How to Resolve Stalled Cases (500928)
Date: 28 September 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Good evening.
Tonight we’re going to have a talk about stalled cases. I hope some of this data may be of benefit to you.
The main thing there is to know about stalled cases is that cases get stalled. That’s—is a little truism that sometimes misses people. A case will be running along very nicely and all of a sudden, boom, it’s not running. And a fellow thinks, “Well. . .” Very many things can happen. For instance, a person can get into a manic. That is the most interesting one.
John, back at the Foundation last winter, got into one of these manics. It was a little engram; it didn’t amount to an awful lot. It said, “I’m sure that the child will grow up to be a fine, upstanding young man.” This was a prenatal and whoever was running him got him back down the track and clipped this thing and John became a fine, upstanding young man. He became so upstanding that he almost broke his spine. The muscles across his back contracted and he was walking around there like this. And he wears glasses and they didn’t fit him suddenly. He had to take these things off and throw them away for the moment, and he couldn’t—he could see perfectly. It was a nice manic, all right. “Gee,” he’s saying, “now, I know how it feels. Now, I’m Clear.” And I let poor Johnny suffer along in this delusion for the better part of a day and then I decided something had to be done about it so I took him back down the track and knocked it out. And it was just that engram in the basic area—Grandma, an ally, saying, “Fine, upstanding young man.” Now, this should tell you that occasionally as you take a preclear up and down the track he’s liable to hit one of these manics. Manic is really a rather bad word for it because it’s a psychotic word, but all it is, is an engram which is highly complimentary. And any compliment which it contains in it will be obeyed to its most literal and fullest extent.
Once in a while, for instance, you will find somebody who has been (quote) cured (unquote) by snakeroot oil or something. What’s happened is that a manic has been restimulated. And you want to watch these manics because they will fade out, usually—when triggered in therapy, in processing—they’ll fade out in about three days.
You should know this about all of these engrams. Usually it takes from three to ten days for a case to settle. If an engram has been hit and restimulated badly, if the case is merely permitted to go about its business, the thing will settle out and you will have a—the case will balance. You can rebalance any case like this in about ten days. But if you keep forcing at the case continually over this period of ten days you’re going to get just a restimulation of more and more engrams. Something is going to happen like that. So if a case gets rather unmanageable to you, if you’ve hit an engram that wouldn’t reduce—you know, you’ve gotten down to about six months postconception; you’ve hit this engram and you’ve run it several times and all of a sudden you realize it’s not going to come up; you can’t find the basic that lies under the thing; you can’t find an earlier engram about it; it’s full of bouncers; you get yourself into what looks like an awful lot of trouble—let it settle for from three to ten days and it’ll come out all right.
It won’t come out all right if you are running your preclear in sedation. It won’t come out all right if you are running your preclear in amnesia-trance hypnosis. Once one of these things is restimulated while the preclear is under sedation—phenobarbital, sodium Amytal, any one of these various things—then, they—you’ve got bad news, very definitely, because it won’t settle out.
I should give you a word of warning on this in—if you’re ever called upon to work a psychotic in an institution, the common practice is using sedation. They want them quiet and so they’ll have a vast quantity of sodium Amytal in them. And you go in and you start to pick up engrams and every engram you hit, when it goes into restimulation, it’ll stay that way. So you want to be very leery of it. So the main thing in running cases is just this knowledge that as long as you’re running them on Standard Procedure, standard Dianetics, you’re not going to have anything that won’t settle out in from three to ten days.
It’s an interesting thing that this three-day period is sort of a standard period. If you run a preclear every four days, for instance, you will have gone across the three-day stretch, there, and the case will settle. If you want to work this case, then, every four days, it’s just like starting the case all over again every time. But if you work the case every two or three days, he will stay “in work” very easily.
It’s an interesting thing, colloquially speaking, that a time track gets “greased.” You return a person down the track enough times and back and forth across an area enough times, session after session, and you will eventually get the material you require out of a case. This is the saving grace of all of these stalled cases. If you will just keep working at it, you’ll get results.
What happens there is that he gets used to going up and down the track. He’s coming across various areas and the material which you’re running out of the case all brings it up a little more and a little higher. Attention units are more available. But if you wait for four days between runs you have trouble. This, incidentally, compares with the electric shock to this degree; electric shocks evidently are efficacious over a three-day period. There’s something about three days in the human mind. I don’t know what it is yet, but there is that period.
If you beat into recession an engram—let’s say you get into a late-life engram—you’re trying to pick up somebody’s exodontistry, ill advisedly, maybe, or let’s say you’re trying to pick up his mumps—a little, light thing, something like that—but it won’t lift. And you start going over it and over it and over it and over it and over it and all of a sudden it sort of disappears. It sort of fades away before your view. That’s a recession. You can do this with the case and three days later have a stalled case on your hands because this engram that you have beaten away at so many times comes back into full play in three days. It should be interesting to you.
This—it’s very easy to tell, by the way, the difference between a recession, a reduction and an erasure. You should know these things. A recession—it’s sort of like trying to kill a snake with a matchstick. Well, not quite that but it’s something there that you’re—you keep trying to push this thing out. You keep running it and running it and running it and running it. The somatic maybe gets worse and worse and worse and then gradually—oh, you have to run them sometimes seventy-five times to beat them into recession, a whole engram. It’s a very, very poor way to spend your time. If an engram isn’t showing marked change and the somatic isn’t disappearing after six or seven runs, there is something wrong with this engram.
That’s another reason why you should sample the beginnings of engrams before you run the whole engram. For instance, if you get the person into birth—you run them in from the beginning of birth—run it three or four times, just the first few contractions. Find out what happens. And if those appear and you can get the perceptics out of them and the somatics seem to be reducing a little bit, why, you could keep running that one section. If that one section will run into a reduction, the whole engram will run into a reduction. If the first end of it starts to beat into a recession, the whole engram will beat into a recession. And you don’t want these recessions because they are going to reappear on you. In other words, this reduction takes place; it’s unmistakable.
An erasure is unmistakable. Don’t ever ask a preclear under any circumstances whether or not the engram’s erased. He’ll always tell you yes. He starts over the engram, starts through the engram; if this thing is going to erase, new material will appear in this engram. Old material will drop out. And after, certainly, somewhere in the vicinity of ten recountings, if it’s going to erase it’ll then start disappearing. Often but not always yawns will come off. The unconsciousness comes off of it. That’s an erasure and that engram won’t come back again. Anything that is actually erased won’t come back.
In order to start getting erasures, you have to get into the basic area and start recounting engrams all the way up to present time, one by one. You miss one, and the engram here in the middle that you didn’t touch will hold up this next one. So you’ll get the odd situation of finding yourself—you’ve had erasures on the case and then all of a sudden you are getting nothing but reductions; they’re not erasing. You skipped an engram. You can reach that engram. The proper thing to do is to get that engram and erase it.
Sometimes engrams are held down by late grief charges. This is a primary cause of bog-down in a case. The fact that you’ve started an erasure, let’s say, and you’ve erased just so far and then suddenly strange things start to happen to these engrams. You touch one and it disappears. It doesn’t erase and it—the person starts skidding badly on the track and so on. You’ve brought into view somewhere up above this level a grief engram, and that grief engram is all ready to bleed, right there. So what you should do, you see, is to erase as long as you can erase and when you stop erasing go and try to find grief in the case; I mean, if you can’t erase any further. Works the other way around. If there’s grief available on the case, and you take all the grief you can get off the case, and all of a sudden you can’t get any more grief, go into the basic area and you’ll find there are engrams there ready to erase.
In other words, they go basic area to grief, back to basic area to grief, so on. There’s either grief or. And some of your cases that have stalled—I don’t think you’d consider any case really stalled if it just wouldn’t bring forth any more grief. The thing to do, though, if you get to the point where you’ve discharged several grief engrams, get down to the basic area and see what you can erase down there. That’s the best thing to do. And if you—erasing in the basic area and all of a sudden your case appears to stall or bog down, there’s a grief engram.
You see, every one of these grief engrams depends on physical pain. There has to be physical pain for there to be a grief charge. So, when you start running out a grief engram, it’s very usual to run the grief engram several times and then find actually the prenatal or the early physical pain engram it’s sitting on. As a matter of fact, every time you run a grief engram out, you can go down lower and find the physical pain engram it’s sitting on. That’s one of the clues on bogged cases. That’s the technical side of it.
Now, there are two other reasons why cases bog down. First and foremost is bad auditing and the other one is poor or nonconducive environment; these two. There’s this technical thing about erasure being held up because of the unlifted grief discharge and then there are these other two: Auditors Code break and environment.
Now, the Auditor’s Code—I say—it’s worse than that, it’s an auditor error. He has either broken the Code or he has made some fundamental error in auditing. Now, the most fundamental error he can make in auditing is failing to pick up an engram, failing to reduce an engram.
I ran a psychotic here very recently who had been run by three or four student auditors—I beg your pardon, he’d been run by fifteen consecutive student auditors. I don’t know who did this to him, but he was better being run than not being run at all. And they—one auditor after another had worked this case. It was a very poor show. The next thing I knew I had him in my lap. It was very sad. The poor guy had four engrams: his conception, his birth, a hypnotism sequence and a time he was scalded—a late-life engram, very severely burned. A boiler had blown up in his face and his wife had stood there alongside of him saying, “Hold on to me, dear, I will stay with you. I will not leave you. Now go ahead and live. As long as I am here, you will live.” A couple of years later she decided to leave him. So he went into a psychotic break, naturally; he had this as a big engram. And his wife had started auditing him in the hopes that she could free this up and get rid of him. So she went into this late-life engram as the first thing in the case—late-life physical pain engram. She didn’t ask the file clerk; she didn’t do anything. Here was a case that would have run pianola. And instead of that she says, “Go back to the time when the boiler blew up in your face.” And she ran it four times and decided that, well, she wasn’t getting anyplace so she went someplace else and ran something else. But she wasn’t getting anyplace there, so she went someplace else and ran something else, because she wasn’t getting anyplace there. And then this poor guy gets a long parade of student auditors, one right after the other, and they’d audit him for a while. “I wonder what’s wrong with this guy” and “I’ll try to get some grief off but no grief is coming off here. Let’s go back here and see if we can run out birth. But birth is not much good. Let’s see if we can reach conception. Well, we’ve run out four lines out of conception. That’s good enough for today. We’ve got to quit and have chow, so let’s go up . . .” Now, this is one of the reasons cases stall.
I ran this fellow and the first thing I found on the case—I sized him up and found out that he was running on a high paranoid reaction. And nobody had thought to hit this one and this had kept all of his engrams grouped up on the track. Everything had been sort of pushed up to present time. His engram said, “Everybody is against me. Everything is against me. I can’t go anyplace.” That was a standard dramatization. So “Everything is against me,” which just put all the engrams against “I,” you see, the interior world. And I ran down the track on this “against me” and found it in the basic area and got some yawns off the first engram on the thing. But his case didn’t improve. As a matter of fact that night he really started spinning. My reputation as an auditor really started to go . . .
You know, being in my boots is something like an old-time gunman. Everybody wants the title. And people sit around like bloodhounds waiting for one of my cases to spin. Well, this fellow started spinning very badly. So I—next day I went and I got into the history of the case a little bit more and I found out that a fundamental error had been committed, a fundamental error: hitting an engram and not reducing it.
Well, people don’t realize that the first time across an engram, all the content will be there. But if there is a bouncer on this first recounting along the engram—if there’s a bouncer in there—the next time you start to put him across that thing that bouncer is reactivated and up the track he’s going to come. And then they won’t be able to find the engram. Of course, the auditor, instead of suspecting that the person has bounced out of this engram, will just say, “Well, I guess it’s erased,” or something, and go off and leave it.
Well, this exact thing had happened to him—conception, which is very aberrative. It was run one night at ten-thirty. At eight o’clock the next morning he woke up curled up in a ball and frozen on the track and in terrible condition mentally. So I went down the track and I found conception and conception was non-coitus, and it just went on and on and on. Good heavens, there must have been three or four hours of chatter. And bouncers, bouncers, bouncers, bouncers all over the place. And I got each bouncer, one after the other, and get a denyer, get a holder.
Now, the way you run an engram, then, is a very specific way. This is the way to run an engram. You get the somatic strip down to the first part of the engram. The somatic strip will try to go to the earliest moment of the engram. Sometimes it can’t make it. Sometimes there are four or five phrases earlier than this and they are so situated there, with so much pain on them, and there’s so much unconsciousness on them that some tension has got to be taken off of this area just by running it from where it is. So you tell the somatic strip to go to the earliest part of the engram. It does its best. There may be some words or phrases a little earlier than this, but you don’t worry him about that. You start in there at the earliest part of the engram—that’s what you tell the somatic strip. You accept what it says is the earliest part of the engram and you start to run the engram.
Now, if you start to run the engram, you get merely aberrative phrases like “You are a donkey,” “I like candy,” “Men are so nice,” any one of these phrases, you see. They’re not action phrases; they’re merely aberrative. They merely cause people to climb lamp poles and things like that. We’re not interested in those. What we’re interested in are these action phrases. Bouncers. Bouncers: “Get out,” “I have to find out.” That’s a bouncer, by the way, “I have to find out,” and he will leave the engram. You see how literal these things are? “Go away,” “Go ahead,” “Go on,” any one of these things in the engram. Anything that’ll make him move out of the engram, that’s a bouncer. And as you run along this engram, all of a sudden you hear a phrase which literally translated would boost him out of the engram. You—right there, you make him repeat that phrase several times. You make him just sit right there on that phrase and spin it until it’s desensitized. And then you run the engram on along a little bit further and maybe you have a holder. Well, this holder says, “Hold me tight” or “Stay here” or “I’m going to stay here” or “I can’t move” or whatever the holder is. You recognize that as the auditor. You’ve got to be right on the ball when you are listening to these engrams out of some preclear. And all of a sudden, it says, “I can’t move.” Well, this is a holder. Now, if you try to go beyond that holder, start reaching beyond the holder, only a few attention units are going to come with you. His sonic is liable to turn off. You see? The attention units get held right in this holder and then he gets out and it’s harder and harder and harder and harder to get early or get late in this engram. Now, when you try to get back early in the engram again, he’s liable to be held up in the middle of it. He can’t go either way.
So, when you hit something that sounds like a holder, you do the same thing. You spin on it. If it’s “I can’t move,” you have him go over it again. He says, “I can’t move, I can’t move, I can’t move, I can’t move.” Go over it again. “I can’t move, I can’t move.” And then—then all of the attention units will be able to flow on along the engram.
The same way with a denyer. If you run across the denyer the first time and it says, “I can’t tell.” Whatever it means in an analytical sense, “I can’t tell” means simply that: “I cannot tell.” So, you start over this engram the second time—you’ve activated an “I can’t tell”—you’ll find out the guy, he’s trying to talk and he won’t be able to. He can’t tell. That’s a fact. A person’s jaw sometime will just lock up on this subject and he’ll try to talk, and so on. It’s very interesting. Well, so there’s a denyer. It says, “I can’t tell.” So you stop right there on that denyer and you say, “Go over it again, go over it again, go over it again, go over it again, go over it again.” Take the tension out of the thing. Now continue, next line. Next line maybe is, “All automobiles have red suspenders,” or whatever it is. You don’t care what that is because that’s not an action phrase.
We hit a phrase then that says all of a sudden, “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.” Well, this is a misdirector phrase. Or “Everything that seems up is actually down.” Anything that is one of these phrases that will give—“I don’t know whether north is south today,” or something of the sort. Hit this phrase. By the way, a misdirector—a common misdirector—is in birth when the doctor says, “I’ve got to turn him around now.” I’ve actually seen a preclear start to run an engram backwards just like you run a piece of movie film. He hits this “I’ve got to turn around,” and the next thing you know, why, he’s backing out of the engram, phrase by phrase. And maybe you just didn’t catch that, “I’ve got to turn him around now.” Maybe you didn’t hear it very much. But the second something strange happens, now you want the cooperation of the file clerk. You say, “The file clerk will now give me the phrase necessary to correct the running of this engram.” Or you say, “The file clerk will give me yes or no on any of the following: Bouncer? (snap) Holder? (snap) Misdirector? (snap) Denyer? (snap) Valence shifter? (snap)” That’s a new one for you: valence shifter. And the file clerk will come forward with this one you missed. And you can get that and have him repeat that several times. And you’ll get this “Turn him around” here that you maybe overlooked. Maybe you weren’t listening closely or maybe you didn’t recognize it at the moment when you went across it that it would produce action in the case. In other words, any one of these action phrases—they’re directional phrases, is what they are, all of them more or less. The bouncer says, “Go up.” Actually there can be a kind of a phrase which says, “Go down,” so that he will go down the time track from the engram. That’s a misdirector, is the way it’s classified. “Don’t know whether I’m coming or going.” You know, that’s direction this way or direction this way, indecision. Holder means “no direction.” And valence shifter means “Be somebody else.” “You’re just like everybody else” is a valence shifter. “You’re like your mother.” And then there are many, many crazy valence shifters like “If I were you.” Oh, there are—I can think of dozens of these things. Anything that indicates the person should be somebody else. You hit those in the engram and the person is liable to shift valence on you right in the middle of the engram and the somatic is liable to turn off and the person is liable to lie there going on with somebody else’s somatic.
You can suspect a valence shifter, for instance, when your preclear is running along all curled up on the couch very nicely and you’re running along and all of a sudden he stretches out for no good reason at all. And you ask the file clerk, “Give me a yes or no on this: valence shifter? (snap)” And if you get a yes, why, then you say—you ask him to give you the valence shifter and you count from one to five. “Valence shifter will flash into your mind when I count from one to five. One-two-three-four-five, (snap)” And it’s something like “You try to be in my shoes.” Something like that and whoomph, he’s in Papa’s valence.
Well, when a person goes out of valence his own somatics turn off. And it does no good to run a person—engrams very much, out of valence. You can run engrams out of valence all you please and it will do the case some good. But nothing like getting him into the basic area and really getting him in valence. That is, getting him into himself. Not being Papa or Mama or something else, or Grandma or Grandpa or just anybody, or in no valence. And as a result when you run through an engram, watch for these phrases which will cause a person to change identity. This is another one. And every time you hit one of those phrases that you think would cause him to change identity, whether you see the action happen or not—because it usually won’t happen on the first run through—whether you see the action take place or otherwise, you suspect that action may take place on that phrase, immediately make him repeat it over and over and over and over and over until you are sure that that phrase is deintensified.
Now sometimes, as you run through one of these engrams, it’s a great temptation to go sweeping right on through the engram. That is not the proper way to run one. The proper way to run one is start at the earliest moment, start through, spot action phrases, reduce each one as you hit them. And of course, as you reduce one of these action phrases you may find that you’re too late on the chain, too. You can go earlier. So you go along on the engram, go through it, deintensify each phrase that is going to cause him to do something peculiar. When you’ve got all of these phrases deintensified, say, “Go to the earliest part of the engram you can now reach,” and try to run it again.
Now, if you have reason to suspect that there was a solid blow or something or you haven’t got all of the engram, you say, “The somatic strip will now go five minutes before this took place,” and you are liable to get your preclear to relax. You can say to him, “Now the somatic strip will sweep forward one minute, two minutes, three minutes, four minutes. Now it is going to sweep forward until the moment of the boomp,” and you’ll see him go glunk! He’ll get the jar out of the thing. Well, that’s getting the front end of it.
What you should do is work on the front end of it now because all the rest of it trailing out behind actually depends on the pain in the front end of it for its activity. After you’ve gotten all of these bouncers and denyers and everything out like that, you can work over this front end, work it over real good. Try to get the thing completely knocked out and then sweep on down the rest of the line and you’ll find your job is pretty easy. That is the correct way to run an engram. And if you don’t run an engram that way, you will bog down a case.
Most cases that are bogged down are bogged down specifically for that reason only: that the engram has not been run correctly. The preclear has been allowed to go through an engram, has hit several bouncers, let us say—or maybe even just one bouncer—has bounced off of it again. The auditor did not even know that he bounced and didn’t pay any attention to it. Maybe he went into another engram up here someplace and the whole context changes. Well, he is held down here in this lower engram, you see, and now you run another engram up here and maybe you let him bounce out of that, and he goes up here and you run another one up here and there were holders here, and holders here. And all of a sudden you can’t get him up to present time and you don’t know what to do with this guy. Now, that’s the way you can stall a case. That’s one of the best ways I know of.
This will happen sometimes. You run an engram and the first time through it you get lots of action, lots of action. The person maybe cries and toes wiggle and they tremble and roll up in a ball and all this happens. And you’re getting all this action as you run through the thing. All of a sudden, the next time you’re not getting action. Now, you may suspect that this thing has reduced but that has not happened. No engram I know of will reduce on one recounting. Even on an erasure you normally have to recount twice. Even on a good solid case that’s erasing late, the second time you go across it you’ll get a couple of yawns off of it. It doesn’t all go the first time. So, just one of these runs and then all of a sudden this person can lie there and fairly calmly go in through this engram.
Several things could have happened but what you should expect has happened: they’re almost on the site of the engram but not quite. Something is saying, “Come back.” So there’s a call-back that’s bringing him back to the engram. There’s probably a holder in the engram and there’s probably a bouncer. And all of these things are operating so that he’s riding just that high off the engram. He isn’t getting any action out of it. And I’ve seen a student who ought to know better run somebody through an engram and then the second time through it get no manifestation but get content. And the person had bounced and been called back off this engram. And they were running just that high above it. The thing to do and the way to solve that thing is to say, “Give me yes or no on the following: Bouncer? (snap)” If you get a yes, why, you say, “When I count from one to five the file clerk will give me a bouncer. One, two, three, four, five. (snap)” And the preclear will say, “Get away.” “Go over the words ‘Get away.’” He’ll go over it, “Get away, get away, get away, get away, get away.” All of a sudden, you get all the manifestation again, see? You’re not too interested in the call-back at that moment because you’ve got him running the engram now. So, you let him run through on the engram, and in this way you reduce the thing. But to let him go into an engram and then carelessly decide that, well, he bounced out of it and it must have erased, that will bog a case.
Now, many of you may be called upon to start some case that you know has been worked rather indifferently. The first thing you want to look for are engrams that have been hit and out of which the preclear has bounced. That’s the first thing you want to look for in that case. The way to do it is start running the kind of auditing he was having. In other words, run the former auditor’s auditing. You may find all sorts of Auditor’s Code breaks. That’ll stop the case. So all of a sudden he says, “Well, I don’t see why you’re so mad at your mother. She had her engrams too.” I’ve actually run this out of a preclear. What happens there is at that moment he is being attacked by Mama, the auditor, everything simultaneously, and he just falls in on himself He goes into an apathy state very often when this sort of thing happens. In other words, the auditor agrees with the antagonist who is attacking the preclear. That will stall a case right there. That’s a serious Auditor Code break. Or the auditor has said, “You—you sure this isn’t imagination?” All of a sudden, wham, this fellow’s sense of reality goes out on him perhaps and we have to run this Auditor Code break. So one of the things you want to address when you start in—pick up somebody else’s auditing and the case is bogged down—is run the auditing as engrams. Just, “Go back to the first time you were audited.” If he can get there, why, get him back to the first time he was audited. “Now what’s being said?” Now start running this thing out and sometimes you’ll find some peculiar brands of auditing. Run this material for a while and you will find here’s an engram and there’s an engram and another engram that have been hit. Go back to these things and see if they’ve been cleaned up. And if they haven’t been, go on early and get the basic on the chain—if they were just beaten into a recession—get the basic on their chain and knock it out. But by and large, what you will find as the primary error is that the preclear has bounced out of the engram and the auditor hasn’t gone back and picked it up. He’s just carelessly said, “Oh, what the devil,” and walked off and there’s the preclear stuck on the track. You can do this or you can wait a few days and the case will settle out. Sometimes that’s easier. But in any event, an Auditor Code break won’t settle out. That has to be run out. And you can spend quite a bit of time patching a case up that somebody else has ruined.
Now, once upon a time I thought that it was possible to so thoroughly ruin a case in Dianetics that it couldn’t be patched up. I thought this might be possible. Well, I know now that this is not. It’s not possible to so thoroughly ruin a case that Dianetics can’t patch it up.
Two cases of which I am thinking. One stayed in a state of bog, a complete state of bog, for about three months. This girl had been insane and had been worked on under sedation and finally an auditor had worked and worked and worked with her until she got up the material. He ran out the sedation periods. And suddenly, in spite of the fact she was not even very accessible, the case started to move again; they got the engrams out of the case that should have been gotten in the first place and she went on her way. Of course, this person was insane in the first place. You couldn’t have done too much to hurt her.
The other case was a girl who has—and by the way, this is not too rare; some percentage of cases will have them. The auditing was so bad: down the time track to an engram, run it once, decide that wasn’t important. The auditor goes to something else, decides that isn’t important, goes to something else, decides that isn’t important, goes to something else, doesn’t know what he’s doing—or perhaps runs down and lets the preclear get away with just stating the concept. “Yes, here I am on the football field. Yes, somebody just hit me in the stomach with his head. Yes, here I am lying here.” “Oh yeah? Oh well. Let’s go off someplace else.” No content, you see. That’s just running the concept. And that’s almost fatal.
Basic personality will suddenly say, sort of, “The dickens with this. Here I was doing my best and no cooperation was given me. Well, I’m not going to cooperate anymore,” and basic personality sort of goes on a strike, says, “No, the auditing was thoroughly bad.” One of the best ways to clean this up is just as I said before: start and run out the auditing if you can reach it. Normally you can.
This other case was stalled for two and a half months because of bad auditing, nothing but bad auditing. The husband had some sort of an engram that said he had to keep moving. So not only did he move on his own time track from engram to engram all over the shop, but when he started to audit his wife, he wouldn’t let her stay in an engram long enough to reduce the thing. And after he’d run about thirty engrams on the case, his wife’s basic personality said, “No. I’m not going to be audited anymore.” And that was the end of that. And auditor after auditor tried to work this girl. And about three weeks ago this chap came up to me and he said, “You know, my wife’s case is open. They’ve run out basic area engrams now and she is moving on the track and everything is fine.” Those are the only two cases I knew of that were in foul shape because of bad auditing and they both came through. So evidently Dianetics can undo these things.
There is your environmental problem as the next reason why cases bog down and this can be very, very, very serious. We have Preclear Jones who has somebody in his vicinity who doesn’t like him much anyhow, or something of the sort, and who quarrels with him about what has been happening between him and his auditor. He goes home; he says, “You know, I ran out a period in birth where the doctor was saying . . .” “How do you know it was birth?” This is—this doesn’t help a case.
I had a fellow on a basic area erasure. He had erased about ten engrams up the basic area and this had been a very, very hard case to start. It had taken about twenty-five hours to start this case. I’d finally gotten into the basic area on the thing. I was getting erasures and coming back up the track. He went away as happy as a bird. He came back for his next session, he lay down on the couch and he couldn’t contact his fingertips or anything. He was just there, that was all. Reality was completely washed out with him. It was gone. Was he alive? He didn’t know. He had done just this trick: He had gone home and he’d said to his wife, “We hit basic-basic.” She said, “Yeah?” And he says, “But we did.” “Hmpf!” “Honest, we did. I mean we got into the basic area and it’s all going along fine and I feel a lot better.” “You don’t look so good.” “Well really, honey, I did.” “Look, I know it’s all imagination. You should know it’s all imagination. Now stop kidding yourself!” And boy, it really just took him right across the face. She was Grandma. That was her little role in life was being his grandma, only she was his wife. One of these complicated things. Everything which she said had to be taken absolutely literally. And exactly what she had said there for some peculiar reason latched up on a mid-flight engram that was halfway up the bank. It restimulated that engram and it stopped him right there. It took about fifteen days for this case to settle out. Tried to run out this lock, did most everything to it. Finally managed to start the case running again. But I was very relieved; wifey went to the Virgin Islands. The case ran beautifully after that. Never saw a fellow so happy or run so well.
I’m not giving anybody the advice that he should advise the preclear to get divorced, and I’m not advising anybody to shoot his wife or any such thing. It does happen that a person’s friends very often victimize him in this and particularly now, you might say, when Dianetics is in its very early stages, where validation has not been broadly offered, where people are just now, in the high academic fields, getting down to a point where they will really look at validation, you can expect your preclears to get upset with this sort of thing. It’s quite serious. It’s the invalidation of material in the environment.
Furthermore, they may be living in an environment which doesn’t necessarily invalidate the material but which is so thoroughly restimulative that the case bogs down. You’re running this preclear, he is running fine, you’re having no trouble and, all of a sudden, on Tuesday one week, he comes back in and his case is not moving.
What you want to do immediately is to find out what happened to him between the last time you saw him and this time. You find that out and run it out as a lock. Sometimes by straight memory you can do a better job than running out these locks as such. You can make him go back over the thing until he finally remembers the exact moment it was when he started to feel bad. Maybe it hung up on an earlier lock. Try to make him remember the earlier lock. Get down to the first lock on this engram rather than try to run the engram, because sometimes an engram in the middle of the bank—of course, an engram doesn’t care where it is on the track when it restimulates. It has no idea about that at all. So you may have an engram in restimulation which can’t be erased or can’t be reduced, can’t be touched. This shock happens to him, keys in the engram, gives him a lock. The thing to do in this case is try straight memory or try to run out the lock in reverie and you’ll get that case started again. In any event if that doesn’t happen, wait for a few days, if you can’t get anyplace with the case, and then try straight memory again. And this little lapsed time—he’s got a little bit better tone—that’ll make him feel better. Or you can try to run pleasure moments with him. Try to run a series of pleasure moments to get him moving on the track again. In other words, pull his attention units out of this new lock and put them in a moment of pleasure and then bring all the attention units up to present time. This trick will sometimes work.
Now, the environmental case can go so far—for instance, you take a child that is being badly abused and you are trying to work this child and the child goes into another environment every night or goes to a school which is highly antagonistic to him, and his case seems to be—it’s like the frog that’s climbing up out of a well: climbs four inches by day and falls back five inches at night. It will seem that way to you. Try and do something to keep the child from being badly restimulated all the time. Try to talk it over with the parents if you’re working and you’ll have better luck. But the environmental problem is a very serious one because you as an auditor can’t regulate your preclear’s environment. But sometimes it is necessary to take the child out of the environment or take the preclear out of the environment. This is particularly true of children. That’s why I keep saying child; usually adults can stand up to it. Children don’t have quite that much luck.
Now, all of these bogged cases have in common the fact that somebody is stuck on the time track. And that is the common denominator of all bogged-down cases: somebody gets stuck on the time track. So don’t ever be guilty of bringing somebody up to present time and then not checking it.
In other words, don’t say, “Come up to present time. Cancelled,” snap your fingers, (snap) and say, “Be alert.” Don’t be content with that. Bring them up to present time and say, “How old are you? (snap) What’s your age? (snap) Give me a number. (snap)” You get all three the same, he’s in present time. If he’s not, he’s stuck on the track someplace coming up and you should spend a little time trying to free him.
Even so, sometimes you may feel like it’s going to take all night to get this person into present time. If this case is chronically stuck on the track anyway, of course don’t waste the rest of the evening trying to free him on the track. At least get him into a state where he’s fairly comfortable, but keep working on bringing him into present time. That’s very important.
You can accidentally stick a case on the track so that the case will be quite uncomfortable. Always try to get the preclear to present time and always check it. You can get the case bogged down by failing to bring him to present time.
Now, there’s another thing happens. You may have gone by an engram which you tripped in progress and you get him up to present time and something’s back there in the engram says, “Come here.” So he comes up to present time and you say, “What’s your age? (snap)” He says, “Thirty-six.” “How old are you? (snap)” “Thirty-six.” “Give me a number, (snap)” “Thirty-six.” And you say, “Isn’t this swell. Okay, cancelled. Be alert, (snap)” Then you say, “How old are you? (snap)” And he says, “Three.” Now, there’s a call-back there. That’s caused by a call-back mechanism, so you give it a double check.
Last night—on this “cancelled,” as I pass it by—last night I—you might have noticed the preclear here—I didn’t give him a canceller. I should have been exactly precise and given him one anyway. But actually, a person who is stuck on the track isn’t much affected by such a thing. You can’t do much about it anyhow. The canceller is most effective when the person is in present time. And usually when a person is stuck on the track, I don’t use one. So don’t be terribly alarmed at that omission.
Now, when it comes to getting a case moving originally, you have Standard Procedure. You should follow Standard Procedure very closely. At the beginning of the case give him the inventory, then start Step Two. Do exactly what it says there in Step Two. Run engrams. And at any place where you all of a sudden aren’t getting any further, go down here to Step Three, straight line memory. Try to find out. Try to discover the circuitry in the case. Try to find out standard dramatizations.
I resolved one case one day by making the fellow go back to a time when he was bawling out his children. That was his own dramatization. I made him bawl out his children. I said—by the way, I didn’t take him back to this moment. I just told him to imagine he was bawling out his children; he went back to a time when he bawled them out. He wouldn’t admit that he had ever gone anyplace on the track. And I said, “Well, pretend you’re bawling out your children. What would you say to them? What’s this child done?” and so forth, “She’s spilled the milk pitcher. What do you say to her?” And he, “Yappity-yappity-yap.” “Now, who in your family might have used those words?” “Nobody—me.” We had immediately and instantly the fact that he was in somebody else’s valence.
This is the dramatization: he’s in that valence and that’s what he’s using and he thinks it’s himself. But by just using repeater technique on that dramatization of the little kid, wound him up down about the age of two years of age and found out that he was in Papa’s valence. But he didn’t work so well this way. He didn’t work well as himself so I regressed him up and down the track as Papa. I said, “Now Papa will go here on the track and do this and will do that,” and he was perfectly willing to go back and look at himself and play checkers with himself and spank himself and so on. He was solidly in Papa. I found this out—the first clue of this is valence-shift stuff: “Go back and pretend you’re Papa and go back to the time when you’re spanking the child.” No, no, he wouldn’t do that. “Well, let’s go back and be spanked.” No. “How would you go about—how would you go about lying across somebody’s knees and being spanked? How would it feel?” Just trying to get him moving, trying to get him to do something. “Well,” he says . . . Papa, see? He isn’t lying across anybody’s knees. At this point, why, he’s Papa. Finally found out that his—that Mama’s screaming dramatization was, “You are just like your father more and more every day. You will always be like your father. Oh, how discouraged I get.” And when he had finally shifted into his fathers valence through other engrams keying in, he had gotten terribly discouraged. And there he had been for a long time in Papa’s valence and Papa had been a terrible failure all his life. And so we had a failure from that moment on. Finally got him out of Papa’s valence and got him moving on the track. And then he’d move on the track as himself, and so on.
In short, just follow out Standard Procedure here. You will get used to Standard Procedure, Straight line memory has a little law behind it. If you find a case that is badly bogged down, use straight line memory on the case and see if you can’t free some attention units up.
An aberree never says anything once. He will dramatize what he dramatizes many times. That is one of the first and foremost laws of straight line memory. He will do or say what he does or says many times. This is important because if you find one of the parents saying a certain thing in the childhood of your preclear, you can be fairly sure that that is also in the prenatal bank. So you want to find these dramatizations. You know how early they will lead. You’d use—have to use some sense on this, of course. If the parents—Mama and Papa—were both killed when he was two months of age and he was raised by somebody else, you don’t have their dramatizations to draw on; at that moment straight line memory breaks down. You can still do some stuff with it but it’s not as effective. So you take straight line memory on these bogged-down cases and you will find things like circuits, valences and so on, A standard patter on straight line memory is as follows: The person is sitting there, his eyes wide open; you say, “Who is your worst enemy?” And, well, he doesn’t know, “What’s been worrying you lately?” He says, “Well, I—as a matter of fact, I’ve been awfully worried about money lately,” “Who used to worry in your family about money?” “Nobody ever worried—well, my father. Ha-ha, Yes, he used to worry about money,” You get these little chuckles. And when you hit the gong with straight line memory, you’ll get a smile of relief or a little chuckle. Doesn’t amount to much, but you know when you’ve hit it. When you haven’t hit it in straight line memory, you don’t get that. There is the tester. That is the little meter that you watch for. So if you key out a lock, you get a smile. That’s your pay. Leave that subject at that moment. You get your smile, you’ve keyed something out. Now go on to something else and you can key something else out, and so on and so on. You can knock out circuitry. You can knock out various types of engrams. You can knock out their locks. You can return this fellow to present time and after you’ve got him all straightened up on the subject of straight line memory, you take him back down the track again, restimulate the engram, and it’s just as before. So you have to run out engrams. Straight line memory is one of these quickies. But if you’re going to give a person straight line memory, by the way, and call it an alleviation, and say this person is much better, don’t put him in reverie. Leave it alone now. He feels fine. Leave him alone, because the second you put him back down the track you’re going to start hitting these engrams and restimulating them and you’re giving him new locks. Of course, you’d have to bring him back up to present time again and you could do the same thing—knock out its new key-in. But you can keep on going like this for a long time.
You could cure a person’s headache, for instance, with Straightwire by just making them remember things in their past, pleasant things in their past. Remember this, remember that. “Who died of a headache?” The person said, “Oh I, oh, ah, died of a headache! My grandmother had migraine headaches but she didn’t die of one, certainly. She died—see, she—when she fell downstairs when she was eighty-two and died of a fractured skull.” And the guy says, “Well, think of that.” All of a sudden this person is quite amused that Grandma fell downstairs and died of a fractured skull!
The next step on the thing, you say, “Who used to tell you you were like your grandmother?” “Oh, she did. She said, ‘You’re just like me, aren’t you, honey?’ She always used to say this.” “When was the first time she said it?” “Well, I don’t know. I don’t-I don’t know.” “You can remember this. You can remember a specific incident. Where would she be standing?” Now, your trick is that they can remember the concept easily. But to remember the exact moment when one of these things is happening is the other trick. First you get them to remember the concept, then get them to remember the exact moment. That is straight line memory.
You want to find out who told them they were like other people. You want to find out who used to say, “Control yourself,” “You have to mind,” all of these things. You want to find out who’s dead. That’s important. Because if this person is in the valence of a person who is dead, that death has practically frozen him into that valence. It’s as though life— this is not true but it’s just a little analysis to fix it in your minds—it’s as though life desired Grandma to go on living forever so when Grandma died, life decided there should be a continuum of Grandma and threw this person over wholly into Grandma’s valence. Grandma’s death, then, is enough to fix the child, who is slightly in her valence already, fully in the valence. For instance, tonight I was on KGO-TV, and we had quite a confabulation up there on the show. And I stepped off the stage and a young lady was there, a very pretty young lady, and she had a bad cold. Well, she was pretty and I couldn’t leave the studio at the moment and so I stood there while she was leaning up against an icebox which she was going to sell or display or something. And she was about to go on the air in another ten or fifteen minutes and I said—she says, “You know, I have a terrible cold.” And I said, “Yeah?” And I said, “Well, close your eyes,” and, you know I took her back down the track. She was a pianola case. My God, why don’t I get some cases like this? She went back down the track to the time when her first boyfriend kissed her. The most beautiful look came over her face. And she was running this off very nicely and I said, “Well, is it nighttime, daytime, outside?” She said, “Oh, it’s outside.” I said, “How does the night smell?” And she said, “Gee, it’s just—I’m really smelling it!” She knew nothing about Dianetics, you see, and to find herself—this happening to her, first time in her life, this really startled her. So I ran her in three or four more pleasure moments up and down the track and ran her back to the time when she got her high-school diploma and a few other things and brought her up to present time—it was about time for her to go on—and got her all the way up into present time very nicely. And she— standing there, and she said, “You know, this Dianetics is very interesting,” she says, “I bet it could cure my cold.” And she starts to sniff, because she’d been sn——, she tries to blow her nose and it isn’t running. And she says, “Where’s my cold?” Now, I didn’t see that show. I don’t know whether she pulled the gag after I left the studio or not. But she says, “I’m going to tell people about this as soon as I get on.” In any—in any way, you can use Straightwire as a sort of a booster up the time track. Or you can run the person back to—this is another way you stop a bogged-down case from being bogged down, by the way—use Straightwire as a sort of a booster. Make the person remember something pleasant or early in their lives. Don’t run them back to it, just make them remember it. And they sort of build back up to present time in this fashion. As a matter of fact you can open up a whole time track just with nothing but straight memory.
You can take a psychotic and work on nothing but straight memory with him, day in and day out for a few minutes every day. And the first thing you know this fellow gets awful sane. It’s very interesting stuff. Don’t work it for very long periods. Fifteen minutes of straight memory is just fine.
Tell the person he’s going to remember something tomorrow. It takes a little while for the file clerk to get the drawers out sometimes. You ask them the same question tomorrow, ask him the same question day after tomorrow; all of a sudden he’s got the answer. It takes three days for deep-seated and lost and occluded memories—there again is your three days—to come into view. It takes three days, sometimes, for these data to come into view.
You ask somebody today, “What is the specific gravity of mercury?” He hasn’t heard about this since he was in high school. Ask him tomorrow, “What’s the specific gravity of mercury?” Ask him the next day, “What’s the specific gravity of mercury?” And he says, “What is it, 13.6?” Huh! He remembered it. But that’s because you kept insisting that he remember it. And you get the file drawer out and it’s very loose and so on, and you get the effect. And the other way that you stop a case from being bogged down is to just sit down and run pleasure moments. If you can get the pleasure moments, run them. Run pleasure moments. Take him swimming, take him horseback riding. Make him feel the hair of a horse. Make him feel the water, taste the chlorine, listen to the girls laugh, do this, do that. Run him through the incident so he’s all the way through the incident, so he really experiences the pleasure. Because one of the functions of the analytical mind is to obtain pleasure for the organism. You see? And of course it’s more important to obtain pleasure than it is to stay around pain, because it’s supposed to get away from pain. So you run them through these pleasure moments and very often you will bring a lot of the attention units up and the case will suddenly start running again. And sometimes when you try to run a pleasure moment and you start running this pleasure moment through, something very gruesome happens: a death or wherever he was latched up on the time track, if you can’t find it, will sometimes flash into view, bang! And you get off a terror charge while you’re asking for pleasure. Okay?
And, in short, I hope that the stalled cases that are around at the moment, if there are any, can be restarted again using these principles which I have given you tonight.
Thank you.