Handling Chronic Somatics Stuck Cases (501127)
Date: 27 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
This series exactly parallels the Standard Procedure which is in the bulletin.
Standard Procedure, of course, as written in the book, is taking an inventory. Now, you have already seen, this last week, that there is a point of accessibility which has to be established. Actually, addressing a new preclear, the thing to do is to try to take an inventory, and depending on what kind of an inventory you get, starting in at that point on the Accessibility Chart which is indicated by your findings on the inventory or your findings in the first few moments of reverie. In other words, actually this Accessibility Chart would belong right above Step Two. In any event, you try to get an inventory. But as you start working with the preclear you find where he spots on this Accessibility Chart and then you know what you do next.
Of course, the first thing you do is to establish his position by finding out what his probable sense of reality is, by observing his ability to receive communication from you and for you to receive communication from him. You would be amazed at the considerable ease of communication which is possible between a person who is not aberrated and a relatively unaberrated auditor. The person, for instance, who has a hard time with what you have just said, a person who says—you say, “Now, did your mother ever call you ‘Dear’?” and they say, “What did you say about my mother drinking beer?” This is not necessarily an indication of deafness. This is a person, perhaps, who hobson-jobsons all of his words into something else; the person who doesn’t get a joke easily, these various things. An estimate of his ability to communicate. Further, an estimate of his ability to tell the truth and, in addition to that, an estimate of his general reality. It’s an interesting thing that these estimates, as rough as they may be, can place your preclear on the Accessibility Chart, If a person is unable to communicate with you easily, well, smoothly, you had better look for communication interruptions; straightwire, find out what they are. If he is unable to communicate with you, you might say, with perfect visual, perfect hearing and so on, you had better look for communication interruptions in his case.
Actually, if a person’s engrams have expressed themselves in terms of physiological defect, they might be said to less seriously have expressed themselves in terms of aberration, mental aberration. The person who is expressing it in terms of a physiological defect is fighting back, actually, against an engram; he’s not obeying an engram as well as he might be. If he obeyed the engram perfectly, for instance, that had to do with sight, why—that is, mentally and so on—his actual eyesight would probably be all right but mentally he wouldn’t be able to perceive what he’s supposed to perceive. Anybody, for instance, who is wearing glasses is fighting back an engram that says, “I can’t see,” And the glasses say, “Well, I’ll be damned if this is true, I can too see!” And the fight takes place there and the engram says, “You can’t see,” and the fellow says, “Well, I can see, and I’m . . .” And it’s pretty blurry so he hangs glasses on his nose and he says, “See, I can see.” For a little while he’s all right and then the engram cuts in a little bit tougher and it says, “You see, I said you couldn’t see,” And the eyes deteriorate.
The ophthalmologist can tell you all about how an eye normally deteriorates because of the neurological decay and deterioration attendant to the stress of modern living and automobile horns or something. That’s a lot of bunk. What actually takes place is that the engram that is saying “You can’t see” wins a little bit again and then the person gets thicker lenses; and for a while, 20/20 vision. And then after a while this engram says “Hmrrh!” cuts it out, and thicker glasses; for a while, 20/20 vision. That’s the way it goes.
You all know that eyesight goes into this so-called dwindling spiral, but I’m afraid that the neurological deterioration and decay of the optic nerve is something you will find only in books on structure and they’re all outmoded now. Anybody who wants to start picking up engrams about his eyesight, for instance, will find that his eyesight starts coming back and sometimes he’ll hit right into the center of what’s interrupting his eyesight and his eyesight will come back, bing.
A very startled psychiatrist, for instance, in the East, named Turner, had an auditor who let him get into an engram and didn’t pull him out of it. And this engram had to do with a knitting needle through the left eye, and the thing was in restimulation and for several days this psychiatrist went around with a deteriorating optic nerve. In fact it got so deteriorated that he went practically blind in this eye, and in addition to that it ulcerated. The eye ulcerated and suppurated and was in very, very serious condition. So much so that he stayed home from the office. And because the Director of Training in Elizabeth wanted to get a relative out of a sanitarium and needed the aid and assistance of the psychiatrist, he went over and worked him for about five hours. He found the rest of this engram and knocked out the chronic somatic there. And this psychiatrist always had a very weak left eye. In addition to that he evidently pulled up some engrams that had to do with communication breaks. They just said, simply, “Can’t see.” Here physiologically we had a reason why he couldn’t see —a knitting needle through the eye —and then in addition to that we had some engrams that said he couldn’t see.
Got the psychiatrist back up to present time again and his eye had been all bandaged up, and he took off the bandage and there was no ulcer and there was no suppuration. And the psychiatrist put on his glasses and couldn’t see through this lens and went into the bathroom and heated up the plastic and dropped the lens out of the thing and put his glasses on and then he could see. This eye was perfect. It had taken place that fast.
One of the strange things that happens is occasionally a wart or something will disappear without a scar. The fellow will have a wart on his hand or something like that and he’ll go into a little processing and two or three days later he’ll notice he has no wart. There’s no scar. Occasionally, in other words, the whole trouble is so thoroughly wrapped up in one engram that the erasure of that engram will permit the body to go into a terrific resurgence.
Now, the speed with which the body can heal is, as far as I’m concerned, a matter—lots of question about it. I’ve seen it react swiftly and I’ve seen it react rather slowly. What I’m getting at here is that—you come back to this, very much on the groove—is the thing which was suppressing the eyesight there, the thing which was making it deteriorate is he was still trying to see and the engram and the injury were saying, “You can’t see.” And it was this fight between “I” in trying to go on living, you might say, and the engram which said, “You can’t have this part of living,” which caused a physiological deterioration.
Those people who just—“I” hasn’t enough attention units left to say, “I want to go on living”—they don’t have any chronic somatics. This has been a matter of grave upset to some people in past schools of mental therapy because they would notice somebody’s neurosis suddenly express itself in terms of dermatitis, they would say. They saw the intimate connection between the neurosis and the dermatitis. And the neurosis would go away and up would come the dermatitis. And then they would get rid of the dermatitis but this fellow would develop sinusitis.
Actually, what they are doing, they’re more or less moving the person around on the track and breaking his dramatization. And they’d break his dramatization on one, you see, and it’d come back on another one. Fascinating business. A person, in other words, could have a dramatization broken on engram after engram after engram and show up with this chronic somatic and that chronic somatic and the other chronic somatic. It’s very, very fascinating.
Now, the main thing that you would look for would not be indicated by the chronic somatic which you see—the pair of glasses on the nose and so forth. Then you’re not looking for that specifically. To some slight degree you can straightwire that, but that isn’t the real one that you are looking for. The tough one will be the one which is not being fought. It’ll be in the field of thought and it will not be expressing itself physiologically. However, even a pair of glasses or a little bit of bad hearing, something like that, those things are things that you would be alert toward. But what you would be more alert toward is the person who consistently confuses words—let’s take the field of communication again—consistently mis-hears, consistently missees.
Let’s take somebody who walks into a room and is in the room for a moment or two and then whirls around suddenly and was just sure they saw somebody sitting in the chair. That’s a case of “ding-ding-ding, here comes the wagon” as far as sight is concerned. That says specifically, “You’re always seeing things,” and so on. A person who thinks somebody has just walked up behind him, for instance—he’s having a bad time with both communication and reality. A person who has difficulties of this nature, in other words, not your physiologically expressed difficulties, is the person to whom you would address, particularly, Straightwire on the field of communication. Now, communication is a very interesting subject.
The first thing, then, as you begin your scout for accessibility, would be to look over this communication situation and the rest of them: the general affinity this person has for people, and his sense of reality. And you’d probably test him out also by putting him into reverie. You’ll find enough cases which are just in beautiful shape to be run that you actually should put them into reverie, test them out. Save you racking your brains a lot on some of these cases. Then you’ll know about what the state of the case is, because you won’t know accurately until you get the person in reverie. There is nothing like a little attempt to run down the track to do a diagnosis for you.
Let’s send him back to yesterday, and he sits down there at the table eating a steak that he says he had yesterday, and—only there’s no steak and there’s no table and it was last week that he had steak all of a sudden. And you say, “Well, let’s go back to the time when you were a little boy.” And well, he’s a little boy all right, but there he is, he’s plastered on the ceiling and he’s watching this little boy down there, and he says he guesses it’s a little boy but he doesn’t know. And then you take him up to a time when Grandpa expired, and we find a little bit of chest motion but he says it never bothered him very much anyhow. And in short, as we review this case on the track, then we start to pick up very, very valuable data.
A person, for instance, who can’t move on the track at all has had robbed from him so many attention units that “I” is unable to boost itself back up to present time. Now, “I” normally should be able to boost itself back up to present time out of some very rough engrams. Sometimes the mechanism of the mind is just unable to quite make the grade by itself and the auditor merely says, “Come up to present time,” the person comes up to present time; maybe they’ve been riding back down the track for some time. There is that, but that is not general. The usual case is if a person is stuck on the track, you will have to go through the several mechanisms necessary to unstick him.
Now let me give you a very fast resume, right here, of how you unstick this person on the track. This one we’ll have to cover because when you tell a person to close his eyes and move someplace in time and he doesn’t go anyplace, you see, there’s two things wrong. There’s not one of two things wrong; immediately you know there’s two things wrong. “I,” his “I,” is pretty low on attention units, pretty low, for him to be stuck on the track at all. This man may, in life, be a complete powerhouse. But if he can be a complete powerhouse on the few attention units there, proportionately, that’s available to him, compared to those that should be available to him, why, this man will be a super-powerhouse as soon as you get him rolling along. That’s a fact. Just the simple aspect, just the simple mechanical action of unsticking him on the track will probably bump his IQ ten, fifteen, twenty points, just bing. Well have to take some psychometry to find out how much it does it on the average, but it’s very interesting how it does that.
Hell tell you, for instance, I’m stuck in present time.” Sure he’s stuck in “present time.” Present time has been at the age of fifteen years for an awful long time. Present time—only that’s not present time. Hell say, “Well, I’m stuck and I’m in present time.” Now, there are three or four methods of getting him free. You want to get him free in order to take him anyplace. And I will say that most book auditors bog down right here. They find somebody who doesn’t move on the time track, and—when they first read the book—and they say, “Well, you see, nothing can happen here. I—this book’s a lot of horsefeathers because actually nobody can move on the track. See, I can’t move and Betsy Ann here, she can’t move.” And one of the tough things for an auditor—the toughest thing that an auditor will face in terms of cases is a case which won’t move on the track. You get into some of these cases and boy, they’re really fixed on the track. And sometimes you get them unstuck in one place and they’ll latch up in another place and it’s just sort of playing billiards with them—out of one engram, into the other engram and so on and you still can’t get them moving on the track easily. Now, you’ll run into this sort of people and we’re not interested here in teaching you how to run easy cases. You can read the book and learn how to run easy cases. This stuck-on-the-track case is almost a normal affair.
Furthermore, as you process the person, somebody else—we won’t say that you would ever let the person get latched up on the track and not get him out of it, but it may happen that some other auditor comes along and sticks him on the track, and you’ve got the same problem all over again. This is the same problem: somebody is stuck on the track. So you make your first tests and we find out that the person is stuck on the track; or you pick up a case that’s been in run3 for some time, we find out the case is stuck on the track—same thing. Now, we want to know how to unstick the case.
Now, there is a definite and specific routine of unsticking this person. This is a one-two-three-four proposition. You don’t sit around in despair or wonder or work your imagination to death, because this is awfully easy. The first thing you do with this person is simply this: just tell him to come up to present time. That’s the first thing you do. If he doesn’t move—and 98 percent of them won’t, but remember that 2 percent will! We mustn’t overlook those. Can’t do anything with that, you say—next thing you do is you say, “Now, let’s go to a moment of pleasure,” and try to ease him into a moment of pleasure. You don’t care where this person is stuck on the track. It wouldn’t do you any good to know anyhow at this early stage of the case because normally he is stuck in late life. So we don’t have to know for this step where he’s stuck or what phrase is sticking him or anything. We don’t have to worry about that. All we do is tell this person (he’s in reverie), just tell this person to go to a pleasure moment—preferably get a moment of pleasure and triumph. When they beat up Mrs. Hogwollegar’s kid; when they were awarded the cup for making the best apron in social or household science class; when they were given—when the fellow, maybe he’s a writer, when he got his first check; when—anything possibly that might happen.
Incidentally, it’s very interesting to take people—how standard these pleasure moments are. You can practically lift yourself up to the role and position of a seer. You say, “Well, let’s go to the time that you were given this pet.” And the person sort of looks at you, “How did you know about that?” and so on. Well, it’s so—that’s an obvious one, very obvious. But everybody, they have more or less a standard run of experience. I’ve never met anybody yet, for instance, who didn’t have a moment of triumph sometime in school. I have met very few men who, as a boy, did not win at least one fight. If—by the way, I use that diagnostically—if this guy has never won a fight, oh-oh, this fellow’s in bad shape. That’s just one-two, just like that. You look at this fellow, you run him the rest of the way on the track, you find out he’s normally exteriorized and he’s in pretty bad shape. Because there’s something about little boys: they fight. And just by the law of averages, sooner or later, another little boy should have come along who got licked. If this never took place, it means many things. It means that Mama was a dominator, probably, or that Papa was, or that the boy was very sick when he was young which gave a lot of chance, you know, there, for a lot of ally engrams and which immediately spoke of a very serious prenatal bank, so on. But any vital, live boy will have won at least one fight. So you send them back to the fight and let them beat this kid up again.
Now, if you can reach one of these pleasure moments, whatever the pleasure moment was, you can possibly unstick the person on the track. Because what happens is the—one of the functions of the mind is to find pleasure for the organism, and when the mind starts to find pleasure for the organism it has a tendency to go away from pain. So the attention units are liable to come out of this engram which had him stuck on the track and you’ll get enough attention units into the pleasure moment so that you can then move him free on the track and bring him up to present time. And you always do that, by the way. You run them—if you run them into a pleasure moment and you’ve got them fairly well secure, then, in the pleasure moment, and you’ve pulled them to some degree out of a painful incident, you can do just that: bring them up to present time. And you should, at that time. Get them up to present time and stabilize them in present time. All right, that’s one trick.
Now, you understand that a person who is stuck on the track is using that for present time. So you can try to run them into a pleasure moment. If you fail to do that and fail to get them moving that way, you go to the next step. You really ought to make a list of these because they’re not written down anyplace.
The next step is to try to straightwire them out of it. Give them straight line memory. Oh, you can shift over from attempts to put them into a pleasure incident to straight line memory and back to putting them into a pleasure incident again and back to straight line memory without doing anything very fancy, because this person is stuck on the track. It doesn’t matter, you see. This person—if you get this person moving, why, then you can bring him up to present time. So you can alternate the two when a person is stuck that way. Without bringing them out of reverie or cancelling or anything else, you can put them into straight memory and into reverie and into straight memory. This is always true. It doesn’t matter how many times you shift.
You say, “Let’s go to this moment,” and they don’t go anyplace so you say, “Well, let’s remember something or other,” and then “Let’s do this” and then “Let’s remember that.” And just by trying to get them to remember various moments, locks of various kinds (communication, affinity, reality breaks, things like that) just shifting back and forth there from straight memory into reverie, straight memory, trying to get them to run something else—it’s sort of like putting them on stilts or something, this straight memory. It gives them an impetus. You can break a lock, maybe, and then give them a little impetus and it sort of pries them up to present time. So that’s the step that you use there. It’s a combination of trying to run pleasure moments and a combination of Straightwire into these affinity, reality, communication break locks. You get one to the other, you can generally free up enough attention units out of the place they’re stuck to get them up to present time.
All right, if that fails, we’ve got the next routine, which is a very simple routine. Person’s eyes are closed and you say—and by the way, let me put a caution right here: Don’t give this person a lot of holders to repeat. That is not a way to get them straightened up on the track. That is a way to get them further locked up on the track! Don’t give them just holders at random to repeat. That is gruesome because the person says—you say, “Well now, let’s see. What would you say a holder would be?” And the fellow’s just read the book, maybe, and he says, “Well, ‘stay here.’” And so you say, “All right, let’s go over that.” “Stay here, stay here, stay here, stay here, stay here, stay here.” “Couldn’t be anything there. Well, how about ‘hold still’?” “Hold still, hold still, hold still, hold still.” That’s engram two, engram three, engram four, engram five— now you’ve got him stuck on the track in eight places. Probability is that he was stuck on the track in several places to begin with, but you want to get him out of the main place on the track, and by giving him repeater technique you’re going to get him stuck in a lot more places on the track. So you just leave that repeater technique alone. But you can do this. It happens quite often that the file clerk, when a person is stuck on the track and so forth, is in very good working order. The file clerk is in good working order, you may even get the somatic strip to work. So what you do is just try to move the somatic strip through the engram in which they’re stuck, and up to a time when they were well and bring them up to present time. You just tell the somatic strip to go on through the rest of the way to the engram and go to the time they got well and then go to present time. Works, quite often.
Of course, almost any one of these things may find you working an engram with a call-back in it, and that’s very discouraging. You get the person up to present time and then this engram says, “Come here,” you see, and you give him an age flash a moment later and the person is right back there where he was before. You’re working a call-back. And take good note of this little technique just in passing, here. It’s not something that you should overlook: telling the somatic strip to go on through an engram and run the somatics in an engram. You can actually tell the somatic strip on almost anybody to go back to birth and run through birth and—without restimulating it particularly.
The somatic strip works very nicely. You would be amazed at how handily this somatic strip works. Because you cooperate with the file clerk and the file clerk cooperates with you and you order that somatic strip. You can order the somatic strip all over the track. You can tell the somatic strip to go to the twenty-first of August, nineteen hundred and forty-three, at two o’clock in the afternoon. Just tell it to. And then don’t say, “Are you there? Would you like to—I mean, do you think it’s gotten there yet? How—how do you know it is there?” Don’t do that to them. Just say, boom: “It’s the twenty-first of August, two o’clock in the afternoon. And now when I count from one to five, a visio will flash. One-two-three-four-five.” (snap) The fellow is there. It’s an interesting thing how one human being can put another human being all through the time scale, if he ever looked at it as such, particularly, if he’s working in Dianetics for a while. But the way it works and the preciseness with which it will work is wonderful. But if that somatic strip won’t move, then the person is really stuck hard. By telling the somatic strip to go through the rest of the engram and go to a time when the person got well—you can do this sometimes when you haven’t explained these things to the preclear, you can do this by just saying, “You will.” And he moves up to the time he got well. That’s a technique that you should know.
It has this additional side panel. Whenever you’ve run a person back into a childhood illness and you don’t know what the devil to do with it and you haven’t got time to monkey with it and you didn’t want to get there in the first place, it is often enough to run them up to a moment when they were fully recovered from that illness, two or three weeks after it took place, and stabilize them and settle them in that moment. It destimulates the illness which you have just ticked and so you can bring them on up to present time from that point.
Otherwise a situation may occur such as that which occurred up in Connecticut, where a fellow went out and he got a copy of the book and he went home and he said, “I wonder if this works.” He says, “Dear, lie down on the couch,” and his wife lay down on the couch. And he said, “Well, let’s go back to a time when you were really sick,” so she did and went back to a time when she had measles. And goodness, she remembered all about this and she looked at the room and so on. He said, “Isn’t this fascinating,” brought her up to present time and the next morning she had measles. The only trouble with the measles was that there was no respiratory disorder here; she just broke out all over with spots. So he took her down to the doctor and said to the doctor, “Now, what is this?” And the doctor said, “Well, obviously this is a case of measles but there is nothing wrong with the throat or nose.” So they puzzled a great deal over this, and they had a big conference and a consultation and they went at it with such efficiency and rapidity that of course the engram destimulated before they got anything done about it. And then they couldn’t do anything about it because the measles had gone. But I just give you an idea of what will happen. So what you do in a case like that, if you get into a measles or something of the sort, is bring the person up—sometimes you can bring them up hour by hour or day by day, up to a point where they’re well. And you get them up to a point they’re well and then run that moment thoroughly, really get them settled in that moment, then go to a pleasure moment later than that and run them in that and bring them up to present time, and no bad effects will happen. But this is exactly parallel to this fourth method I’m giving you of getting a person unstuck on the time track.
All right, so we do all this and this person is still beautifully stuck up on the track. And this is not the time to advise him to go blow his brains out. What you do then is really get down and start working. Now, the funny part of a stuck-on-the-track case is that a lot of them have, right at the exact moment they’re stuck, have a visio and a little sonic. Actual sonic is sometimes right at the exact place they’re stuck. Now, you start pushing this case all over the track and getting this restimu-lated and that restimulated and feeding them a lot of holders and so forth and repeaters, something like that, and getting the case all thoroughly stirred up—that thing is going to get covered up. But sometimes when a person is stuck precisely in one engram, there is a sonic on the holder. So you just ask them to listen and see if they hear anything. Simple. And ask them to take a look, “Do you see anything?” And they try there for a moment, and you’ve picked up their attention to it and they’re liable to give you a phrase. And if they give you this little phrase, “Stay here” or whatever it is, or, “I’ll be right back,” that’s fine. Run it! Very often take the tension off of it enough to move them out of the spot.
Matter of fact, I think, by the way, the bulk of people—just to give you the averages of how many times you’ll use what, here—I have only unstuck, I think, about five people off the track by telling them to listen. But they all got unstuck very rapidly. The rest of them heard nothing, saw nothing and so forth and it was a blank. But so you see the method does have some efficacity.
Now, if they get a little visio on the thing, that’s fine. They might be able to identify the place, and sometimes just by identifying the place it will restore enough attention unit and recollection to them so they’ll move out of the place right then.
Now, what I’m giving you here is just the degrees of solidness with which they’re stuck. These are tougher and tougher methods of getting them out.
This person, then, suddenly recognizes where he is; bring him up to present time. Got a little sonic on the thing, you had him repeat it a time or two, “Come on up to present time.” They’re unstuck off the track right then.
Let me give you a caution all through here. Don’t try to run a flock of physical pain engrams on this person any time they’re stuck on the track. The person won’t move on the track, don’t go try to get another engram; you’ve got an engram right there.
Now, sometimes—I mentioned a moment ago about the file clerk working. You’ll get a good working file clerk and a person is solidly stuck on the track, we get an age flash. Now, the way you give an age flash is a three-way affair. Most people who are stuck on the track have gotten a built-in circuit that gives back their age. This circuit will very often give itself away immediately after a birthday, and the person will keep giving his old age, whereas the file clerk would never do that. A person who consistently, for instance, dates his checks “I949” when it’s actually been 1950 for two weeks is stuck on the time track. He’s got a dub-in circuit there that’s giving him the date instead of the file clerk giving him the date. People who are moving and very mobile on the track don’t make this mistake. So we give the person a flash, (snap) The way to give an age flash is “How old are you?” (snap) And he says, “Twenty-nine.” Well, that’s probably his right age. And you say, “What’s your age?” (snap) Now, this circuit—you see, demon circuits are usually pretty dumb, and this circuit is probably educated to respond to “How old are you?” All right, so you say, “What’s your age?” (snap) Well, the demon circuit can’t work there; that age circuit isn’t working on “What’s your age?” Boom, his stuck-on-the-track age comes through and he says, “Two.” Of course, you follow that with, “Two what?” and the fellow says two months, days, whatever it is. But you give this a three-way test: “How old are you?” (snap) “What’s your age?” (snap) and “Give me a number.” (snap) Those are the three questions which are asked. If you get, let us say, “twenty-nine, twenty-nine, twenty-nine” on rapid flash response this person is in present time; there is no doubt about that. The normal, of course, is to get “twenty-nine, sixteen.” But if this person has really got some fancy circuit there fixing it up so that nobody is going to find out how old he is, you’ll get “twenty-nine, twenty-nine,” then “Give me a number,” “Two. I mean—why did I give you a number two?” Yeah, well, the fellow wants to know right away how come he’s not following through on this “twenty-nine.” The reason he isn’t is because he has a circuit there that’s trained to “What’s your age?” and “How old are you?” but not one trained to “Give me a number.” If you follow—mind you, you can’t ask the person to give you a number and he just gives you the number seven and you expect that to be his age. You’ve been asking him his age: “How old are you?” and “What is your age?” and boom, then “Give me a number,” it’ll follow through on the same data and all of a sudden the file clerk will be able to send through his actual age. That’s you working with the file clerk. The file clerk is pretty cagey. He’ll work with you.
Male voice: How about people like me that don’t know what day it is?
You’re probably to some degree stuck on the track.
Now, there are your various tests.
Now, if you get an age flash on this person who’s stuck on the track, you want to know what happened to him in that year. And sometimes by just making him recall what happened to him during that age, he’ll all of a sudden click in to the engram in which he’s stuck and you can bring him up to present time. It puts it on straight line memory. That’s not too hard to do. “What happened to you when you were twenty? What happened to you when you were five years of age?” Something like that. And he starts telling you this and that and so on. You can also waste a lot of time this way; but you’ll normally find that the age he gave you is usually terribly occluded. If it’s terribly occluded, you’re not, ordinarily, going to spring him out of there just by making him remember what happened to him. But let’s say we got the age flash—let’s take one particular case: a man of forty-five who kept giving the age flash of twenty-nine. And by working with this person for a long while we were finally able to find out (a long while for anything like this—about fifteen minutes) trying to find out what happened to him in his twenty-ninth year. And at first he didn’t know what had happened to him from the time he was twenty-five to thirty-four. And by using Straightwire on the thing I finally made him recall the period by asking him apparently disrelated questions. For instance, “Who gave you your first job?” Now all of a sudden we get the network and the sequence, the chronological sequence of jobs there, till we finally spot who he was working for when he was twenty-nine; whether he liked the job or not; who the boss reminded him of. We start getting his mind picked up on his twenty-ninth yean “Now, what happened to you in that year? When were you sick? Did you have an accident, something like that?” And all of a sudden he says, “Ah, yes, that . . .” This chap, this is an actual case, he says, all of a sudden he says—and by the way, this fellow had had about fifty hours of processing and nobody could get him budged on the track—“Yes, appendicitis. That’s when I had my appendix out!” Up to this time there was no record of an appendectomy on his case. All of a sudden (snap) appendicitis, when he was twenty-nine years of age.
So, he got a visio, immediately, on his room, on the nurse, and he picked up a sonic on the nurse telling him he’d have to stay there. He kept trying to go home and the nurse said they wouldn’t let him go home. He’d finally picked up a little sonic on the darn thing. But, oh, that was a tough one. And by the way, even after that was found, this fellow would still wind up when he was twenty-nine. He really liked this nurse. So there is an example of how you do it.
Now, if your file clerk is working, you can get this sort of a routine—if that doesn’t work out too well, only that really should—you get this sort of a routine going. He’s stuck on the track; the file clerk is working somewhat but we get his age all right, but we get no clue as to the incident he’s stuck in. We can’t refresh his memory in any way so we start asking for flash responses on this order: you ask them any question which can be answered yes or no which will refer to accidents, injuries or any kind of an engram. And so what you do there, you say “Hospital?” (snap) “Give me a yes or no on the following: A hospital?” (snap) Fellow says, “No.” “Doctor?” (snap) “No.” “Fever?” (snap) “Yes.” “Home?” (snap) “No.” “Office?” (snap) “Yes.” Now we start figuring out from this and we start building the personnel in the engram and just with yes-no responses, by your series of questions, you can get the entire nature of the engram and everything that took place. You build it back, now you’ve got the data. It requires a rather fulsome questioning by the auditor but he can get the data of what it is.
Now, just by getting this data usually isn’t enough to free the person out of that place, because this engram is usually in the bank in this fashion—getting him unstuck here, [drawing on blackboard] Here’s your time track: conception, ovum sequence, birth, and here’s a whole series of late-life engrams and here’s present time up here at the top. And he—let’s say he’s stuck here at the age of thirteen and you want to know what happened at the age of thirteen and so on. And he isn’t—you finally get more or less what happened, and you’ve got this incident into view—whether you got it into view or not isn’t vital for the rest of what I’m going to tell you here—but you’ve got this pretty well into view, and what you are trying to do is get this engram out of there. You even have contacted the holders in the engram and so on, and he still won’t move out of that engram. That is almost normal in this operation.
What’s happened is, is your thirteen-year-old engram here [drawing on blackboard] is actually a very solid chain, and the person has gotten stuck on the track in the middle or at the end of a chain instead of the early part of the chain. Now, you know how an engram behaves. If you hit them in the very early part of the chain, you can reduce them. If you hit them at the very beginning of the chain and the beginning of the chain is in basic area, you can erase them. But not when they’re halfway up the chain.
You hit this thirteen-year-old engram, then, and it says, “Yak, yak, yak, yak, yak,” and you want to get him out of this thing, and you’ve got the holder and you know where it is and everything, you make him repeat the holder and you try to deintensify this thing and it just doesn’t deintensify. He just stays right there. That’s because this thirteen-year-old engram is actually in a pile of engrams, like this, see?
Now, don’t lose your head at this point and say, “Well, that’s just too bad.” This is the simplest of the simple. What you do is ask the file clerk, “Is this the first engram on the chain?” (snap) That’s just a test whether or not, not because you want the answer. Of course the file clerk, if he’s working, will tell you no.
All right. The odd part of it is, is if it is stacked in a chain, and he is stuck at thirteen years of age, you can go right back down the same chain in which he’s stuck. You take a little tension off of the engram in which he’s stuck; you just run the thing just a little bit. And tell him to go to an earlier engram. “The file clerk will now give us an earlier engram,” and you’d get it. In other words, you can go back down the track through this chain. Now, don’t overlook that. That’s the point where most auditors foul up. They go through all this rigmarole of getting somebody—they locate the engram and everything else, and then they try to repeat it out of existence; they try to handle it like this and all of a sudden they evidently consider this as being an entirely foreign, new thing: a “whugbug,” not an engram. It’s just an engram and it is probably at a late position on the chain—usually, as a matter of fact. And if you can’t get him out of there by Straight-wire or any of these other dodges, and get him moved up to present time, then you’d better walk down that chain and get the earliest engram in it.
Now, here’s another thing about working with the file clerk. Sometimes the file clerk is forced into telling you a lie. You as the auditor tell the file clerk that you want the earliest incident on this chain, and the file clerk will give you an earlier incident but it’s not the earliest incident. This is a compromise between you and the file clerk. You’re telling him to give you the earliest incident on this chain and you ask the file clerk, “Yes or no, is this the earliest incident on the chain?” and the file clerk says yes and you run this incident.
Well, the funny part of it was you forced the file clerk to tell you a lie. The chances are as you go down one of these chains that the file clerk can’t get to the bottom of the chain without getting deintensified, on the way, a couple or three engrams on this chain. So he gives you the first engram of the chain necessary to deintensify so that he can get to the beginning of the chain, the basic on it. And I’ve seen a file clerk give six consecutive engrams out, each one as the earliest on the chain, because each one had to be deintensified. I hope this point’s very clear to you. It’s a very simple point.
You tell the file clerk—here’s this person stuck on the track, way up the track someplace and you tell the file clerk, you say, “Now give us the earliest incident on this chain.” And the file clerk actually comes up with an earlier incident. You tell the somatic strip to go to the beginning of the incident, when you count from one to five the first phrase in the incident will flash into mind—one-two-three-four-five, (snap) and you get that and you’re running an incident. And you start running this incident and all of a sudden—you would assume, now, the file clerk gave you the earliest incident, you’re sure of that. But you ordered the file clerk to give it to you and you have to work with a file clerk. The file clerk is not under your orders. The file clerk is your partner in trying to get these engrams out of the preclear, not your slave. That somatic strip: you can order the somatic strip or the file clerk can order the somatic strip. The file clerk does very often; that’s what freewheeling is. So you say, “The earliest engram on the chain,” the file clerk will give you the earliest engram that has to be deintensified on the chain to get to earlier engrams. So you take the tension off whatever the file clerk gives you. You take the tension off of it; you reduce it if you can. And sometimes you have to run one that can’t be reduced or erased. Sometimes you have to run it a couple of times in order for the file clerk to give you the earlier one on the chain. So never make the mistake of taking just the first thing the file clerk gives you as the earliest one when you’ve told the file clerk what to do. You say, “Give me the earliest engram on the chain.” The file clerk gives you an engram. Now you run it a couple of times. Don’t assume that was the earliest and you can go back up the track now. You say to the file clerk, “Is this the earliest engram?” The file clerk will sometimes tell you yes when it has to be run a couple more times. But then you ask again, “Is this the earliest engram?” (snap) and all of a sudden you get a no. The other one’s in sight now. So you say, “All right, the file clerk will give us the earliest engram which can be reached to resolve this chain. Now, the somatic strip will go to the beginning of this earliest engram. When I count from one to five the first phrase will flash into your mind—one-two-three-four-five.’’ (snap) You get the first phrase and you find you’re earlier on the thing. Now you reduce that one.
You get that one, two or three passes on the thing, and apparently it’s not going to reduce terrifically, but you at least get two or three passes on it. Was this the earliest one? No, you’ve told the file clerk that it was. The file clerk didn’t tell you that it was. So you have to go earlier. And you can expect to work back this way and that way. I have gone down a chain of about twenty-five engrams, one by one by one by one, getting down, having to deintensify a little bit out of each one in order to get the basic on the chain. Finally got the basic on the chain! It was in basic area; the person (I’m talking about an actual case now) the person was stuck at thirteen, and it took superhuman wits trying to find where the hell this was! And the file clerk finally just got tired of being fooled with and gave up the information. That was a weird one, by the way. I said, “The file clerk will now give us the month in which this occurred,” and instead of the month I got “Tonsillectomy.” The person said, “Tonsillectomy—but I’ve never had my tonsils out.” I said, “Open your mouth.” They were missing.
That’s like a dub-in case, by the way, one time, that used to get run over all the time. I mean, he was run over by everything. And one time he was lying there telling about this terrific, oh man, this awful travail he’d had and so forth, and it seemed like this thing had gone right straight across his throat and so on, and they’d had to take forty-eight stitches in it. And auditor just reached over and pulled his collar down a little bit and let him go on talking. No scar.
All right. When a person’s stuck on the track with great solidness, then, you can expect, just as a routine affair, that the person is stuck in a chain of engrams and that there are earlier engrams that have to be reduced before you can get them loose off the chain. So it’s a question of walking back. If you can’t get them walking back or something like that, just keep on using Straightwire. Try to knock out enough affinity, reality and communication break locks until the person finally has enough attention units to come up to present time.
I had an awful tough time with a preclear one time until I told the file clerk to give me present time, and the file clerk did. So what I’m warning you about there is that any time from there on out you may tell the preclear to come to present time or the file clerk to give you present time or something like that and find out that you’ve got present time. You’ve gotten to a point where this case had enough alertness to move on the track. All right?
The thing that you’ve got to do first, before you can do any great deal with reverie, is to get the person moving on the track. That’s why you test their perceptics, why you try to find some pleasure moments and so forth.
Occasionally you will enter a case with reverie which is actually stuck on the track and will become unstuck before you notice the case is stuck. I’ve had that happen. And checking back over on the behavior of the preclear a couple of moments before and the behavior of the preclear now, I see it’s entirely different—the facial expression and so forth. You just put the preclear in reverie, and by telling them to go to last night; they don’t go from present time to last night, they go from the engram in which they’re stuck to last night. You see, you didn’t ascertain where the person was; you just told him to go someplace and they went.
All right. The compleat expert and certified auditor who doesn’t know how to unstick a person on the track might as well just give up his ghost as far as his efficiency is concerned because oh, more than half, certainly, of the people he runs into are going to be stuck on the track. Additionally, as he goes through processing and so on, he’s going to find his case occasionally stuck on the track and he’s going to have to go through this whole routine trying to get him unstuck.
Now, I give you a word of warning on this. Never leave your preclear stuck on the track if you found him moving on the track. If you found him moving on the track, don’t leave this preclear stuck on the track at the end of the session. This preclear can be moved on the track, and you must bring him back up to present time.
You must always check a preclear, particularly one that you don’t know well, if you don’t know this case well. After a while you can get careless on this if you know your case well and—that is to say, the person ordinarily comes to present time and stays in present time and doesn’t get called back down the track. But on a new case or one that you’re not too sure of or one that has difficulty moving on the track anyhow, check two or three minutes after they came to present time to find out if they’re still in present time.
The way you bring a person to present time is to run a pleasure moment (which is part of Standard Procedure) and then bring them to present time and then give them straight memory on all the processing that you gave them during the last two hours. Make them recall this, not by telling them or assisting their memory, because this undermines a person’s self-determinism; you tell them just to remember these things—they can remember these things. And they’ll go on, they’ll remember the processing and so forth; they’re in present time. That inhibits a callback. But you want to test. You want to give them age flashes: “What is your age?”(snap) “How old are you?” (snap) “Give me a number.” (snap) If all three figures agree, that person is in present time.
All right, so you give them your canceller and bring them up out of it and they’re sitting there and they’re going to talk to you about gee, they didn’t know that they had ever drowned their grandmother’s kittens and they start telling you about this sort of thing. All of a sudden you say, “How old are you?” Certain percentage of your cases are going to suddenly say, “Seven.” A call-back has activated.
What you do on something like that, then, is—they were not sufficiently stabilized, you run more pleasure moments and you go through this same routine that I have been giving you here this morning. You go through this same routine and get them into present time and so they’ll stay there and be stable in present time.
Now of course, the case that you have just started for the first time, you find this person stuck on the track and being called back to earlier engrams on the track and all sorts of things like that, it very well may be that you won’t be able to get them unstuck in the first session, of course. It may take you many sessions to get them unstuck. The longest number of sessions I have seen anybody stuck on the track is eighty hours’ worth; eighty hours of being stuck on the track. This person, by the way, had somewhere close to a hundred insulin shocks and he was stuck in the last one and the auditors just were going crazy trying to get this down.
By the way, I told somebody back East to write up insulin shocks and electric shocks, so that you’d have the standard routine of what doctors ordinarily say around them; assists pulling it apart. It’s pretty yakky and there’s lots of it.
All right? But on this stuck-on-the-track proposition, the thing which the auditor is concerned with is fluidity on the track. Now, we examine the mind and we find out that there are several things that can take attention units away from “I.” Communication, reality and affinity break locks; communication, reality, affinity secondary engrams. These take the attention units away.
Mind you, both of these depend on physical pain engrams. But the things which—the acts and actions which charge up the reactive mind and charge up and separate “I” and take attention units away from “I” and starve “I” down, get “I” so weak that ‘“I” can’t move on his own time track, these things are communication, reality and affinity break locks or affinity, reality, communication secondary engrams. Secondary engram includes grief engrams, so on—we call those secondary engrams now—grief engram, these various upsets, apathy engrams and so on. These take the attention units away from “I” and ball them up in a ball with the physical pain engram and there isn’t enough attention left; the person can’t move smoothly on the track. So whenever you find anybody sticking on the track, the degree of seriousness with which they are stuck does not depend upon the seriousness of the engram in which they’re stuck.
It depends upon the supercharging of the bank, on the general condition of the bank and the robbed condition of “I” by these affinity, communication and reality break locks and by the engrams—under which of course are all these physical pain engrams. It’s the supercharging.
You find somebody, then, that sticks on the track so lightly that you say, “Come up to present time” and he comes, you can probably work this person. If one is stuck heavily enough so that you have to tell the somatic strip to move on forward and go to a comfortable moment, and you run a pleasure moment, then get present time and give him Straight-wire, this case is just supercharged a little bit more. And if you get somebody that is just plain stuck—stuck on the track so that you have to go through this “Yes or no. Doctor? Hospital?” and so on, this routine, creeping down the bank engram by engram to find the earliest moments of it and so forth, you are working a supercharged case that is really supercharged.
Now, this case may be so serious that it is exteriorized all up and down the track; this person’s sense of reality is going to be negligible. His ability to communicate with you, much less his own past, is going to be almost absent. The seriousness—now, this is a new index—with which a person is stuck on the track is an indication of the amount of charge on the case. In other words, it means that the more charge there is on the case, the less able “I” is to move on the track.
I’ll give you a picture here that will tell you more about this. Here at the right is the rectangle, and we’ll say this is the standard banks, this vertical rectangle here. And over here at the left, even with the top of this rectangle, we’ve got an “I.” All right. This whole thing is brain area; and down here at the bottom we’ll draw this tangled-up hurrah’s nest5 and we’ll call that the reactive mind. Now, these engrams down here are just engrams; they’re sleepers until they get keyed in and start to get locks. When they first get keyed in the engram first becomes active. The engram is not active until it gets keyed in—an engram which is not keyed in is not effective in any way on the mind. This is like a stored phonograph record, and that’s all; that phonograph record doesn’t begin to make any noise until you get it near a needle.
All right. So here’s this bundle of sleepers, and the person first gets his lock. Up to this moment there’s no circuitry—no circuitry. There isn’t a single keyed-in engram in this hypothetical case, and there’s no circuitry because no engrams have keyed in yet. So now one engram gets keyed in. The person was tired and there must have been some analogous situation to that engram occurring in his workaday life. All right. The second this happens, this engram gets a little bit restimulated and we get a reaching-out from this engram bank a little bit. Now another incident takes place which restimulates this engram, again analogous to it. And we get this thing built up just a little bit more, picking up, impinging itself now And all of a sudden we get an affinity, reality or communication secondary engram. There’s the charge going in, big charge starting to interpose between “I” and the standard banks. Now, this would also indicate a shut-off of the early portion of a person’s time track, and this sort of thing begins to happen. This is charge, reverse charge. The secondary engram there could be a death. This has started to charge up the bank. Now we start to pick up locks on this secondary engram. Not only are we picking it up on the early engrams and so on, we have this secondary engram—anything. Let’s say it was the death of Grandma. Anything that has to do with the death of an older person becomes a lock on this thing, and anytime that occurs in life we get this thing built up just a little bit more. And these things can be on there in terms of thousands and thousands; every time a person reads a newspaper and he sees the word death it makes a little tiny lock. All right.
First darned thing you know, we’re getting pretty heavy charge on this case. Where does this get charge? We’re not working here in some wonderful mechanism that picks its energy up out of thin air; we’re working with a mechanism that has a certain degree of conservation within itself. This charge has got to come from someplace, and every time this big central charge off the engram bank—in affinity, communication and reality secondary engrams and so on—every time this thing got charged up, it charged up by taking something away from “I.” So the second we got this one, why, we get a little bit missing off of here.
Now, for every lock that occurs on this secondary engram there’s a little additional scrap comes off “I.” “I” has to have more in “I”—more power in “I” than there is in the charged-up bank, to move on the track. So if “I” gets gradually cut down here, slowly, steadily cut down through life, finally this bank becomes too highly charged for “I.” That is, “I” has 50 positive units and the bank has 250 negative units. Postulating that “I” would be positive units up to a moment that a secondary engram is received, at which moment these units are taken over and reversed in polarity and deposited there as something opposing “I.” In other words, “I” is being stolen to fight “I” with.
This is the same trick that life uses throughout all of its mechanisms against the material universe, to discover how to get a little piece of the material universe and turn it around against itself, and it operates when you start to get the material universe mixed up in engrams. That law starts to operate in reverse and “I” starts to cut down, less and less and less and less. And the ease with which you enter a case—the accessibility of the case—depends upon how much “I” is left in proportion to how much charge there is on the reactive bank. Is that clear? In other words, we could have a person—and this doesn’t mean that he would be conceited, this is a person who has tremendous survival value. This person we would probably say you couldn’t kill him if you ran over him with a battleship. It would express itself in various ways.
All right. You start taking off some of this “I,” bank starts getting charged up. There’s lots of bank to charge but it takes quite a bit to charge it. He goes all the way through life and he’s still got that much “I.” Now, let’s take Mimi, that’s how much “I” she had to begin with. So she hits one secondary engram and she goes right straight to Napa6 because it took all the units she had, and all of a sudden “I” isn’t there anymore. A person goes mad in inverse ratio of the amount of attention units or the size of their survival dynamic or how tough they are in the business of living. And that is genetics and it’s inherent; that is the dynamic of the person. Lots of dynamic, lots of force, lots of power—boy, engrams, they can just have thousands of engrams and they can be all piled up with all kinds of secondary engrams and locks all over the place and this person’s still functioning. Then you see somebody else that lost a doll when she was five years of age, or somebody knocked him off a tricycle when he was nine years of age and he’s crazy. That difference is just the number of “I” units that can be stalled down, because this doesn’t take it out in ratio to how big “I” is.
Here we’re getting a charged-up bank, and you will never find a psychotic who has not had a very thoroughly charged-up bank. The secondary engrams are tremendous in number, usually, in proportion to “I”—not tremendous in proportion to the average human being —but in proportion to this fellow’s ability to take it, you might say. The engrams were too much for him and he gets swamped. What happens then is that “I” just eventually disappears from view. It actually just disappears.
Now, your job in trying to get the person to move on the track is not just a job of getting a person to move out of some holders. Yours is a job—let’s say he was down to here, and you have got to put this much “I,” you’ve got to pick up enough attention units by breaking locks and generally restoring this person by running pleasure moments and so on, you’ve got to pick up enough attention units so that “I” is strong enough to run on this charged track. That is the mechanical aspect of trying to get a person to move on the time track.
When you run out circuitry engrams you are going to be running down a chain of engrams; when you run down a stuck-on-the-track engram you are running down a chain of engrams. Ordinarily you have to go down the chain, find the bottom one on the chain; when you get down to the bottom of the chain make sure you are at the bottom. After you have reduced the thing and then run it all the way out—all the engram that is there at the bottom, you run out. Don’t run a chain down—of words or something like that—and get to the bottom of the thing and run the somatic that’s on those words and then walk off and leave it. You run the whole engram at the bottom of the chain. You then do not need to walk back up this chain engram by engram. You wouldn’t be able to do that—you’d get into trouble if you did, because you start up to the next engram above that and it’s usually got something on a lower chain than that.
Be content to get to the bottom of this particular chain of engrams and to run out all the bottom engram on that chain. Because a person is not in his own valence, and you can’t get him in his own valence at that time, is no excuse not to reduce this engram. You reduce this engram in any event—the bottom engram on the chain. As you start getting there you reduce engrams enough so that you can go earlier, but don’t interrupt the sequence, earlier, until you are at the bottom of the chain and then you reduce the whole engram there, not just a part of it. And then you make sure it was the basic on this chain. Ask the file clerk again, if you’re working from the file clerk, and just try to get the person back a little bit earlier if the file clerk isn’t working. Get the bottom one off the chain, I just give you that in passing; it’s a word of caution.
All of this I have been telling you this morning has been intimately associated with Standard Procedure, This is Standard Procedure, Trying to give you some expanded points in Standard Procedure, make it a little more standard for you, make it work a little bit better.
Now, we have talked quite a bit this first hour in terms of affinity, communication and reality break locks and we have talked about secondary engrams. Now, in the next hour, having given you this close an entrance into Standard Procedure, I’m going to give you a better understanding of what those engrams are, exactly, and I’m going to give you the Tone Scale, you might say, of communication and the Tone Scale of reality as well as the Tone Scale of affinity which you already have.
Okay, let’s take a breather.