don’t go into a case and grab an engram here and an engram there and an engram someplace else, and get tired of that one and race off elsewhere without reducing anything. Because that case is going to seal up on you sooner or later.

Male voice: How long should you stay on one where you just get, say, one phrase or two phrases and you can’t keep at it for fifteen minutes or a half-hour? And you can’t get anything else? Well, what’s the matter there? I’ll leave that to somebody else to answer. What should you do? What should you do?

Male voice: Go to the earliest There’s another use of repeater technique. Repeat that thing back earlier in the bank and find the first time it occurred.

Now, I want to tell you today about another subject, which is stripping an engram, stripping the thing off phrase by phrase. Let us say we have a nitrous oxide. This nitrous oxide is a long incident. It is very engraphic. It has a very bad effect upon the mind in that it picks up the whole mind, the whole reactive mind you might say, selectively, and grabs it up and pulls it into the nitrous oxide. We try to run this case and we try to run it and we try to run it and just nothing is happening. This person has been in and out of this nitrous oxide for years. He hasn’t been able to touch any part of it. He doesn’t know he’s there. We eventually discover this incident.

Now, the second we discover the incident we get a bad problem on our hands. The person wasn’t conscious. This could happen with any kind of an incident, late-life painful incident where he is unconscious and in physical pain. It’s a bad situation because we start to run into the beginning of it and we can restimulate it and we can make the person extremely uncomfortable. So one has to be pretty well convinced that he has to go into one of these things before he starts it. Because this is a special technique, takes a long time. But it is effective. It is better to leave alone unconsciousness in late life unless you absolutely have to tackle it. If the case will run without those areas being tapped, that’s wonderful, that’s good. But if those areas are occluding the earlier bank—and you can tell that fast enough—then tackle them.

You tackle one of those engrams in this fashion. You get as far into it as you can at the beginning. You run as much of it as you can at the beginning. You will find that you will get several phrases, let us say, at the beginning of it. Now, let’s take phrase number one. It’s a cinch that that has appeared earlier in the engram bank. You take phrase number one and start running it back. You run it all the way to the bottom. And having reached that point, you run out the whole engram you find there.

Male voice: Deintensify all the way down, or just straight down?

Just as straight down as you can go. Each time you hit that phrase as you go down the bank, each time you hit that phrase just test it about three times to see whether or not it’s loose, and then go earlier and earlier and earlier and earlier until you pick that thing up the first time it appears.

Now, having picked it up the earliest moment that you can pick it up, run the whole engram in which you find it. Theoretically you should be coming down toward the basic area, if this thing wouldn’t release earlier. So you run the whole engram in which you find it. Now, as you run that whole engram in which you find it, you’re going to find that there are two or three phrases in that engram that probably won’t release. You run those as early as you can get them. And when you find one of them that will release very early, you run that whole engram. You follow me? You run that whole engram, reduce it, but pick the phrase in it which won’t reduce and run early on that phrase until we get the first engram (we think) in which that phrase appears. If you do this thoroughly and systematically (and you have luck) you’ll find basic-basic on the case. But, having done all this now, you start back up the line and you erase as much as you can get your hands on, on the way up the case. You see what I mean?

Male voice: This is a process of a week’s worth of. . .

Yeah well, you can get well down on one of these things in a couple of hours, actually, if you’re working at it. But this is going to take weeks, this whole thing. But you’re actually practically resolving the whole case. Now, you get as much data as you can get on this now—that you’ve scared loose, and you erase as much as you can, reduce as much as you can. And now take the second phrase in the late incident you’re working, phrase number two. Now you run it all the way down, you run it all the way down. All the time you’re doing this, by the way, you get the person down into the basic area, you can throw him into his own valence and get the whole thing with all perceptics, the whole engram that you’re going for, early there. That case is starting to resolve. It will resolve fairly rapidly unless it has enormous computational difficulties, like Mama’s lover or some of the other things. So we get down into the early part of the case, we erase. Then we take another phrase out of the late one, and we take it down in these various steps and stages and we erase it. Do you follow me?

In the meantime this late one is getting more and more material missing out of it. You’ll come along this late one and you’ll find out that you’re skipping ten minutes here and fifteen minutes there but you’re not aware of the fact that you are skipping them, really. It appears to be consecutive, but the stuff’s buried. So you have to keep running it from the beginning each time. But don’t run it deeper than you have to. Don’t restimulate it more than you have to. Because the somatic on that thing is going to hang up the case . . .

Male voice: Let it get up to the first new phrase, come through a groove right down the line.

Yes.

Male voice: What happens, Ron, if somebody gets hold of one of those cases and runs through the thing with late unconsciousness. Is the person going to be very sick?

Well, no, it’s long and arduous and relatively unproductive. But they can be ground down to a point where they’re ground to recession. They aren’t reduced and they aren’t erased, they’re just ground to recession.

Male voice: But that should open up the case too.

Yeah, that would open the case too but, boy, that would be a tough one.

Male voice: That brings up another point. In these cases where you do get restimulation like that, how long is that likely to last before it . . . ?

As long as you’re fooling with it.

Male voice: Well, I mean . . .

If you don’t go into this case with narcosynthesis, you don’t go into it with amnesia trance hypnotism, you can tackle these things and they’ll settle out in a few days. But as long as you’re fooling with that case, as long as you’re running it, as long as you’re clipping this thing, it’ll stay in a restimulated state. And that, however, should not bar you from going right on with it.

Male voice: I was running a pc the other day through a tonsillectomy at about six and instead of letting him go down earlier—he kept wanting to all the time—he d get something and go prenatal Well, it was getting a little late and I knew I didn’t have time to run a bunch of that stuff so I’d pull him back up and keep him going Mm-hm.

Male voice: And I ran the tonsillectomy pretty well out so that he’d get out of it. It was after I’d been through there.

That’s a perfectly valid technique, perfectly valid. This other one I’m trying to give you is a case where the incident has bundled up the track to such a degree that you can’t do much with the case. The technique, then, is to strip it off, phrase at a time. But you can go all the way through an incident and deintensify the incident, get it into recall and so forth, that’s fine. But you go through that tonsillectomy next time, however, let three, four days go by, if you go through that tonsillectomy again you’ll find out that the incident has sagged.

Male voice: Mm-hm.

Now, you keep picking that incident up. Do it two or three times.

Male voice: He has been in it for about three or four years now.

All right. Take a tonsillectomy like that, or take birth if you want to. If birth is lying there wide open and accessible, if you can actually get birth, you can run the thing out. But for heaven’s sakes run it out. Don’t just tamper with it and go off someplace.

Male voice: I got birth with a girl about a week after I started. It came up without asking for it.

Yeah.

Male voice: And it reduced nicely.

Yeah. There’s another technique you can follow on this, by the way, if you really want to get rid of birth. Let’s say somebody has asthma. And you figure out that asthma comes from birth. And what you want to do is to get rid of birth in order to make his asthma easier. Just start grinding birth, if it’s accessible. It may not be. It may be out of view.

Male voice: Is it the birth itself?

Second male voice: If it is chronic asthma it more likely would be.

Yeah.

Second male voice: I have a cousin who has very chronic asthma.

Well, if the state of his birth is such as to admit an easy entrance to it, get it as early as you can get it and just start recounting it, grind it out. When you’ve ground it out to a nub practically, bring the person up to present time from it and have him recount it again. And have him see if he can pick up any of the perceptics or anything else up in present time. Then take him down to the birth area again and see if there’s anything left down there. And then bring him up to a pleasure moment and bring him up to present time. And quite often, not invariably, but quite often you will find that birth will stay stable and out of the case. And very often it’s very good to do this to birth, because it opens up the whole case. Birth may be the engram that you may have to strip or something. I’ve been in and out of birth in some cases where just a phrase would be presenting itself. And the person would be quite happy to have that phrase or that little consecutive comment gone.

Male voice: This was right after I read the book, before I’d even come over here or anything. This girl came in with a chronic headache, very bad headache. She came in there. And all I did was say, “Go back to the first time you had that headache and boom, we were at birth. And so it ran out fairly easily.

Sure.

Male voice: Took me about two hours and a half to do it.

Yeah. And the next thing that should have been done to that, you should actually have brought the incident up to present time. Don’t tell them to bring the incident up to present time, just tell them to come up to present time. “Now, let’s start in at the beginning of birth again in present time. And now let’s go over it in present time,” and you’ll find out that they’ll still contact some of the somatics, sometimes. And if they can, you really flatten it. [gap] Male voice: And when you find, at least the birth engram—I’ve been avoiding the birth engram because I’ve been getting that . . .

Well, you can—by the way, as far as I know, a real, honest-to-God, full-blown migraine doesn’t come from birth. Those that I have found that are really savage were high blood pressure. Now, this could still be definitely wrong. There are many varieties of migraine headaches, but the one which really lays the person out I have found stemming from high blood pressure. Birth will give a kind of headache. An AA, a thrust with a knitting needle through the skull, will also give a kind of migraine.

Male voice: How about taking with instruments?

Yes, yes, that will give—but that isn’t a real migraine. A real migraine just fills the whole body, overcharges the child with pressure to such a degree . . .

Male voice: Feels like your head’s going to split right open.

Yes, and it’s interesting to note that when you have run one of these migraines, as you’re running it—it’ll be in the prenatal area—as you’re running the thing, the person will suddenly notice after a little attention’s off of it that he hurts all over his body. He hurts all through himself. But hitherto his head has hurt so bad, he’s been in such bad shape with regard to his head that he never noticed the rest of him. But as you deintensify it, why, he’ll find it out fast.

Let me make this statement. It’s perfectly valid to tackle any engram anywhere whenever that engram presents itself rather easily. But you make trouble for yourself when you go off searching for engrams that you say, “Well, this person has a pain in the abdomen. Let’s see, oh, you had an appendectomy. Well, let’s go back to the appendectomy.” That appendectomy isn’t accessible at that point. And you can tangle yourself up most horribly by trying to reach it and run it and slug through it and so on. But if you say, “Now the file clerk will give me the reason why we have this pain in the stomach,” if the file clerk turns up the appendectomy, run it. But leave it on the choice of the person.

Like the two cases I had not very many days ago where both people, husband and wife, were stuck at birth. Both cases. And there was nothing you could do in either case but to run out birth in both cases. I did not run it out on the wife. It got rebalanced, by the way, in about three, four days. She was quite ill you know, headache and sniffles and so forth for about three days. I thought the husband would run it out but he didn’t. And then she has settled down to having an occasional headache. She’ll have a headache a couple of times a day now. But gee, the birth is just lying there waiting. All he’s got to do is tell her to close her eyes, “The somatic strip will go to the first part of birth, now let’s roll it,” And yappity-yappity-yappity-yappity-yap, he’ll get rid of the incident. Because it’s right there waiting. It’s the key incident of the case. [gap] You can’t guarantee at any time an invariable behavior along these technique lines in the reactive mind. Because some of the stuff is filed on top and some of it’s filed on the bottom and there’s some stuff in the case which is repressed by painful emotion but other stuff isn’t. In other words, it’s a bad filing system that we’re going toward. If it were a good, smooth, easy filing system, there’d be nothing to Dianetics. You’d just take the person back to the first moment of pain or unconsciousness, recount it out, erase it, take the next moment of pain or unconsciousness, erase that one, keep right on going, right on up the case. Bring him up to present time, then take him back to the beginning of the case again and catch everything that may have sprung free that was wound up in the later incidents. And the case would be Clear. That would be all there is to it. It’s not that simple.

It requires a lot of judgment on the part of an auditor. We’re looking right now for a drug or something which will pretty well straighten out the reactive mind so its filing system is straight so the analytical mind can contact it more easily. That drug all by itself would cut a case down to about seventy-five hours to Clear.

Okay, are there any more questions?

Male voice: I have one, Ron. I had a patient running a prenatal incident without somatics. Is there any sure way you could tell whether he’s in another valence or he is hanging up?

Running a prenatal incident without somatics. What position is he holding?

Male voice: Lying, lying Flat out? He’s in another valence. And he has a pain shut-off, probably.

Male voice: Can you be sure if he is in his own valence hell at least be connected to . . .

If he’s in his own valence? He’ll at least be curled up.

Male voice: But when I asked him to go into his own valence, he didn’t He didn’t curl up.

Now, if you take a junior case and you say, “Go into your own valence,” this is very confusing because his valence is Papa’s valence. And he gets all snarled up on that. Now, the trouble with that case would be that you wouldn’t probably have the patient early enough on the track.

Male voice: He can’t go earlier.

Yeah, that’s what he says.

Male voice: Why is it so—in the case then, when you have a father and a lover and a child all of the same name . . . [gap] . . . right after birth, and it says, “This is a secret, don’t tell anybody. I’ll die if you do. . .” Right after conception?

Male voice: Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That would be a fine case. You’ll discover various kinds of computations and so forth by taking a patient and just diagnosing the hell out of him. Just asking him questions, trying to open up his memory, trying to get data of various kinds, you’ll discover all sorts of things. Like for instance the other night, trying to get a diagnosis on Betty, it finally turns up that the one thing that she can’t do is answer a question. She can repeat what you say, but as far as answering a question, that’s impossible. All right, there’s an engram, she’s in somebody else’s valence and so on. Now, you come up the other day here—last night—and you say, “You ought to hear her mother, ‘I hate men, I hate men,’” and so on. Well, heck, I spotted the case as being hard to run for a man. A male auditor would have trouble in that particular case. A woman auditor would have a tendency to throw her over into her father’s valence, and he’s the one that’s asking questions. So your diagnosis will show up the computation and so forth, in that fashion.

The gentleman the other day who, “Say just what you were told to say and don’t say anything else,” great words. All right, just a straight diagnostic run on a little memory and a little bit of return and so on, finally turns up the fact that Papa’s a businessman.

In other words, you can spend time on diagnosis, you can look the case over pretty carefully and get a pretty good idea of what it’s all about, whose valence he’s in and what languages the basic area is in, what recent incidents might have triggered the case and you can do all sorts of things. But you should take every precaution to run a case as close to sonic with everything turned on as possible. And you can save yourself a lot of time in the progress of a case, by taking time at the beginning of the case to make sure that you’ve done everything that you possibly can. Such as returning him to pleasure moments; if this doesn’t work, find why he can’t go to pleasure moments. Try to take him into the basic area just with main strength and awkwardness. Try to get him there and throw him into his own valence, see if he can run stuff out there. If you can’t do that, find what late incident’s got the whole track all balled up. Try to tackle that incident. Keep searching. But you’re searching for an entrance to the case.

Male voice: There s also the question of working the analytical mind fairly regularly also.

Yes. One noteworthy case on this memory business should be remarked here as part of not only diagnostic technique but something which, about the center of the case, will quite often speed up its final resolution. A person has a tendency to begin to rely on return rather than memory, particularly if this person’s running nonsonic or something of the sort. And they have built up already all manner of bypass circuits which reach data in the standard bank without remembering directly. So asking such a case to remember sometimes clips out some of the circuits that are there. Halfway through the case you have perhaps a dependency, by this time, on returning. Well, he returns to get the information. That isn’t the kind of recollection this man’s going to use straight through. There are still extraneous circuits all over the place and you can actually blast some of those circuits out very gently merely by asking him to remember.

Up to this time he has had, let us say, a tiger parked back of a curtain. He knew damn well that tiger was back of that curtain. Well, you’ve gone down the track and you’ve picked up the engram which was the tiger and now there’s no tiger there but the curtain’s still there. And to persuade the guy to remember this particular area of his life, he thinks at first you’re asking him to tackle a tiger head on. And he will remember and all of a sudden the curtain will vanish. And you could set it up for a patient halfway through therapy just to, “Let’s see how much we can remember. Stay in present time and remember.” And you’ll find out that the first part of the case he can never remember a single face or a single person anyplace. Just urge him a little bit. Ask him to remember this person and that person and another person. And start building it back, building it back. First thing you know, you’ve got your standard bank straight memory circuits going well. And, that is the fastest way I know of to get occluded areas back into view again. You’ve taken the . . .

Male voice: We’ve already put in several hours on that Oh, sure. But he could do a lot of this himself; just ask him to go around remembering things.

Male voice: Yeah. And you’ll get a lot of success on it. Particularly one of these cases which has run without any sense of reality. You could spot, finally, the computation why he has no sense of reality. Now you can ask him to remember the reason he can’t remember. You can ask him to remember the reason his data is invalid and so on. Keep insisting on it. Help him out. Suggest things for him to remember. Because when he gets things into memory they are valid and real to him and more and more of his life’s getting this way.

I first came across this technique when I was running a patient in amnesia trance exclusively, out in Los Angeles. I was running this patient in amnesia trance, and he had finally gotten to a point where he was entirely occluded. He had started out, he was bad enough, but now he was really bad. I’d never fed him any data back, he had no recollection of anything he had run. Because it had been run in amnesia trance and I never told him he could remember it or urged it on him in any way. He had lost just remembering. It’d be silly to tell a person that he could remember, because you’re going up against a negative command.

About three-quarters of the way through his case he was apparently one of the most loused-up individuals imaginable. This is why we don’t use amnesia trance unless we absolutely have to. It’s not an optimum method of doing therapy. It’s slow and so on.

Well anyway, he was about three-quarters of the way through. I sat down with him and started him remembering. And if you’ve ever seen anyone approaching a pool of water they believe to be ice cold and first in goes the tip of the big toe, tentatively. And then finally they get all five toes in, and then the foot and then the leg and then the first thing you know, they’re swimming. [gap] . . . I wasn’t going to tell him anything. I set it up on the basis of the fact that he absolutely had to remember this material, just kept him in present time and kept handling him. And the first thing you know, why, his whole life started to come clear. His sense of reality had gotten very bad by the way. So it’s a good therapeutic measure. After all, there was a past school of mental treatment which did nothing but this and in 20 percent of the cases, something like that, they produced a slight alleviation, just by doing nothing but remembering. Of course occasionally they would go off the rim of it a little bit and the next thing you know, they would have spun the person out of the depression state into the manic end of the state or turned on a psychosis or something of the sort. But just by the process of remembering they were able to achieve therapeutic results.

Now, when you’re dealing with Dianetics remember that you’re dealing with not a specialized slot of activity, you’re dealing with anything and everything that has ever proven effective on the treatment of the human mind. And its researches are good and advantageous only when it is recognized that anything can be part of the problem, anything. A medicine drum3 is highly effective on a psychotic. We’re working here with precision axioms and so on, and you will be surprised how far those things will go out and how much therapy they still have to show There will, before the next five years are out—it’s a hard thing to picture this therapy even a year hence. Because about every sixty days its breadth is widened. Then there’s more, there’s more pieces. And more and more people are thinking about this. And more people think about it, more people handle it, more people get ideas, the clearer it gets, the easier it gets and so on. A doctor that was in training here with us is going into the navy. He’s interested in biochemistry. He’s awfully interested in the one-shot Clear. Well, he’s got all the naval research program back of him on such a thing. It’s going to turn out all over the country now.

Okay. If there are no other questions, let’s adjourn.