Handling Somatics (500704)

Date: 4 July 1950

Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard

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I wanted to just make a couple of random comments here at first. There seemed to have been a little confusion on this business of “don’t go straight for a somatic.” Now, and on the other hand . . . What was the other half of it?

Male voice: Yesterday noon you said we can eliminate a headache by putting him in a pleasant experience. I assumed you meant by that going through all . . .

Well, what I meant specifically was this. In entering a case or in working a case you will very often discover that the patient is impatient to have a certain somatic relieved. Where we have a difficulty in altitude, particularly—well, take a husband and wife. Maybe the husband has more altitude than the wife. The husband will start telling the wife when he is a preclear that “Well now, you know these pains I’ve got around here. These are the thing. Now, we—well, let’s go after that. Let’s work on that today.” Or “I have a terribly sore throat. Let’s see if we can’t get rid of that.” He can waste time, nothing but time, just continually on and on, waste more and more and more time, fooling around with this.

Some fellow has no great faith in his auditor, or his engrams tell him not to have. And the next thing you know, he is telling his auditor what they must go after. Well, that’s not the file clerk working. I have seen somebody waste fifty hours where the patient was saying, “Now, the next thing we go after is so-and-so. And the next thing we go after is this and that.” And he is beautifully skipping and avoiding everything they should go after because he’s doing it in present time. That’s not the file clerk at work. That isn’t auditing.

In a case where a person has a chronic psychosomatic pain, illness, it is not worthwhile if you’re going to clear the person to fool with that illness as such. Follow the mechanical side of it. That is to say, get the painful emotion off the case, get early in the case, deintensify those somatics necessary to get basic-basic. Get basic-basic out of the case and start the erasure. But sometimes the preclear will insist, “I’ve had a headache for three Days.” And this is always the same headache. Or the husband will say, “Well now, I’ve got to get my wife back there and find out why it is she fights with me all the time and won’t let me spend any money” So he goes after a specific aberration.

Going after a specific aberration or a specific psychosomatic illness is dictating to the file clerk what should come up and what shouldn’t come up. Well, it won’t work.

Now, in this other case, it’s an order of magnitude, a person merely comes in and he says, “I have a headache.” All right. There is something you can do about that. Take him back to a pleasant moment in his life and just start through this pleasant moment ignoring the headache completely. Keep him going through it and develop all perceptics of this pleasant moment. If that doesn’t do the trick, take him to another pleasant moment. After you’ve taken him to three or four you have in effect keyed the thing out. Or knock it out on a straight memory circuit. “Who used to have headaches in your family?” That sort of thing. The fellow’s liable to start comparing it up and thinking about it, and it’s liable to key out then.

God help Bayer aspirin and the rest of the big drug companies because you can knock out headaches and things like that very easily, momentary psychosomatic manifestations.

Male voice: Well, could it be said then that the—whether you go after a somatic directly or not depends upon the acuteness of the somatic, if it’s recent?

No. No, we’re dealing here with entirely two different things. One is the overall computation of the case entrance, the big computation, what we’re doing with this case. And the other one has to do with making the patient comfortable.

Male voice: Well, if they just had a stomachache that just came on an hour ago and you think it might be because they’re coming just to see you, something like that, could that be done too?

Oh yeah. You could knock out a stomachache if you wanted to. I wouldn’t, personally, because you start running engrams and you start sending him to the proper engram and the file clerk turns up something else. And the thing will kick out anyway. You’re talking about a momentary somatic.

Male voice: Well, something that came on maybe an hour or two or a day or two . . .

That’s right, that’s a momentary somatic. I’m talking about a psychosomatic illness such as chronic psychosomatic sinusitis.

Male voice: Well, then that . . .

That’s a different order of magnitude.

Male voice: . . . it fits then.

Well, this thing the person’s been carrying around all his life.

Male voice: The acuteness of the somatic.

You’ll keep turning on somatics on people with Dianetics, right straight on the line. They’re actually not of the same order. I want you to get it very clear. That when a person, a patient, starts to run his case for you, the auditor, and tell you what you’re supposed to go after, or when you as an auditor have spotted a bad aberration in this patient and you decide to go after a specific illness in the case or a specific aberration in the case, you’re wasting your time. The other is just a somatic, a somatic like I could turn on and off. You know, that’s a different thing. That’s just the physical pain accompanying an engram. But a psychosomatic illness is not just a somatic.

Yes?

Male voice: Well, how about menstrual pains, can you key them out that way?

I beg your pardon?

Male voice: Menstrual pains, cramps, things like that!

Menstrual pains are almost always prenatal. A prenatal engram in full gear. Oh yeah, you can go back and flounder around if this is in terrible restimulation and the person is ill and you can’t work them. But most of the time you’re just wasting your time to do anything about them. If the file clerk hands it up, the file clerk will hand it up. That’s all there is to it. This is actually too simple to stress very much.

Male voice: Well, would it be fair to say that the only real direction you would do of the file clerk and the somatic strip would be towards the basic area?

Toward the basic area, yes. Into engrams in the basic area, by demand. And into painful emotion engrams late in life, by demand. Because the file clerk and the somatic strip will not go into painful emotion. You can ask till you’re black in the face and you won’t get painful emotion. You can get painful emotion out of repeater. You can just slug him into it. It’s pretty hard because the charge on painful emotion seems to be a repelling charge of whatever electronic mechanism it is that keeps the file clerk and somatic strip tracking along. It repels them, in other words, as though you had the same charge that they have.

Male voice: What about a migraine headache that this woman has had, say, off and on most of her life, and she gets this problem—well, once a week she gets it for two or three days?

All right. You’re going to have a hell of a time working her. And that is actually a physical psychosis.

Male voice: Yeah.

All right. A psychosis bleeds fast. This is taken care of on another channel. You can take somebody who has a specific engram which is causing a psychosis, consider it a body psychosis. Such a—the physical mechanism of the body is crazy. Definitely is. Because it thinks that the way to survive is to have migraine headaches. Well, that’s crazy if I ever heard of one. So the thing to do in this case is just keep hitting away at the case.

Now, there is this that you will discover quite rapidly. That when these things are very solid and very chronic, they’re also holders. So you’re going to have to shoot the thing apart just to get the patient moving on the time track. So it’s cared for in that category. Not on the category that you must first cure her migraine headaches before you can go on with therapy. That would be the wrong concatenation of thought.

Male voice: She has been coming to me only when her headache has been off.

Mm-hm.

Male voice: And would you advise her to come in when her headache is on, or . . .?

Her mother have . . . ?

Male voice: . . . or off? And by the way, in passing on that, did her mother have high blood pressure?

Male voice: I don’t remember Well, that’s a vital piece of information in treating a migraine. Its inception, a migraine’s inception is usually very early in the prenatal area, down in basic area and is—a real migraine headache which does everything a migraine headache is supposed to do according to the medical texts—is a high blood pressure condition on the part of the mother. And you get them back into basic area on the thing.

Now, there are migraine headaches that really don’t answer the professional class—or the medical classification. And these migraine headaches are something else. They’re head injuries of various sorts, usually prenatal. They are AAs and smashed skulls in general and so on. But when you examine the case, it won’t be following what the medical doctor calls a classic migraine headache. Migraine, half of the head starts off and so on.

Male voice: Would you attempt to work her on—work on her when it’s on?

I would never attempt to work her when she had one in restimulation for this reason: I have worked migraine patients. And they are so crazy with pain when you’re trying to work them that you can’t get them to make any sense at all. They just writhe around and so on, beg you to put them to sleep and so on. It’s a lot of wasted time. The best time to work her is when they are off. All right. So much for that.

I want to tell you something now, a little note here on the subject of the similarity between that tape recorder and an engram. Engrams are just pieces of film, you might say, by analogy. They do everything that you can do with a piece of film, and more. Because the film would have to have tactile, kinesthesia, and smell and rhythm for it to be complete. But you can consider it on a limited analogy as a color video in three dimensions.

Of course, in the prenatal area the color and visio part of it are there but they are black, except at such times when of course you get a flashlight shined up in there. And then you get a visio recording. But there is the problem with one of these strips, that it does behave just like you had such a film. It can actually run backwards. It starts ahead at a normal speed, let us say, for an engram. In the basic area you’ll quite often find these strips running slowly, as though the time element in the basic area was stretched. And as the person gets later and later, the engram, that is to say, gets later and later—the later and later engrams, one by one as you come up the line you’ll find out that they’re faster until about midlife, they settle down and . . . [gap] Now, by normal speed I mean word for word. But in the prenatal area, particularly in the basic area, you can have one of these things running off this way: “I . . . don’t . . . know,” as a speed run of a person saying, “I don’t know.” Now the engram in midlife would be running “I don’t know.” (said at normal speed) Now, as you run these engrams the projector mechanism speeds up. So the first time you run it it may be, “I . . . don’t . . . know.” The next time, it’s “I-don’t. . . know.” The next time it’s “I don’t know.” And then it’s “Idunno.” And then it’s “whack!” Now, this is never more apparent . . . You’ll notice this manifestation in cases. You won’t find it there always because sometimes this strip and so forth will run off by a slight bypass circuit even when it has sonic, which tunes it up to the proper speed. But—that’s not desirable by the way, but don’t pay any attention to it. There’s nothing you can do about this. I’m just pointing out something you’ll see. And something that will cheer you up a little bit if you have a patient who is going “I . . . don’t . . . know” and Mama is a monologuist.

It’s taking five minutes, let us say, for one minute of engram content. The next time you go over it, it starts to come up even. And then it goes better than even. Well, the funniest thing that you’ll see in this is when you work somebody by amnesia trance. And you’ve knocked out fifty, sixty engrams in amnesia trance, and you’ve never taken him back down the track wide-awake. Now you take him back down the track wide-awake and he’ll find these things running, gararrara. And he says, “That—that’s funny.” And you could take him a little bit earlier on one and he starts to run it, and the first is a good, solid, loud clink. Just a normal clink. Somebody put down an instrument there. This was not picked up in amnesia trance. But he gets clink and then dalublublublublalublulubla and he sees the people in the operating room moving around like this, (laughter) And he says, “For God’s sakes, what am I into?” Now, you can’t expect this as really a standard manifestation because you aren’t tackling cases that way. That is not a good way to tackle a case. But I’m demonstrating to you that it’s there. And when you’re on an erasure, quite often coming up the line on an erasure, you’ll find out that the thing goes through fairly slowly and then . . . and then ƒƒƒƒƒt! The three speeds, and it’s gone. It can disappear then by rolling faster until it just isn’t there. Now, it might be said that it’s there but it’s rolling so fast that he can’t perceive it. I’m quite interested in that manifestation. I haven’t studied it a great deal; it might lead to something.

Female voice: Is it actually gone then?

Oh yes.

Female voice: Once it goes that fast, it has no staying power.

Well, you can’t—if it went that fast you couldn’t take him back through it again to save yourself.

Female voice: I see. It’s the same as if it were entirely erased, does it actually—does it move over to the standard bank then?

Well, it’s already filed in the standard banks. This is just what’s left on the ground on the track. This is—becomes most unusual when the person has had dub-in. And the imagination has spotted pictures. Incidentally, that’s nothing wrong, lots of patients have this and lots of them work very smoothly. It’s just a computive circuit which throws in scenery.

Female voice: That’s a dub-in?

Well, that’s a “prenatal ESP” (quote). And this type of dub-in is not uncommon. It doesn’t retard a case any. It’s when that dub-in is the substitution-for type of dub-in, that is dangerous. And that isn’t on the ESP line. In other words, Mama says, “biscuits,” and the dub-in knocks out “biscuits” and says “cake.” Well, you’re running through two stratas there and you’re not running the engram. And then dub-in becomes very confusing and very bad.

Female voice: You have to go back and find the other one, is that it?

Well, you have to knock out the dub-in mechanism. And that will be knocked out- That’s the “you can’t tell the truth” business.

Male voice: If you go through the prenatal with the dub-in without the outside perception, do you have to go back after the session and go through that again?

What, the . . . ?

Male voice: The prenatal With dub-in?

Male voice: Yeah. No! If you go through basic-basic and all of that before a clear sonic and the other perceptics are established.

Oh, you’ll find some pieces of them lying around afterwards. Just start back down the track and these pieces start flying in all directions. It becomes a very amusing picture, by the way, when you finally—sonic is finally turned on in a case, because you go down the track, good God, there’s no sound been picked up in the whole case, you see. So dishpans are falling, toilets are flushing and you get all of this varied sound. But the voices have been so thoroughly deintensified that they’re just occasional quacks. And you’ll get throat mechanisms of people. You know, somebody has a habit of saying, “Hrumgh, I believe, hrum hrrung . . .” And the track will be full of hrum hrrung Male voice: On that business of change in speed, I’ve noticed in a number of cases the file clerk would stop on a spot and start to describe and then jump over to another spot and describe some more. I would request the file clerk to move smoothly through the incident just as though he were there, and this seems to help straighten out I was wondering if a request of that kind could alter the speed.

Mm-hm. Yeah. But I wouldn’t try to. It upsets a person quite a bit. He’s maybe running something which has a great deal of nervous tension on it. And now you try to do something else with it than he can do at the moment and he gets upset by it. You can go through this, you can take a person through a pleasure moment and if he’s working very well you can actually slow down the pleasure strip. So that you can take him through a dive in slow motion.

Male voice: I’ve been getting sonic when I go to sleep and wake up, and the first time it turned on I was waking, at all times, more or less awake, and I heard this terrific rumble, it sounded like I was inside of a water-filled bag in a boiler factory. I opened my eyes and looked around and no sound. I closed my eyes, relaxed and it turned on again.

You were clipping in and out of an amnesia strata which is not amnesia. You were just flicking back to it and up out of it again and back to it again. There’s sonic on, you know, right next to the standard banks. You always got sonic, everybody has. It doesn’t do you a hell of a lot of good for the excellent reason that it’s not connected to “I” But one does have sonic.

With regard to that, a long time ago I had a demon circuit, a sonic demon circuit that would turn on and off this way all by itself. Only it wasn’t talking about yesterdays engrams. It was talking about things right now And it was just a demon circuit with a part of the computer walled off. Well, this demon circuit would do such things as, I’d be sound asleep and it would suddenly say to me, “Ron, there’s somebody at the front door.” Okay. So I’d wake up and go down and sure enough there would be somebody—had been at the front door or just was there or was about to come there, which was very confusing to me. And this circuit, by the way, went out of sonic production an awful long time ago but I still get what it used to do. “Ron, wake up. The telephone is going to ring in a few minutes,” it would say. So I’d say, “Oh, all right, all right,” just like I was talking to it, and rub my eyes and sort of come out of it groggily, sit up, smoke a cigarette and walk around, maybe wash my face. About that time, brring brring brring there would be the telephone. And I still do that. But there’s nobody warning me. The circuit has become nonsonic and it’s just been incorporated into the general machinery of the mind. I have no idea why. It isn’t good, I mean it doesn’t work all the time. It’s not invariable, works out on the basis of about—it misses about one call out of ten, something like that. And I’ll very often—on that one call I get awakened by the phone.

Male voice: Does it tell you who’s calling?

Hm?

Male voice: Give you an idea who’s calling?

No. It used to tell me who was writing me letters and show them to me. That was awfully confusing. Getting mail two or three weeks before I was supposed to see it. I got a reject once from the Saturday Evening Post three weeks before the letter was written!

There is something very funny about time. There is no reason for us to be spooky on the subject of telepathy and ESP and God knows what. As far as I’m concerned there’s just something awfully haywire with time. One of these days I’m going to find out what time is because it will run before the fact, it will run after the fact. And it’s—there seems to be different hookups.

Somebody came through with a proposal the other day that possibly engrams were not registered and experiences in life were not registered at all in the brain or in the cells, but they are on an endless time belt. And that when you return back down the track, time, not in three-dimensional space but on a straight endless belt just the same, you are actually going back down a time stream. And it was on this time stream that the engrams were impressed.

This is particularly impressive due to the fact that a great deal of study on this subject of recording, cellular recording, demonstrates as far as I can find out at this time with what we know about electronics and wave motions and so on, that it’s impossible, utterly impossible, to record anything on a cellular level as such. I mean the structural end of the brain, in other words, poses an impossibility as far as we know now. The waves are too big, the memories are—you couldn’t transform a wave. There is no known wave motion small enough to. And there is not enough storage space. And the latest one that came out in Vienna, like most things that come out in Vienna, and it’s quite the rage and in neuropsychiatry and so on it’s the accepted thing (and is even accepted by those interested in electronic psychiatry, such as McCulloch at the University of Illinois who’s a very advanced boy) is an impossibility by computation; it’s an impossibility. Because you say there are protein molecules and memories get recorded in shots in the protein molecule, and each shot, let’s say there are a hundred shots or a thousand shots or something like that in the protein molecule, and the memory goes into the protein molecule and it’s all very fascinating. But when you compute out the number of protein molecules which is 1021 binary digits, or something along in that order—I have not even bothered to follow this thing down. I would happily go back and play you the recording on it but it’s a bore.

The fact is that the protein molecule theory accounts for just three months of observation if you use every protein molecule in the body. [gap] Well, here I’m pointing up to you the fact that you may like to think of things in a highly precise, superexplained fashion, labeled and branded by an authoritarian name. But so long as we know what we don’t yet know we then will not fall into the fallacy of expecting something to happen which won’t happen. Do you follow me?

We could be led very swiftly astray by didactically assuming that some of our analogies in Dianetics were absolutely correct. There’s no such thing as an absolute.

Our basic tenets are—they’re demonstrable. And particularly over the last twelve years of work as far as I’m concerned, they’re straight. They’re about as straight as we can get, along a certain strata. And even they can probably be simplified in some degree. They’re producing results and they’re working. We now go up into theory, theory of application. We have to have a theory of how we apply these things. We have to have some vague theory and analogy of structure in order to make these things practiceable. And now we have application, the theory itself is subject to shift. So you see here are your axioms. Now, here are your theories. Here are a body of theories which are derived from these axioms. Well, these theories are fairly straight. But they are definitely subject to change and alteration, definitely.

As you know more information, if you can’t change this body of theories in here, the science is going to slow down to a stop. And up here in a highly nebulous state is the practice of application. And that in that state in anything, no matter how precise the science is, is always an art. It’s an art of application of the theory. For instance, you will run into continually little problems that you have to solve yourself, right on the spot.

My job is to tell you the general rules of the road, to give you a feel of the subject, and bring you up to a point where your understanding of the existing theory is so good that you can derive. And mostly what I’m talking to you about in this course is theory and its application. In the book we have the axioms, tenets and background. You’ve got that. As far as Book One is concerned, the amount that Book One is altered is quite slight. As far as the source of this trouble is concerned on a functional level on Book Two, that’s pretty stet, on a functional level.

It’s not stet on a structural level. One of these days somebody’s going to find out something, enough about structure so that the field of structure can be adequately entered. Right now all the explanations are crazy. There are no adequate explanations to explain why a molecule can work in this direction to do this, to send a charge down a neuron, to do something else.

Anybody that tells you they know anything about brain structure is really stringing a longbow. Because nobody knows anything about it. They have the most fantastic array of names assigned to the parts of the brain. But they are descriptive names. And they’re in the most jaw-breaking Latin imaginable. And they are, as far as our purposes are concerned, useless. It’s all very well to talk about this sort of a thalamic cortex, emotional reactionism of the ars forcina, that’s just swell But it says that something happens in the brain which does something we’re not quite sure of.

It’s one thing to reach into the brain with an apple corer as they do in the—with a topectomy, take out a big section of brain and find out that after that everybody sees everything upside down. Now, to say that by touching that part of the brain and by achieving this effect that we have touched the actual and complete mechanism which does this is an unwarranted assumption. Because all we might have touched was a radio set. All we might have touched was a battery. But all we might have touched was the lead or the switchboard or some portion of it. So the problem just blows up in one’s face immediately.

As far as axioms are concerned, boy, we’re on solid ground. That ground will take a hell of a beating and still stay. As far as the theories are concerned, quite a few of those theories are solid. We take something like the theory of valences. We can demonstrate as the theory of valences becomes more and more obvious to us that something is definitely at work here, and that it follows this line and this is our theory to account for it. Now, if the theory is good, we can now predict further methods of application of that theory. We can predict phenomena which hitherto we did not know existed. And now we look for it and, by golly, there it is. So that’s a good theory. It doesn’t mean it’s a true one.

As a matter of fact this theory of valences has speeded the devil out of Dianetic therapy. It’s well up there now. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised with the theory of valences at work to see that very desirable thing, a standard, hundred-hour Clear in a fairly normal case, as this theory becomes better and better and as the skill of the people applying it becomes better and better. I wouldn’t doubt that this could happen. The theory is pretty good.

We had two theories work there. One of them—there evidently is some value in both of them. One is a synchronizing theory whereby the time track is considered to be a bundle of perceptics. Now, as we even up these perceptics, a person can run through the engram— thinking of my fingernails there, each one is a level, a perceptic—and we run through the engram, we get all of them simultaneously. Therefore if we considered this as a—time track as a bundle of perceptics, we can consider one of them getting out of phase, like this. Well, that’s evidently workable to some degree because you run through pleasure moments, so on. But that theory’s stopped. It predicted nothing new and hasn’t to date; maybe it still will. But because it didn’t advance rapidly—yes, it would turn on sonic in a lot of cases, yeah, yeah, sure. But not one, two, three, four. Not an invariable working. So we had to get a new theory. All right. The theory of valences.

The theory of valences was already in existence, had been in existence for some time and nobody had ever paid any attention to it. It had been used in a valence shift. One knew that—the winning valence theory, one knew these various things. Hadn’t been assembled. All of a sudden the theory of valences is assembled, it’s been predicting new data rather consistently. And I think along that track, with maybe a modification of it, we may be able to get 100 percent reaction. That’s what we’re working for. That is 100 percent on sonic, 100 percent perceptics. If we could do that, we could probably knock out chronic psychosomatic illnesses just bing bing. As a matter of fact, the last case I ran it on, which is Mike, Mike’s running like a pianola case now. He’s playing himself. Hm?

Male voice: Pianola?

He’s pianola, yeah, plays himself. The boys have been calling it—calling a case you didn’t have to run, a pianola case.

I’m trying to give you—adjust your viewpoint here a little bit to give you an idea of what you are looking at. What is precise about it and what is unprecise.

The precise thing is the basic tenets, axioms and cause, and the behavior of that cause. That’s evidently precise as hell. That has held solidly and stood up to every test and beating that you could give it. The basic philosophic tenets in their present form have been in existence for twelve years. And they’ve really been mauled, down through those twelve years, trying to find holes in them. And as a matter of fact it was quite alarming to me at first that they were so solid. I had no therapy method to back them up. And it’s rather dismaying to have pushed off on you by the universe in general some equation and some axioms that you can’t shake and that people didn’t know their value before and they’d never been evaluated. All right. So that’s good.

The cause, the existence of the engram, that sort of thing—I’m repeating this again just so you know right where you stand on it—that is solid. That has stood up under a beating now of five years. Tried and tried and tried to find something else, some other way, and the darn thing is so mechanical, the engram is so mechanical As far as the analytical mind is concerned we can still learn quite a bit about the analytical mind. Every once in a while I turn up a new datum about the analytical mind. As far as the reactive mind is concerned and its general behavior and its functional activity, it’s pretty darn stet. We’ve got that. But now we’ve got this gimmick and we know its purpose and we know that about it. And we are handling it. Now, what is the best way to handle it? That’s a problem which I’m sure that amongst you here today there will be lots of new data. How to handle it? How to get rid of it? A lot of theories, for instance, the Russians had of how you got rid of political prisoners. You could drive them crazy, you could shoot them, you could send them to Siberia. You know, it’s the same type of problem. It’s got a lot of solutions.

All right. Off of that basis I want to give you today a rehearsal on Dianetics diagnosis. We talked about it in the last professional lecture. We talked about it last night. And we’re going to talk about it today. I’m going to talk to you about it today for a good reason.

As professionals you’re going to be expected to have a magic eye. You’re going to be expected to be able to look at a patient and say, “Ah, yes. Uh-huh.” Look very wise about the thing, tap him lightly on the left ear and he promptly gets well. You’re not going to be able to run every patient you have all the way through to Clear, yourself. And if you think you can do so then you had better get one of these personality multipliers that makes eighteen or twenty thousand people out of you, all simultaneously working.

Your best bet as far as carrying people through to a cleared state is by starting, opening and check-running teams. You will find out that you will have lots of headaches doing this, but it’s still the best way. You’re going to find a husband and wife and you’ve started them out beautifully on a team, you’ve opened their cases and everything is running fine. It took you maybe forty hours, fifty hours of work to get their cases open and get them running because they really aren’t the type of person that could be expected to handle this easily. And then you come over and one of them’s broken the Auditor’s Code and they’re all messed up. So we have to get a couple of other partners and split them up. And you’re going to be doing a lot of jockeying. But when it comes to being a professional auditor, the magic touch has to be there. You definitely will have to cultivate one, the sort of open sesame to the engram bank . . . [gap] . . . we’re going to help you by stressing the fact that a professional auditor, one certified by the Foundation, who has been trained at the Foundation, does minor miracles with great ease. It’s true. You will be able to. Certainly they’re miracles compared to what was being done in 1940, or 1205 for that matter. But you had better develop the touch.

A part of that touch is self-confidence. This will gradually build up in you as your own therapy progresses. You will begin to develop horsepower, even if you’ve got horsepower now. But it takes also an educational level approach. The exhibition of self-confidence, the demonstration of certainty of touch to the patient will get you more engrams in less time than any other method I know of. You know they’re there. His file clerk knows they’re there. You just leave him out of it, to hell with it. “Well, what you think about this?” We don’t care what you think about this. The file clerk, your somatic strip and I, we know all about this. Nothing to it. The first thing you know, this guy will sort of stampede. And he’ll say, “Well, gosh, uh . . .” You say, “Well, you don’t think that you have these engrams there. You don’t think that’s the one that goes through? The somatic strip will now go to the beginning of the tonsillectomy. It’s now one minute later. It’s now two minutes later. Now come up to present time.” “My throat’s sore.” “Oh, all right, your throat’s sore.” “What are you doing to me?” You have people sometimes when you do this kind of thing to them, they look at you with the most fascinated face. I don’t think that a savant in the middle ages, a magician, ever had more awe thrown at him than you will occasionally get as a professional auditor.

The associate editor of Collier’s almost blew his stack one day because he was sort of mumbling along about it. I’d had his case fairly well straight—I’d cracked the center part of the case—but he was into a morning sickness chain which was really a rough deal. He was getting up and vomiting and lying back down again. And then somebody would say, “I’m all upside down.” So he would promptly turn around and put his head at the foot of the bed. He was in a mess.

Well, this didn’t impress him very much because he understood this on an intellectual level. He knew what was behind this. He understood it. But he was sitting there after the session and he was holding himself doubled up like this. By the way, that button wore out awfully fast. I tried it on him two, three days ago and it didn’t work at all. He had gotten accustomed to the idea. But at this moment here he was in pain, still in pain, we couldn’t reach all the engrams that had his stomach tied up.

I said, “Hm. What’s the matter with you? Your stomach doesn’t have to hurt.” “Oh,” he says, “well, goddamnit, do something about it.” I said, “All right, I will.” And skeptical, see, on the basis of, “God, these pains have been certified by physicians.” So I said, “Well, I could turn them off for you. But after all, it would take a couple of minutes of your time.” He looks at me kind of spooky, and I said, “By the way, how did your father used to talk?” He said, “Well, he’s kind of a slow fellow.” He takes his hands away from his belly. “He’s kind of a slow fellow. He talks sort of carefully and so forth.” “Where’s your pain?” “Jesus!” I had him spooked. He went around looking at me like I was haunted or he was or the house was. Because he didn’t understand anything about valence shift. Well, right away he started keeping his ears open, wide open and flapping, and he soon learned the theory behind this. Now he had a supporting theory. He could understand it, it was no longer a mystery so he was all right. But you’re going to have a lot of people that are never going to understand it. They’re going to sit and look at you and say, “How did you know ‘get out’ was there? You must be a mind reader.” Well, at this moment to try to explain it to them that “get out” is a bouncer and this sends one back up the time track, you’re talking to somebody who wouldn’t be able to get the concept of time track down, probably, but you’re still making the person quite sane and everything’s going to go along fine. But you are now dabbling in necromancy.

Female voice: Do you make the explanation though?

Oh, I don’t know. I seldom bother. There are a lot of patients that— there are a lot of patients, you explain the patter to them. You tell them what you want and what these various words mean. And when you’ve told them this, the theory has just escaped them utterly. But they will do, then, and they will put into practice the words. They know by “somatic” that you mean a pain or a pressure or something or other and that you’re calling it a somatic because you don’t like to use the word “pain.” They understand this.

Male voice: If these terms are explained to them won’t the analytical mind pick it up and understand it whether the “I” does or not?

That’s the very peculiar thing. There is a deeper level of understanding that you’re talking to. And after that you get cooperation. But he doesn’t understand it. And he will sit there and look at you dully about the whole thing and about that time you flip him this way and flip him that way And after a while if you don’t watch it, he will become sort of a puppet in your hands.

You’ll say, “Your right arm is now going to lift.” And it will go right up in the air. Because you’ve got altitude now You are doing things that he doesn’t understand. They’re quite easy to understand but he just doesn’t quite understand them.

That is, “I” as far he’s concerned doesn’t understand them at this time. If the file clerk understands them ever, then he as “I” will eventually understand them. I’ve worked a case all the way through without this patter, without any explanation and had the guy batting along, hitting bouncers, running into denyers, running into forget-its, no understanding at all of what he was doing. No recognition of it, no false four off the case either. No laughter because of the ridiculousness of the thing. The analytical mind never latching on to any part of it. He doesn’t know what’s going on. And after he has run in this fashion for a while, all of a sudden one day he’s more accessible. You can talk to him more easily, then maybe explain something to him. He gets brighter.

Male voice: You are—you are all the time reducing engrams though.

Mm-hm! Oh, yes. You’re working just as you would as an auditor except you’re not using maybe all the terminology. You’re not getting the cooperation which you might get sometimes. This is nowhere more true than when you’re working somebody who has an advertised IQ of 70.

Male voice: Oh.

You can work such a patient and you can start bringing his IQ up along the line and it will get up to normal or bright normal.

Male voice: Well, where you re working with a case with a high IQ, good intellectual grasp, just doesn’t get along with the highbrows—to batter that in with first a demonstration, then some explanation, then . . .

You’ve been going up against a self-control mechanism, if you’re interested in that.

Male voice: Right.

Yeah, well, that’s a self-control mechanism. That’s friction.

Male voice: Battering away and breaking that . . .

Self-control mechanism, that’s what you break there.

Female voice: Would it waste everyone else’s time for me to ask you to explain how one would get a self-control mechanism?

Imagine an engram which says “control yourself.” Now you try to control the guy. Or like this chap with the Buerger’s disease, he’s got one that says, “I can handle this myself. I have to handle this myself. And somebody sits down and tries to audit him. By the way, oh, are these things easy to spot.

You occasionally get one coming up like this: the person knows your patten He knows Dianetics. So you say, “Go to the denyer” and the fellow gives you a bouncer. “Go to a forgetter mechanism” and at this moment he gives you a misdirector. The file clerk isn’t that dumb. But the self-control mechanism is intervening in there. So just start him in on the basis, “Who used to be interested in you not ever getting excited, or so on?” “I guess it was uh . . . Mother, I guess.” “Now, who was it, who was it?” “Well . . . it’s my grandmother! Heh-heh. My grandmother, yeah, that’s right.” “Well, can you remember an incident where she told you to control yourself?” He thinks for a while, “Yes.” Male voice: This is remembering and not actually moving on the time track.

Ah yeah, this is the—this is just a method of shooting the case full of holes so it will work, trying to restore a sense of reality, trying to do a few things with it.

Male voice: That’s part of the diagnosis.

Now, that’s what I’m going into right now. You ask what a self-control mechanism is, you just find out . . . Imagine what would happen in hypnosis if you had a person there and the hypnotist said, “Now, you can control yourself and you can do what you want with yourself.” In other words, an autohypnosis demon circuit installed. Now, the analytical mind can control itself and does do a beautiful job of it. Now we put an artificial mechanism into it to make this stet, to always be in force. And you get such oddities as a person getting locks from every word he utters. And where the auditor tells him to do something, the somatic strip stops working, your cooperation goes down, so on.

You’ll find somebody who has read the book—oh, and you will enter this one too. The fellow’s read the book and he starts down the track, and then one of the first things he starts to say, “Ah, yes, a denyer. Uh-huh. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” You haven’t told him anything. You just told him to go back to the earliest moment of pain or discomfort. “Oh yes, a denyer. I don’t know, I don’t know. That isn’t it, that isn’t it. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t . . . I hate you, I hate you. I hate . . . That’s what it is, that’s what it is. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it . . .” And you look at this guy and you say, “Run. Just run.” And then the next thing you know he’s running engrams right out of the book. Let him run a few. He isn’t getting anyplace.

You remember a case of that, by the way—Conover. He’s not the first I’ve run into but I hope—I wish he were the last.

Well, I walked in on the next session and I saw Conover lying down with his auditress working on him. And he was going, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. No, that isn’t it. Uh . . .” Just getting noplace. What happens in a case like this: as long as the analytical mind can stay uppermost and in control and running through, autocontrol is all right. But in going through the incident enough times, the second he really gets into that incident, down goes the analyzer, down goes the self-control mechanism. It has restimulated an engram. And now he is off analytically and he just sort of wanders out of the thing and comes back on up into present time more or less, and finally settles down in one that he’s stuck himself in. You’ll work this case day after day with—if you don’t get the control mechanisms out of it, you can work this case out of this engram and out of that engram, he’s always stuck on the track.

Female voice: That’s only after he starts . . .

He starts running things all the time. He starts thinking about these things. He’s running them through his mind all the time.

Female voice: He says, “Well there, it’s important to handle that first.” Mm-hm. This sort of thing is spottable from the standpoint, “Has he ever been hypnotized?” And so forth. You’ll get this sort of thing, “Is that autohypnosis at work?” If it’s autohypnosis, it’s probably lying on an actual engram if it were effective. So, “I have to do it myself. I just have to do it myself. I can’t get my mind off of it. I just have to do it myself. I can do this myself, now I’ve got to do this myself,” and so on. That will produce this spinning of engrams. A person will keep running them.

Now, the idea of going back to sleep, that as an engram phrase will send a person up and down and move him around on the time track when he is asleep. But self-control and autocontrol . . . You can find somebody who—in the patient’s past who was upset about getting excited and so on. Well, that’s the source of it. Get the dramatization of that person and then run it down. You’ll wind up with the autocontrol mechanism.

Male voice: Ron, when you have a case who has three principal valences, each one a part of you or a part of me, you re a part of me and part of you and so on . . .

I heard about this engram. [gap] No, that wouldn’t make them take on that valence.

Male voice: Well, it makes them . . . “You’re just like everyone around you” would. But go ahead.

Male voice: All right, yes, there are three principal valences there, and things all through there that shoot him off into . . .

You know, a person can be in five valences simultaneously.

Male voice: Yes. And there s things there that are boosting him out and a strong autocontrol in each one of these . . .

Uh-huh.

Male voice: . . . three principals, plus . . .

I’d shoot the patient. (laughter) Male voice: . . . control with everything else that he happens to . . .

I just—I’d just shoot the patient. I wouldn’t . . . Who is that?

Female voice: Me! Last night I wished you could have, (laugh) Aw, heck. I understand that—your consternation there, you’re . . .

Male voice: Well, I know eventually, (laugh) but go ahead.

This is a matter of valences. Theory of valences is covered in the book: a person gets into somebody else’s valence. Well, it’s a discovery here that evidently sonic, emotional, all the rest of the shut-offs occur on a valence situation as well as a computational situation. In other words, there’s a mechanical as well as a computational. In the past, the trick was to get a person as early as possible and get him to run out all the perceptics out of an engram. This more or less automatically did this trick. But it was doing something that there—you didn’t have complete understanding of. Now, by gaining complete understanding of this theory we can throw him around and get him out of these valences before we get him into the basic area, which is very helpful.

Male voice: Oh yeah, this Christian Science one, this one—you re one with everybody you meet.

Ah, yeah.

Male voice: This is the . . .

Yeah.

Male voice: . . . principle, I mean, one of the . . .

Any Christian Scientists present?

Female voice: My family were. I’m not.

Male voice: It’s in the engram bank.

It’s interesting to note that the preponderance of insanities in institutions which are labeled with a religious label—that is, insane people—but Catholicism is at the low end of the scale and Christian Science is at the high end, on religions.

Female voice: Well those . . . There is no reality.

That’s right. Believe me.

Female voice: Do you think that’s because they provide their own institutions for that?

Yeah. Yeah, you’ve got something there. You really do have something there. I wouldn’t know any reason why it would be the reverse, because people are just people. Let’s—we won’t go into a religious connotation on this.

Male voice: Because it’s a denial of reality And I stand on this very blunt as far as I am concerned, personally—three cheers for religion except when it’s in the engram bank. There’s nothing wrong with religion. There’s a great deal wrong with blasphemy. You can read it right in the book. That’s the stand, very safe political stand too. Actually, the one religion which seems to produce the healthiest frame of mind is the Quaker, the Society of Friends, quite interesting: individual self-determinism, cooperation, constructiveness, antichaotic practices.

Well, that isn’t getting any further on diagnosis.

Now, the first thing on diagnosis—who’s got a slip? One of those. You got one. Okay. Now I am going to do a complete diagnosis on Mr. Muhl. If you’ll just come up here, we can grab a chair.

I want to show you how much can be understood about the patient just by asking him questions. Anybody got a pencil or pen?

Male voice: Here you go.

Second male voice: Yeah, I got one.

Now, we have here a slip of paper which you as professional auditors might do very well to either have duplicated or get some off of Mrs. Barr. If you’re going to have a lot of these cases and so on, a slip of this type is very definitely of great assistance.

Now we’re just going to go through a straight statement on this. Give me your name in full.

PC: Edward Muhl.

LRH: M-u-h-l?

PC: M-u-h-l LRH: Your date of birth?

PC: February 17, 1907.

LRH: Okay. There’s an address on here which we won’t worry about right at this moment. Your foreign language background? Your parents speak any other language than English?

PC: No.

LRH: No. You have a grandmother?

PC: Yes.

LRH: She speak English?

PC: Yes.

LRH: Your—any nurses in the family who might have spoken some other language? Any relatives who might have spoken another one? Any Spanish?

PC: Great’ grandmother.

LRH: Great-grandmother would have spoken what?

PC: German.

LRH: Ah yes.

Female voice: Pardon me now, Edward, didn’t your father speak German when you were a boy or had he told you that he did?

PC: He understands a little bit, he never spoke it. He knew a few phrases perhaps but he doesn’t speak it.

LRH: Have you ever had any electric shocks? Not—this isn’t shock therapy, just electric shocks? Have you ever been shocked?

PC: Only slight ones.

LRH: And how about electric shock therapy?

PC: No.

LRH: Now we want to know if you’ve ever been hypnotized.

PC: Mildly.

LRH: You’ve been hypnotized mildly?

PC: Yes, that was . . .

LRH: I don’t know how one could be hypnotized that way.

PC: Well, it was tried. It was tried. Let me explain, it was tried on me and I suppose I yielded to it to an extent. But I never went all the way . . .

LRH: How old were you?

PC: Forty- two.

LRH: Who did it?

PC: A psychologist.

LRH: Did anybody ever hypnotize you when you were a boy?

PC: Not that I recall LRH: This is particularly important.

PC: If I understand your question, you mean an attempt to hypnotize, not an accidental paralysis or . . . no.

LRH: [to class] I want something—I want to call your attention to something on hypnotism; we cover and cover the subject. It will work out that what the patient says about having been hypnotized is about as reliable as a five-horse parlay tip, bought down at the bookstore. Because the standard forgetter mechanism on hypnotism can wipe out a whole sequence all the way through.

Female voice: Is that true even if you have never at any moment lost your own consciousness during a session? I mean your own consciousness during . . .

LRH: Ah, wouldn’t have if it’s—if you’ve been hypnotized thoroughly and the hypnotist has decided to do a real bang-up job, you’re not going to have any recollection.

Female voice: How about autohypnosis?

LRH: Autohypnosis is covered here, [to pc] Do you autohypnotize yourself? Can you?

PC: I don’t think so.

LRH: All right. [to class] Let me put this before you, though. That I have had to date several cases which would not break, cases which were quite upset, disturbed, confused and so on. And we suddenly wade into them and we find hidden attempts at hypnotism which were successful. But they are hidden and they stay hidden. And some of these were very interesting, they were done by perverts and for purposes of their own. And the content in that period of hypnosis was enough to completely destroy a person’s sense of reality. Very interesting gimmicks.

Now, hypnosis can also be performed in conjunction with an operation. This is fairly standard. One that I know of just comes to mind is a nymphomaniac nurse in a hospital who would catch the patient—I found two patients from the same nurse, she was operating in the same family—and she’d catch the patient just as the patient was coming out of ether and was hypnotically very accessible. Would put them to sleep and say, “At any time in the future I utter a key word, you will go to sleep and you won’t know what’s happened in the period.” Great stuff. These—both these people had the second dynamic blocked, blocked on the order of smoking tires on the pavement. Really stopped right there. So don’t overlook the importance of this sort of thing. All anesthetics can be administered in an hypnotic way. And many of them are. It’s quite standard practice. So you may get hypnosis joined in with an actual operation. Then, if a person has said to you, “I can’t be hypnotized, several times it has been tried,” then you get pretty alert. Because a certain percentage of these cases, even if a small percent, have been hypnotized and have been told during that period of hypnosis they cannot thereafter be hypnotized. So the fact that they now can’t be hypnotized and yet they look to you like they might have been hypnotized at some time, I mean they look hypnotizable, there’s something very funny.[to pc] All right. Now, mildly by a psychologist. Hm?

PC: I thought it was mildly LRH: Mm-hm, he probably said it was. Okay. I wonder what else he said. These guys can run on and on and on and on and on. “I’ll teach you to argue with me.” (laugh) “You’ll know now that Remarkable Andrew has been at work on you.” PC: It was attempted twice.

LRH: Was done twice.

PC: Attempted twice.

LRH: Twice.

PC: Didn’t work twice.

LRH: Okay. Now, how about anesthetics in operations?

PC: Yes.

LRH: How many—what’s your earliest operation that you know of?

PC: Nine years.

LRH: Nine years. What was it?

PC: Tonsillectomy.

LRH: A general anesthetic?

PC: General.

LRH: General. And what other operations?

PC: Hemorrhoidectomy.

LRH: General?

PC: General.

LRH: Okay. What else? How old were you then?

PC: Twenty-eight.

LRH: Twenty-eight years. Now, what other?

PC: About thirty days later another of the same thing. [gap] LRH: Were you in the war?

PC: No.

LRH: How about automobile accidents?

PC: Two, I believe. Minor. No injuries.

LRH: Two accidents. No injuries. And let’s take up now childhood illnesses.

PC: A long list.

LRH: Do you know when the earliest illness was?

PC: I had, uh . . . respiratory ills when I was a child.

LRH: Respiratory, huh?

PC: Yes.

LRH: Respiratory ills, you know this—you have a bad birth?

PC: I don’t know.

LRH: Your Mama ever complain about it?

PC: No, she did not. As a matter of fact, she said it was easy.

LRH: Oh, she did? Three cheers. What are you doing with respiratory ills? All right. Now, what do you feel is your chief complaint?

PC: It’s still respiratory catarrh. No sinus trouble though.

LRH: Have to find out how you spell all these fancy medical words.

PC: That’s just a—that’s my own word. No sinus trouble. No—no lung trouble.

LRH: Any chronic psychosomatic disorders?

PC: Dermatitis.

LRH: Dermatitis. Ah yes. Very, very important. Where is the dermatitis?

PC: Left hand.

LRH: And dermatitis. Left hand. Mm-hm. All right. Is your mother living?

PC: Dead.

LRH: Mother is dead. How old were you when she died?

PC: Thirty-five. No, I was about thirty-one. Thirty-eight.

LRH: Did you feel very bad about it?

PC: I did, yes.

LRH: Okay. Is your father living or dead?

PC: He’s living.

LRH: What your mother die of?

PC: Blood clot in the brain.

LRH: What’s your father—is your father living?

PC: Lining.

LRH: Father is living. What’s his chronic illness?

PC: Rheumatism. It’s not bad, it’s not the serious one, it’s just . . .

LRH: He has rheumatics?

PC: Yes. In one arm.

LRH: Now, your mother’s mother? Did you ever know her?

PC: Oh yes, very well LRH: Oh, you did. She’s dead?

PC: Dead.

LRH: Dead. How old were you when she died?

PC: The same age as my mother—I was thirty-one.

LRH: Thirty-one years?

PC: Yes.

LRH: They died simultaneously?

PC: Practically.

LRH: Yeah? Gee. What did she die of?

PC: Oh, just old age I believe. It was complicated of course by . . .

LRH: Old age.

PC: . . . diabetes.

LRH: How about your mother’s father? Yeah, we got. . . Yeah, your mother’s father, your grandfather on your mother’s side?

PC: He died when I was a year and a half old.

LRH: Mm-hm. Dead, one and a half years. Of what?

PC: Not too sure.

LRH: Your father’s mother?

PC: Dead.

LRH: How old were you when she died?

PC: I really don’t know. It was close to about five years ago.

LRH: Now, how old were you? Just about five years ago in nineteen forty . . . ?

PC: Yes. Say I was about thirty-seven, thirty-eight.

LRH: Mm-hm. And your father’s father?

PC: Alive.

LRH: Yeah? Gosh.

PC: Yeah.

LRH: What did they make him out of?

PC: I don’t know.

LRH: Do you know what your father’s mother died of ?

PC: Dropsy, maybe.

LRH: Now, how about your aunts? Any aunts dead?

PC: Yes. One dead.

LRH: One dead, what’s her—how old were you when she died?

PC: This was a ways before, and I’m sorry I can’t remember. It was about, I would guess, twelve years ago. No, it was longer than that. It was fifteen years ago. That’s as close as I can get.

LRH: How about your uncles?

PC: All alive.

LRH: And siblings?

PC: All alive. One sister.

LRH: And your wife is alive, did you have some former wife?

PC: Yes.

LRH: And she, alive or dead?

PC: Alive.

LRH: Alive but very much divorced.

PC: Very much. Two.

LRH: Two before this?

PC: Two before this.

LRH: Both of them alive?

PC: Both of them alive.

LRH: Okay. You’ve been in therapy, haven’t you?

PC: Yes.

LRH: Have you ever had a run?

PC: Just one.

LRH: Did you have any sonic?

PC: Yes.

LRH: You had sonic?

PC: At least that was my. . .I wasn’t too sure.

LRH: Okay. Nobody’s going to argue with you.

PC: I think I did.

LRH: Tell you right now this is a lousy slip. I’ve never seen it before. But it will serve. Okay. There’s no room on here for great-grandparents? How about your great-grandparents? Seems to be a long-lived family.

PC: I only knew one.

LRH: Hm?

PC: I only knew one.

LRH: You knew one.

PC: Yes.

LRH: And what kind of a fellow was he?

PC: It was a woman.

LRH: Woman?

PC: Great-grandmother. She spoke very little English. I didn’t know her well. Saw her a few times but at family gatherings.

LRH: What did she think of you?

PC: Well, I was one among about eighty grand or great-grandchildren, it seems to me, I don’t recall any specific—any connection with her.

LRH: Okay. Well now, let’s go into this a little more definitely. What’s worrying you?

PC: Nothing at the moment.

LRH: Huh?

PC: I’m not worried.

LRH: You’re not worried about anything?

PC: I don’t think so.

LRH: What has been worrying you in the recent past?

PC: Getting to New York is the only thing I can say.

LRH: Mm-hm.

PC: Perhaps I’m putting a special. . .

LRH: Who used to tell you to be calm and not worry?

PC: Nearly everybody.

LRH: Nearly everybody said be calm and not worry. Uh-huh. Who specifically used to tell. . .

PC: My father.

LRH: Your father? What did he say to you?

PC: “Worrying doesn’t do you any good.” LRH: “Worrying doesn’t do you any good” and so forth. You remember this?

PC: Yes.

LRH: You remember a specific incident of him saying so?

PC: I remember him talking about it over there. I went back into this, yes. I hadn’t thought about it. This is a very common expression.

LRH: Uh-huh. All right. How about “Keep calm.” PC: Yes, self-control.

LRH: Self-control. Who used to talk about self-control?

PC: My father, and I think my grandmother.

LRH: Your father and possibly your grandmother.

PC: I think this, I think so.

LRH: All right. And your grandmother. Which grandmother is that?

PC: Paternal.

LRH: Is she the one that’s alive or dead?

PC: Dead.

LRH: She talked about self-control, hm? And also “Don’t worry”?

PC: “Don’t worry.” LRH: That’s where he got it, huh? “Don’t worry” and self-control. Okay. Now, what would happen to you if you got nervous or excited or showed emotion?

PC: Well, I don’t think anything would happen to me.

LRH: What would your father think about it if you did?

PC: Might be ashamed of it. My inclination was to say he would be—he would be very understanding but I still would have the—I still would have a . . .

LRH: What did he used to say? What did he used to say to your mother on the subject? What did your father used to say to your mother’s mother about getting excited or emotional?

PC: Nothing specifically.

LRH: But did he say something?

PC: Well yes, he was always trying to abate excitement.

LRH: Mm-hm.

PC: Or concern, anxiety.

LRH: Mm-hm. Do you remember one incident when he tried to do this?

PC: It seems to me that I do, yes.

LRH: Can you remember it specifically? Where was it?

PC: It was in the kitchen of the house we lived in until I was about five years old.

LRH: And what was he saying, more or less, just conceptual?

PC: “There’s no use worrying about it, Gertie.” Seems that’s substantially it.

LRH: And how about her being emotional? What would he have said if she’d become very emotional?

PC: I don’t know exactly.

LRH: Did she ever become very emotional?

PC: Yes, she worried a great deal.

LRH: Mm-hm, PC: Showed anxieties.

LRH: But he said not to worry?

PC: That’s right.

LRH: Where’s this put you?

PC: This puts me in a position, I presume, of trying to—trying to accomplish this command or injunction or . . .

LRH: Well, let’s think about it for a minute. How about Mama, Mama very worried, nervous, upset about something and Papa saying, “Don’t worry”?

PC: I’ve got a problem then.

LRH: But let’s remember one time when it happened.

PC: All right.

LRH: You remember a time?

PC: Yes.

LRH: What were they saying to each other?

PC: He wanted to take a different job and she was concerned about the—what would happen to the family if this didn’t work out.

LRH: Uh-huh.

PC: And this got quite emotional.

LRH: Uh-huh.

PC: Both sides.

LRH: Mm-hm.

PC: And it was within my hearing. And I was very frightened, because as I say it was quite emotional. And let’s see, I had a feeling I was—I mean I could have described it as panic.

LRH: Mm-hm. And? Do you remember the incident?

PC: Yes.

LRH: Where were you at the time?

PC: I was inside the house, within hearing, in bed.

LRH: In bed.

PC: Mm-hm.

LRH: Were you awakened by this row?

PC: It seems to me I was not completely asleep, I was certainly close to it. I don’t know if I was awakened or not.

LRH: You don’t know if you were.

PC: No.

LRH: Mm-hm. As a matter of fact if you say you have a problem on your hands, it becomes much less of a problem.

PC: If I say that.

LRH: No. You say you had a problem on your hands. I say that—it’s not—take a look at it. It becomes much less of a problem.

PC: Oh, yes.

LRH: Who had something wrong with their left hand?

PC: I think it was my mother.

LRH: What?

PC: Same thing, but it was called something different at the time. A word like “petta,” at least that’s what the doctor diagnosed it.

LRH: Uh-huh. And . . .

PC: Itchy.

LRH: Yeah.

PC: Inflammation, would cause the fingers to peel a bit.

LRH: When did that come on with you?

PC: This came on about three years before her death, about 1935, I . . .

LRH: Was she ill there a short time before her death or three years or anything like that before her death?

PC: No.

LRH: She wasn’t ill?

PC: No.

LRH: But about three years before? Now, who died three years before her death?

PC: I can’t be sure of this. The only one it could have been would be aunt.

LRH: What did she have wrong with her left hand?

PC: Nothing that I know of.

LRH: Nothing?

PC: Nothing.

LRH: Uh-huh.

PC: Maybe I’m wrong with the dates someplace.

LRH: Well, you can straighten those out.

PC: Yes.

LRH: Very easily. All right. You say you probably didn’t have a bad birth.

Your mother never told you so.

PC: What she actually said was that most women made a great deal too much of childbearing but as a matter of fact in her experience it was relatively easy.

LRH: Mm-hm. Fine. Gee, you may have a setup here, as a case. All right.

I just got the idea you were thinking of yourself, all of yourself as a case.

PC: All of myself?

LRH: Uh-huh.

PC: No. I don’t. I . . .

LRH: There’s only one very small part of you that’s a case.

PC: I think that would be my own considered opinion too. Not that there aren’t things that are impossible for me to deal with . . . [gap] . . . I haven t been sick.

LRH: Mm-hm.

PC: I used to be sick a great deal as a child for a great many years . . .

LRH: Okay. Whose valence is it?

PC: Father?

Female voice: Both, isn’t it?

Male voice: Both of them. Father because of the self-control and Mother because of the somatic.

Female voice: Yeah, and the worry factor, too.

LRH: Yeah. So we’ve got a problem here that says, “This valence, a winning valence, is saying to the other valence, This is the worrying valence.’” Female voice: Yeah!

LRH: So who used to tell you you were like your mother?

PC: Practically nobody.

LRH: Nobody used to tell you you were like your mother. Who used to say you were like your father?

PC: Everybody.

LRH: Everybody said you were like your father. Did your father ever tell your mother she was like her mother?

PC: I don’t know. I—I suppose so.

LRH: You suppose so.

PC: They were. [to class] Now, there you would have a—move over to this valence, then everybody moves him over to this valence, and now you got the two valences. Tock, tock, tock. Okay. That can be disentangled fairly easily. The sooner the quicker. Expect him cleared by next Friday, a week at . . . (LRH and audience laugh) Okay. Thank you.

Female voice: Thank you.

Well, at this moment on the case you would have completed it this far. You would then and there go in upon the level, first of trying to knock a few of these “You’re just like your fathers” into view. Try to find out who said that Mama was like her mama, which would be a sort of a—that would probably be in the prenatal bank. Then we’d start to hit for some of these emotional charges, see if we couldn’t discover them in late life. Probably be very productive, spring some of the material into view, get some charge off the case. But the chances of doing that are not very good. Because he’s in two valences . . .

Male voice: Self-control . . . and one of them says “self-control.” So if they didn’t discharge there might be one there heavy enough though so that it just goes wham! Sometimes they do this. And all—in spite of all engram computations, the charge may be so heavy that it bleeds fast. Never overlook the fact that a charge may, in spite of all these other computations. Then in order to make the case at all workable, it would probably be best to start picking up as engrams the first times that somebody said he was like his father. Now, you pick that up and you could slue him over then, out of his father’s valence, which would have a tendency to deintensify the self-control mechanism just as such.

The next thing that you would do, you would then have a listing of the words that Father used. You’d get a nice text there. You know darn well that that will be in the prenatal bank.

Now the next thing that you could do on it . . .

Female voice: You would use that then to get down into the prenatal area if they were reluctant to enter the prenatal area. Is that . . . ?

Oh sure. But about this time you would start very definitely to get into the basic area. Try to get into that basic area. If you can get into the basic area early enough, get out, let us say, the sperm sequence. Maybe use the system of a skip—settling him in a pleasurable sexual moment without him telling you anything about it whatsoever, but just make sure he’s settled there and make sure it’s pretty well developed, and then send him straight back to the sperm sequence and see if you couldn’t get it out.

Now, if this still fails, you’re going to have enough self-control mechanisms in the bank there that you’re going to have to turn a shotgun loose on him.

Male voice: I had an interesting experience of this sperm sequence, Ron, where I got a case that was running beautifully. Got down at first chain and the basic in the first chain. And then I got them into the sperm sequence, ran the sperm sequence out, the time came for that, I had to redo it another time so we came back the second time through it and ran it through again and one of the conclusions—conclusive factors here was the person was constantly shifting back and forth from Mother’s valence to Father’s valence to her valence. And finally at the conclusion I said, “Well, how many valences are there here that you re working with?” She says, “There’s number one, number two on Father, and number three, myself” I said, “What number are you? What number is your valence?” “Number one valence.” I said, “All right. Keep it number one valence.” And, my God, the release we got there was just tremendous.

You can . . .

Male voice: That valence thing was (snap) thrown out . . .

You can persuade a person over without directly commanding him into a valence by just persuading him to feel the tactile. Now, you know what kind of a tactile it ought to be. So just coax him into feeling the tactile. Don’t go at this on the basis of—if you really want to make your work swift and easy—don’t go at it on the tentative, testing, experimental basis, that type of frame of mind of saying, “Well now, if he is really here then the tactile will eventually show up,” that sort of an attitude. Because if you want to test it, take somebody and test it. And if you want to roll therapy on people, why, use everything you can in order to get therapy accomplished. Anything’s valid except a positive suggestion, hypnotic positive suggestion used in its technical sense of trying to put something into his engram bank in order to alleviate his troubles. [gap] It takes people time to travel on the track and get into something and get someplace. And by the way, one of the best tests I know of, testing whether or not a person is in present time has nothing to do with age flash, it has to do with the fact that you’re running an engram, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and he’s gone through it fifteen times, blah, blah, blah. You say, “Come up to present time.” He goes pop. “Okay. I’m in present time.” No, he’s not.

In order to come up to present time, it would be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. “All right. Come up to present time.” (pause) He’s traveled. There’s actual travel involved. So it would work the same way going down.

Male voice: Well, even after she had gotten there . . .

As far as you were concerned she had gotten there. Evidently attention units were still on the way. So that you weren’t yet in contact. It would be the same thing. And if you will notice a patient right after he’s come off of a trip on the line—by the way, I’ve noticed, still keep noticing that patients when they come up to present time keep expecting people to greet them. So I generally say hello. But it will take a while for all the units to get out up into present time. You’ll notice a patient’s rather groggy. And then one by one, by this unit analogy, a unit will pop up and then another one and then another one. The first thing you know he’s getting more and more alert. Well, when he first came up to present time he only dragged ten or fifteen units up there. And pretty soon, why, there’s eighteen up there.

All right. Demonstrating here a diagnostic procedure which, as it develops, is very likely to give you maximum information on the case. I have been faced here in communicating Dianetics to—I am continually faced with taking it out of an art classification as much as I can and translating it to you. And I watch people under work and so on. What’s getting better here is mainly, as we go, a lot of the apparent development is actually just a translation, a more concise way of putting it.

Now, in order to transmit and communicate, it is very often necessary to find out what the hell you’re talking about. You know, that’s a great help when you’re trying to tell somebody, is to know. So you have to look it over more carefully and you have to find out a little bit better. And in the process of finding it out a little bit better, by golly, things get a little more workable. There’s nothing like trying to relay what one is doing to clarify what he is doing in his own mind. So the research department—the main work being carried on by the research department right now is strictly communication, actually. But when we try to communicate, all of a sudden we have to have more data, more clearly stated. So the thing gets refined. I have been looking at Dianetics now for a long time. Dianetics was in a workable form three years ago; a very workable form. It was in a rather clumsy workable form about four years ago. But it would work. And at any stage during these last years you could have drawn a line across it and said this is it. And at any time you could have written a book on the subject. But God help you if you’d written the book two weeks later. Because it keeps increasing in terms of precision and conciseness. It will resolve itself out eventually because we know what, precisely what we’re trying to accomplish in the final effort. So, what are faster methods of accomplishing that?

Therefore as you go through this course, if one week passes by without some new method of communicating it to you or without an actual new method of doing therapy showing up, why, you can become very disgruntled, because Dianetics will have bogged down. That’s right.

I call this analogy into view with you again, that in 1894 the electrical equations of James Clerk Maxwell were in existence and so was Freud’s libido theory. Here in 1950 we have electronic computers, we have radar, radio, all manner of electrical gimmicks, and an atom bomb. We’ve got atomic fission. That’s since 1894, and we still have Freud’s libido theory. That’s the comparative progress in the fields.

Dianetics is a very young science. And, my God, it acts like one of these high-powered racehorses that’s got the bit in its teeth and it’s really on its way, because it keeps developing, developing, developing, more and more. The more brains work on this thing, the more ideas people get on the thing, any moment it’s workable. But gosh, let’s do it faster, let’s do it better. I think in five years at the outside we will probably have a one-shot Clear. I hope so. If Dobbs would get off his duff and think about it a little bit. But we will have, even though we have a one-shot Clear, we still have enormous problems in the fields of sociology, education, various developments, medicine, life force, all kinds of things. We can have a one-shot Clear and still have a horizon that would be in Dianetics utterly and completely unlimited.

I want to go over this diagnosis before we knock off here. Just sketch it . . . [gap] I want to demonstrate to you the various parts then of this diagnosis. Number one is get all the background that you can get out of the patient on a straight memory basis. Number two, get the patient remembering on a straight circuit. Because on that straight circuit he will start validating. What one remembers on that circuit is real. That’s real. So you’re restoring his sense of reality right there. Furthermore you are in that operation actually doing therapy. That’s good therapy. I don’t know how Mr. Muhl feels about just the few minutes he was sitting here and so on. But there is a possibility, though I didn’t drive it too hard, that it might have eased off something with you.

Male voice: Yes, it clarified some things.

Yeah. You will find patients many times who want to do nothing—that you want to do nothing with. Somebody walks in and he says, “I understand you’re an auditor—that there thing, Dianetics. Yeah.” So you say to the patient so-and-so and so-and-so. We won’t worry too much about a full-parade diagnosis like this if we don’t intend to take this patient on. So we can deliver to this patient a fifteen-minute treatment that runs just exactly like the treatment I’ve given you there. It’s ask him to remember.

You’ll find many patients who come to you, say, “I’ve been worried about being so terribly inadequate, I know that life just rejects me,” something like that. Well, instead of posing an enormous computational problem to you, all you have to do is find out who said it. And we get it on a straight wire. Because it will work fast, because you’ll knock out some locks. You just knock out some locks with the straight wire. And so he has—he thinks it over and you try to force his memory into various channels in order to find out who said it. “Who acted like this? Who did that? Who disapproved of you? Who used to shove you away?” One patient that I remember of a couple years ago, I asked him bluntly, “You say you feel rejected, your mother rejects you and so on. When did she reject you?” I’ll be a son of a gun if he didn’t come up with an eight-months-old incident. It was just bang! It was right there. And he was—he just acted stunned for a moment. And then he said, “Why, yes. There was a terrific noise and . . .” He was lying there in bed alongside of his mother and his father got out of bed and went out to see what the noise was. I’ve seen this incident in several different forms in patients. But the child turned over and began to nurse the mother who had weaned the child about four months before. But in the child’s fear he just sought this comfort and Mama laughed, made fun of him and shoved him over to the other side of the bed, with a terrific charge of fear going on at that moment of what was the noise and being awakened. Father comes back in and he laughs about what the noise was. But the child thought the father was laughing at him. That was the way it added up. And this went on a straight circuit and it was remembered and it knocked out the key-in of the first solid rejection by Mama. It desensitized all the rest of the locks. Because this was addressed to him personally. It took, I would say, at the outside eight to nine minutes for the whole treatment. And this patient started walking around on the clouds. The case, of course, went very rocky up and down after that. But it was very startling, the enormous amount of relief.

Now, he’s worried about rejection. It isn’t computational, it’s somebody pushing him away. If he says he’s worried about rejection, you be sure that he has picked that up either from, one, some school of mental healing, or two, from his actual engram bank. Now, find out if he has picked this up from some school of mental healing like Freudian psychology, psychoanalysis, or on the other side from his own bank: “Who used to talk about rejection?” One fellow I found, by the way, was talking about rejection, had a mother who wrote. And all Mama would say—she would go into a complete fit if she got a rejection slip. She’d say, “All I get are rejects. Everybody rejects,” so on. And it (snap, snap, snap) got into the bank around when he was sick and a little baby and it had been going on prenatally. But by knocking out its key-ins on a straight-wire circuit, the fellow felt all of a sudden enormously better. So there is a quick little line of therapy. Somebody said it. It came from somewhere. This person is dealing with some sort of a computation. You’re not giving the person insight into his case by telling him what is wrong with him. You’re just making him remember specific things and those specific things you’re asking him to remember directly are locks. Just by being remembered they can’t stand the light of day. So bang, out they will go, if you can attain them. Twenty, thirty percent of your cases you can attain them.

Whenever you want to turn on a sense of reality in a patient, he has no sense of reality, start in on straightwire, because that’s validating. This doesn’t mean that you don’t then enter therapy and just keep right on going in therapy. But it means—does mean that you, by making him remember what has happened to him, as therapy progresses, will get more and more data which will seem valid to him. Otherwise he is liable to get into a state where he’s perfectly content to act as a sort of a puppet. With the engrams coming up, he recites the engrams, there’s no feeling of reality to the thing. He goes on through the thing. The pain that goes on, the pain goes down and deintensifies, he’s perfectly willing just to slug, slug, slug. It’s not real. So get him to—get him to remember it.

Male voice: And after you blow the locks you go after the cause.

Hm?

Male voice: After you blow these locks with the guy, you re trying to . . .

All right. And after you blow the engram, after you just reduce an engram or erase an engram there will still be locks in place. Those will go out automatically as the case progresses. They don’t have to be addressed as engrams because they’re not engrams. You will find a concatenation of locks will generate a terrific charge of laughter on some cases. They’ll laugh and laugh and laugh. But they’re laughing off locks. But now, you turn this patient around and get him remembering these locks and that is the touch which opens up his life to his own inspection. He can do this all by himself. Don’t let him go into engrams all by himself but divert his attention from remembering what Mama said or what Mama said to Papa in the engrams, divert his attention of that by making him assignments of remembering. Tell him to remember. Say you set him up an assignment: “Remember . . . let’s, between now and the next session, how about you remembering all the houses you lived in? Let’s see how early we can get on the number of houses you lived in.” Golly, more stuff will spring into view. By taking out the engram we remove the tiger. Consider it like this: a curtain, a memory occlusion. Behind this curtain sits a tiger. If the person remembered this directly, because there’s physical pain and unconsciousness in it, he would part the curtain and find himself wrastling with the tiger. Well, the mind has done this a few times so it doesn’t go into those areas anymore. But it will black out four years in order to occlude one ten-minute period of time. So you take out the tiger. And now you’ve still got a curtain. And now you ask him to remember. And now the curtain parts because he can eventually be coaxed to peek behind it. “Is there any tiger in there now?” No tiger. Okay. All of a sudden four years’ worth of memory just goes bling! Just like the lights turned on after the war.

This is about all I have to say about it. I want to make your lot as auditors as smooth, make your touch as certain as I possibly can. The more results which you see yourself achieving, the more self-confidence you’re going to exude.

One gentleman that I trained was a very, very nervous auditor, extremely nervous. He didn’t know what Dianetics would do or what it wouldn’t do or what he was supposed to do. He could read all the theory. He had a lot of “can’t believe its” in the bank, too. But he was willing to work right along because it made sense and so on. But he was mostly nervous about his own ability. And then one fine day he got turned loose on a psychotic. Found himself with his hands full. He blew out about three suicide charges out of the psychotic. Bang, bang, bang, bang, wet them all down. They disappeared. The person came up to present time, a normal human being. Ah, what it did for this person’s self-confidence! If a balloon had come along and hooked him up into the air he wouldn’t have been lifted higher.

So, get cases, look at them. All I can do is to stand by and advise you in any way I can about how to run them. You get their specific problems, your case will resolve faster.

The new students here should, for the first little while at least (except with their teammates, if they want to), observe the auditors who are doing auditing, who have been here for quite a while, observe them work.

Female voice: How is that made available to us?

That’s made available by the simple matter of the older auditors have been assigned the younger.

Female voice: Do you have to stay with them?

No. But they should make sure that their people do get in observation, do get in therapy, do bring it off Female voice: You mean watch other people, is that what you mean? You don’t mean . . .

That’s right, observe.

Female voice: Yes.

Observe the thing in action. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go ahead and audit if you get a chance. But observe the thing in action. Within two weeks if a psychotic walks in in a screaming fit, I expect to be able to take the youngest and newest student present and say, “Okay, there it goes,” with perfect self-confidence and perfect confidence on my part that that case is going to run along okay. You’ve just got two weeks to go, and the boom’s going to fall.

Male voice: Got a question there . . . For instance there are gentlemen here who have been in the course in June; I can with confidence assign to them anything that comes up and I know it’s going to come out all right.

Okay. Any more questions?

Male voice: Yes. In running the prenatal engrams, especially those near conception or immediately following I found in running the sperm dream, when you get the description . . .

Sperm sequence. Things change.

Male voice: A bringing up into—and seeing as color—the color changes . . .

Mm-hm.

Male voice: . . . and seeing—that is, in that way—what occurred. Is it dub-in or is it actually . . .

As far as I can find out, the sperm has cat eyes. That’s right. Always gives sensation of vision with the sperm, even though the person has no ESP dub-in. (Recording ends abruptly)