Hypnosis (500626)
Date: 26 June 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I want to talk to you about hypnosis. This is a subject which every auditor should know, not so that he can use it—although occasionally in the treatment of psychotics it is beneficial and renders the patient accessible—but because one will find quite commonly in the reactive mind sessions of hypnotism. These sessions can be extremely insidious since the hypnotist in his patter commonly employs several mechanisms which are hand in glove with the things the reactive mind dearly loves to clutch to its bosom. And one of the things that a hypnotic session will do is first disappear entirely from conscious recall, so much so that the person is not aware of having been hypnotized.
That is done by the simple mechanism of installing, before the session is concluded, a forgetter mechanism. Which is to say, the hypnotist says, “You will now forget everything which I have told you during this session and you will have no memory of it.” And the hypnotist will then go on talking for a very few minutes and awaken the patient—that is, “awaken” in quotes. Then this blots out the session, particularly if this form of it is used: “You will have no memory of what has occurred here,” which was his standard patter.
The next thing it does is install a demon circuit. Now, this is all very common and standard; we just ran into a case of it here, which was quite baffling for over an hour. And the demon circuit showed up in the case with a standard hypnotic remark in full sonic with considerable volume. That is, “You can remember all this in present time.” Now, that is standard patter with a hypnotist who is using regression in amnesia trance: “You can remember all this in present time.” It has the most remarkable effect of pulling the suggestion right along with the patient and also thrusting up into present time everything which the session has restimulated. Not terribly desirable to have birth, for instance, thrown into present time, since the hypnotist may even have nicked birth.
As a matter of fact, you could drive a person close to insane by dropping him into amnesia trance and telling him, “Now, everything which has ever happened to you which has caused you any pain can be recalled by you in present time.” It has the effect of, well, one might say, moving the entire reactive bank into present time and it sort of turns the mind wrong side out. The person existing after that, as his closest contact, will have the reactive mind, not the analytical mind.
Pleasure moments in such a wise can become utterly obliterated and nothing but painful moments will remain in recollection. If you combine this suggestion with the content of a reactive mind, it can become very disturbing to a patient.
Now we move back a little earlier in the hypnotic session, and we find the demon circuit which says, “You can only hear my voice telling you to go to sleep. You can only hear the sound of my voice. You are aware of nothing else but the sound of my voice,” That’s standard patter. That sets up a demon circuit.
He says, “You want to do what I am telling you to do. You can hear my voice telling you to do this. You can’t hear anything else,” Of course he means this actually, in a rational sense, to include the disturbances in the form of noise in the environment, but the way it lies there is in a very literal sense, that only his voice can be heard. His intent may be very good but the effect is to install a demon circuit.
After that a person has an added (quote) stream of consciousness (unquote)—a vocalization which goes along with him. He may not have recognized that it suddenly came into being with the hypnotic treatment or parlor trick or stage exhibition, since that exhibition or trick or treatment may be entirely occluded from the memory, “Go to sleep” is bad enough, and that is in plenitude at the beginning of a session. Another point of it there is “Now, you lie back and be quiet and entirely relaxed,” And it has a tendency to depress the person on the time track. In other words, an hypnotic session can be very scrambling to the reactive bank.
Now, let us take a specific case. We ask A, “Have you ever been hypnotized?” He says, “No, It’s been tried several times but nobody ever succeeded in hypnotizing me,” Well, if we accept this as a blunt answer and accept its validity, we are overlooking the 100 to 1 chance that it did succeed and that he did not know because he was told to forget. Therefore, the information that someone tried it on him is an excellent clue, but it also may be a clue to something else. It may have been tried on him and it may have been very successful much earlier in his life.
Because another mechanism of the hypnotist is to say, “No one else will be able to hypnotize you.” Now we find a person who is unhypnotizable. Of course a large percentage of people cannot be hypnotized, which is a severe limitation, fortunately, upon hypnotic therapy; it can only be worked on a relatively few people. But it also may mean that he was hypnotized earlier and told that nobody else would ever be able to hypnotize him and that he must now forget what has occurred. So the whole incident of having been hypnotized disappears, someone comes along and tries to hypnotize him and he is null on the subject.
Now, when we try to recover an hypnotic session we have to know the patter of the hypnotist. I don’t want any of you to go to sleep under this; I’m going to tell you roughly about what you will find.
The hypnotist will seat the person in a chair or have them lie down, and he will start off his patter something like this: “Now, I want you to relax. There is nothing to be afraid of. There is nothing wrong with being hypnotized. You’re going to sink into a little sleep. It’s going to be a more relaxing and a deeper sleep than you have ever before experienced in your life.” Because he’s a hypnotist, the person is already about half hypnotized just by suggestion, if the subject is at all suggestible. Then he starts in and he says, “Go to sleep. Go to sleep.” He may make passes across the person’s face. “Go to sleep. Now you feel your muscles relaxing. Now all through your body you can feel your muscles relaxing. Now, first your toes are going to relax. And now your legs are going to relax. And now your hips are going to relax. And now you can feel your back relaxing. You can feel your hands relaxing. You can feel your arms relaxing. You can feel the back of your neck relaxing. You can feel your mind relaxing. You can feel your face relaxing and your eyes are closing. Your eyes are closing and they are closing more and more. It is very difficult for you to keep your eyes open. In fact, you will find that it is impossible for you to keep your eyes open when I have counted from one to five” (or from one to ten, or some other such series). Or he may merely make passes. So. Then he says, “Go to sleep, deeper . . . deeper . . . deeper . . . deeper sleep. Now lie there quietly and go to sleep. You can only hear the sound of my voice telling you to go to sleep. All you can hear is the sound of my voice. Nothing else will disturb you. Go to sleep.” He keeps this up for a while and then as the subject drops off into a little light sleep he lets it deepen. There are many ways to deepen that sleep. One of the ways is to put one’s index finger and thumb on the patient’s closed eyelids and say, “I am going to press you back to a deeper sleep.” That’s very interesting, by the way, because to “go back to sleep” is a phrase which makes a person, whenever he goes to sleep, travel back down the time track, which is not the natural method of sleeping. A person goes to sleep in present time; it doesn’t have anything to do with regression.
Well, the person who does not have “Go back to sleep” in his bank someplace is a rare one and should be put in a museum as a strange creature. So he says, “I’m going to press you back into a deeper sleep.” He presses the two eyeballs simultaneously and the person has the feeling of going into a deeper sleep. Then he takes over control of the hands. That is, he says, “Your right hand feels very light; it is rising; it is rising; it feels very, very light.” Finally he gets the hand to move up in the air. He gets the other hand to move up in the air and then he gets the two hands to spinning around each other in an automatic action.
Now he says, “You can try to stop your hands from spinning but you will not be able to. Try and stop them.” The second he tries to stop them, the fellow’s hands go faster and faster and faster and faster. This of course convinces him that he is utterly and completely under the control of the hypnotist. So the hypnotist says, “When your arms drop to the sides of your chair you will go into a much deeper sleep.” And the person’s arms drop, and then he is in his infinitely suggestible mood if this has worked this far. Then the hypnotist puts in a suggestion: “You will be able to talk clearly. You will not have to stutter anymore. You will feel the urge to speak low and slow.” This is, for instance, in the curing—(quote) “curing” of stammering. And that, incidentally, quite often works. One patient out of ten. “You will be able to speak clearly and distinctly. All you’ll have to do is speak low and slow and you will be able to speak perfectly, and without stuttering, without stammering. And now you want to speak slowly and clearly, you want to do this, you want to do that.” And at this moment, or before this—before he’s introduced that as a positive suggestion—and that is a positive suggestion. I mean that’s technically what we mean when we say a positive suggestion, which is what the individual says which is to be implanted in the person’s mind intentionally to produce a certain effect.
Let me delete what I just said and just finish up his session. He says, “Now,” he said, “you want to be”—it’s very often they add this—“you want to be kind to people. You don’t want to be mean to anyone. You want to be very kind and very pleasant with people and you feel very comfortable now. And you’re going to wake up feeling better than you just have for days, and you will be able to talk clearly and distinctly after this. And now you’re going to forget everything I have told you. You’re going to forget it and it’s going to be put out of your mind, and you will have no memory of what has occurred here.” [gap] “Oh, you promise. That’s fine. Now, you promise me you’re going to forget all this.” Now, “promise” may be something that lies in the reactive bank as something very supersacred.
Giving you all this now, and take good note of it because you may have to take this apart in the dark, so to speak, you know. You won’t have any knowledge of when the hypnotism took place, who did it or anything. But these are the essential parts.
Now, he says, “One, you’re beginning to forget it. Two, you’re forgetting it a little bit more. Three, you’re forgetting it even more. Four, it’s over half-forgotten. Five, it is getting very, very vague in your mind. Six, it’s the dimmest dream is there. And seven, you have forgotten it.” Now he indulges in a little chitter-chatter to the effect of “How do you feel?” and so on. He closes down the session by awakening the subject. “One, you’re beginning to wake up. Two, you’re halfway awake. Three, you’re awake.” That is a standard therapy session.
Substituting for the content there about speaking clearly, you can put in positive suggestions to this effect: “When you awaken, you will want to take off your left shoe and you will take off your left shoe and you will put it on the mantelpiece.” That’s a posthypnotic suggestion.
When the patient awakens after the full routine he will be very, very irritated about not taking off his shoe. His foot will get very uncomfortable about it, and he’ll finally take off his shoe and lay it up on the mantelpiece, if he’s going to carry out the suggestion. He will have all manner of explanation as to why he has taken this shoe off. It’s because it had a rock in it; because the mantelpiece is higher in the room and therefore the air is drier there, and the foot was just a little bit damp and the shoe was damp and he wants it to dry out. He’ll have all sorts of explanations. This is justification at work, by the way. And then eventually the hypnotist brings it to his mind that that was the suggestion and at that moment the suggestion deintensifies. This is very interesting to me in this respect: that a person obeying that positive suggestion is not awake. You look at a person’s eyes when he looks at the hypnotist and you will see that there’s a little dull glaze on them; he is not entirely awake. He is still in a hypnoidal state when he carries out the suggestion and finally it has been recalled to his mind that he was hypnotized. The thing flicks off more or less as a compulsion so he can put his shoe back on and he can be happy about it. He very often feels like he has been made into a fool. He is not particularly overjoyed about the whole thing.
You can do anything with this. You can tell the man, “You are now president of the United States and when I awaken you, you are going to deliver a magnificent speech to these people as president of the United States.” And he will deliver a speech. This is interesting to us who are interested in this because if the man, let us say, had a manic to this effect: “Someday you will be president, I am sure.” “He is a nice little boy. Someday I’m sure he will be a great man. He will be a president or something; a strong man.” And now we give him an hypnotic suggestion that says, “You will now be president of the United States,” we’ve reinforced the manic. So in view of the fact that the hypnotist was unaware of the fact that his hypnotic suggestions were often dropping down into the bank as key-ins—“Go to sleep.” There’s lots of “go to sleep” engrams. And “go to sleep” is very hard to spring without getting the lower engram.
In the deepest sincerity and so on, and effort to help people, hypnotists have used these techniques. Now, studying the thing further in the light of Dianetics, we discover just as most hypnotists discover when they tackle Dianetics, that it is not quite the thing to do. It upsets things pretty badly.
If you have a patient who is getting blank-outs during a certain period, a patient who is sure somehow that he has had homosexual relationships with somebody but can’t tell you when or where, you start looking into hypnotism.
You may not find it, because one of the chief weapons of the pervert is hypnotism. He uses hypnotism quite freely. And I have found many incidents of hypnotism used for perversion.
Male voice: I imagine that’s where that “nobody will be able to hypnotize you.” . . .
Yes, and worse than that, you very often find this one in that perversion one, which of course by contagion of aberration—this is an engram; the person will go out and dramatize this. Without ever knowing it’s ever happened to him hell just think, “Well, gee, that’s something to do,” so he’s liable to hypnotize somebody else.
The standard pervert session of hypnotism seems to wind up, “Now, if you told anybody that this had happened, they would never believe you.” If it’s done to a young boy, “Your mother and father would of course drive you from your home if they knew about this. So if you told them anything that had happened here, they would not believe you. In fact, you can’t believe it yourself. You don’t think anything has happened here at all.” And that perversion sequence may contain such a thing as “You are a woman,” or if a woman is using it, “You are a man” and so on. In other words we’ve got a bad engram. It’ll be completely out of view. It’ll be hard to tackle. If you suspect something like this—and you may find this once out of 100 cases, at which moment—although the percentage to date has been much better than that. The percentage has been about once out of 50 cases.
Male voice: With hypnotic . . .
Yeah, with a lost hypnotic sequence in it. And it’s been about once out of 180 cases, I think—yeah, about that. Let’s see, there’s been, to date . . . Oh, I beg your pardon, let’s see, it’s higher than that. It’s once out of about 95 cases. Once out of about 95 cases hypnosis has been found to have been used for perversion.
Male voice: About 1 percent Yeah, about 1 percent. This is not on a long series. It’s on a series of about 180, which is—that’s not good statistics, it’s just a guess.
None of these remarks are leveled at hypnotists at all; they’re leveled exclusively at a practice which you will find in the society. And which, by the way, may still have enormous therapeutic value or anesthetic value. It still may have these things. And in addition to that it is an excellent research tool in Dianetics. But it is not something with which you would toy idly. It has real horsepower in it.
Male voice: What do you do—put a canceller on it?
Oh, you put cancellers in it, you can fix it up one way or the other. Let me tell you then about hypnotic therapy or deep analysis. You will discover this in quite a few patients who have undergone psychoanalysis. Deep analysis is a practice of discovering hidden data and delivering unto the patient insight regarding that data. “You can remember all this in present time” sometimes appears in these sessions. “You can remember it” is standard in these sessions. The fact that the patient often does not has never amazed anybody practicing deep analysis. It should have. Because “You can remember it” is a fact—a statement made in the reactive mind long after the early statement of Mama’s, “You can’t remember it.” So the positive suggestion later falls on deaf ears. The field is already closed off. And incidentally, that’s true of all hypnotic suggestions. You hypnotize a man on Tuesday and tell him that he cannot write and cannot write a line. And he will never be able to write. And now, you hypnotize him on Thursday and you tell him now that he is a great writer. He isn’t going to be a great writer. It takes it on a priority basis. I conducted a few experiments on this which seem to confirm that finding.
Female voice: Isn’t that also true of the engram bank?
Male voice: That would be like any other engram.
Yes. The engram bank does this also. Hypnotism is another engram, but it’s a special kind of an engram because it has malice aforethought behind it. Furthermore, it’s quite often a sympathy engram. The person is in affinity with the hypnotist.
Now, let me tell you a little more about deep analysis. The person is given the insight often while he is still asleep, and here you have a large parade of positive suggestions which were never intended to be positive suggestions. The person has been hypnotized, and now we’re trying to give insight and he appears to be perfectly rational, so why not talk to him? And there you are liable to find almost anything.
Now we move from that field into the drug hypnosis which differs no whit from any other kind of hypnotism except that it is effective to the degree that a toxin is present: the hypnotic drug. So-called hypnotic drug. Therefore when it is restimulated, one gets the weariness of the toxin in the organism. As a consequence that’s a little tougher on a person.
We give a patient sodium Amytal, for instance, and discover that this brings about a seeming rationale which he has never had before. In other words, we sink him into amnesia trance, Dianetically speaking, and BP is there. And he looks so reasonable, he looks so utterly rational, that let’s have a conversation with him. “Well, how do you feel today?” “Oh, I guess I feel pretty good.” “Well, what are you doing here?” “Oh, I’m doing all right.” Now, as long as it’s kept on a question basis, it’s not so bad. “Well, you look pretty sleepy. You’ve been very disturbed lately, haven’t you?” “Yeah. Mm-hm.” “Well, why do you do these terrible things? I bet you don’t know Yourself.” I found that one once. “What’s the idea of raving around here all the time? You know better than to make all this noise,” and so forth.
It’s a lot of stuff Now we go from that into sodium pentothal which is an effort to probe deep memories.
Sodium Amytal is seldom given intravenously, but sodium pentothal is given on a controlled intravenous shot, and the depth of trance is more or less controlled by the sodium pentothal into the bloodstream. It’s adjustable. A person can be held at a depth of trance this way. Sodium Amytal, on the other hand, just follows its own curve and a person finally goes all the way to sleep. But sodium pentothal, there’s some adjustment possible in there. It can be produced very rapidly.
You will find regression if you treat soldiers who have been unlucky enough to undergo narcosynthesis. That’s narcosynthesis. You will sometimes find there was a point in his life which you can’t discover—you can’t discover the cause of this change, but there’s a point in his life when he changed. He was just sick now, and now he’s crazy. And very often you will find lying right there on the borderline between these two things—in the case of people who have been processed by the army particularly—narcosynthesis. Because they try regression under narcosynthesis. You’re working in amnesia trance and they send the person back to—just by asking him questions about things they can send him . . . [gap] . . . in sodium pentothal or some other drug used in narcosynthesis it is possible for the doctor to touch upon a late-life period of unconsciousness and just go over it trying to find something in it. Well, naturally, because it’s late life the earlier material is not out of the case, all it does is restimulate. It has this insidious quality: that when restimulated in that fashion it does not thereafter die away. You can restimulate anything you want.
Male voice: Permanently?
Yes, permanently. Well, there are things that kick out engrams. It just behaves then like an engram in full-blast restimulation. You could perhaps change things around so that it might deintensify some way, but pretty permanent.
Second male voice: In other words, the buttons are thoroughly pushed in that thing The buttons are permanently held down. Now, if this has to do with battle, let’s say, all around him people are talking about killing and so on, we get some of these remarkable things of ‘Man released from veterans’ hospital on Tuesday kills wife on Thursday.” That sort of thing. It restimulates. And anything which is touched in narcosynthesis is apt to be restimulated permanently The only thing that you can touch and get away with is a charge of painful emotion, Male voice: It’ll blow?
It’ll blow If it can blow, if he can reach it. Within those limits. Very often because they didn’t know—see, we’re still talking about how to undo damage done to people we will have to treat. They didn’t know about valence shift or anything and they may have hit some charge in there and they just barely restimulated it. Now the mind closes in over the top of it when the patient wakes up, and the thing is trying to punch its way through and it’s fully active. So you’ll have to reach periods of narcosynthesis. Narcosynthesis can have in it a full hypnotic patter. But now we have doubled the felony.
In short then, when you have a patient who is acting very strangely about certain things, a certain strange manifestation may appear such as you’re working him on a session and suddenly he is frightened, or he can’t recall something, or everything seems to blank out on him and he has no way of knowing, he says, about what it is, one of the things you can suspect—it will not always be there by a long ways but a good enough percentage of the time it will be there for you to be quite suspicious for it—suspect hypnotism. Whether he knows about it or not. If there are hypnotic incidents back along the track somewhere, it is better to relieve those as soon as possible.
Hypnotism has been found in the prenatal area. One notable case was a hypnotism and a rape in the prenatal area by a doctor. That had the whole thing guessing because this person was rather antagonistic toward doctors. And because just enough people will dream up a delusion—psychotics will dream up a delusion that they have been seduced. Because of this, doctors have disregarded the fact that occasionally one of them is seduced.
A perfectly reputable analyst out in the Middle West evidently had the practice of treating young boys in such and such a fashion, since such an incident seemed quite valid when discovered in the bank. He knew nothing about it, and it would be a rough one to recover, normally. This, by the way, is about the fourth report I have had on that. Three of them weren’t reports. That’s the only report, actually. The other three I found in banks myself. They were valid, they were not delusions; because by reducing them, enormously increased sanity resulted. They are very insidious. So hypnotism is something which you as auditors will sooner or later encounter, and you should be ready to handle it.
Remember that forgetter mechanism. It may latch on to Grandma’s favorite trick: “Now, that’s all right, honey; you fell down and broke your face in and knocked all your teeth in, but that’s all right. You’ll forget it in a little while, now, you’ll forget all about it. The best thing to do is put it all the way out of your mind. Let’s think about something else.” And as Dick Saunders’ case, Grandma compounds the injury by saying, “Just lay there and daydream about pleasant things.” This made it lovely because every time you’d take Dick back down the track he’d daydream! So . . .
Male voice: How do you find something like this? Just have the patient run over the words “go to sleep” or something of that nature?
You can have the patient do a repeater technique on “go to sleep,” but remember on the end of the thing is “forget it.” Now, what would you tackle first?
Male voice: “Forget it” That’s right. You can tackle any patient on the subject of “forget it” and he’s going to turn up “forget it.” Around 1910, 11, 12, there was a standard slang phrase, “Aw, forget it” and it’s still going today. And that will appear in the prenatal bank. If Papa has this manifestation of “Forget it, forget it, forget it,” “Ah well, all right, so forget it,” the whole bank is occluded.
From hypnotism also we can learn; by seeing its effects just as I’ve described them tonight, we can see engrams at work. It’s just another engram. It’s even lighter than another engram. But it can be laid in very heavily. And because it’s specifically tailored to be an engram it can be a very insidious one.
The reason I bring this up is twofold. One, we have to tell you about this sooner or later, and two, one of the Professional Course auditors all of a sudden hit a snag a short time ago and we found a hypnotism at six years of age which cured his stuttering, but it also installed the nicest demon circuit you ever wanted to hear.
All right. Are there any questions about this?
Male voice: You talked about putting the person to sleep. In my own personal observation, that’s not the only thing they do, 1 had a man look me in the eye once and say, “Sleep and rest Sleep and rest. Let nothing disturb you. Right to sleep.” Yes, there’s another brand of hypnotism you’ll find interesting that’s sometimes there. You merely grab the patient by the throat, clamp him on the back of the head, shut off the blood flow to his brain, rock him this way back and forth about three times, shouting at him, “Sleep! Sleep! Sleep!” And you’ve got the blood shut off to his brain and he feels himself get dizzy and he realizes at this moment he is being hypnotized—he thinks. And it works on quite a few patients. It’s not as good as the other method but it will work.
Second male voice: How does the hypnotist survive this?
The hypnotist?
Second male voice: Don’t the patients ever go for their throats?
Well, actually there is a sort of a rapport develops between the patient and the hypnotist.
Second male voice: Somebody grabbed me around the throat it wouldn’t be a rapport that developed!
Third male voice: They didn’t say “sleep,” they just hold the veins and . . .
You’ll find that in a lot of kids’ banks when they were going to school, something like that. And what’s said in there makes a minor hypnotic lock but usually it’s just chatter. “Oh, looky, he’s going to sleep!” Yeah. I ran about 150 of those out of one kid. It seems like he could do it excellently. And at prep school he would go around and very proudly let people do this to him. Then everybody would stand around, “By golly, he is asleep, isn’t he! Yup, knocked himself out. Yup, he’s unconscious.” Second male voice: Can’t remember anything, either!
Of course, hypnotism in an expert’s hands, used as an anesthetic and so on, can be a nice therapy tool. In your hands, you can use it if you want on some inaccessible psychotic and you can get results. Remember, however, that if you start a patient working in amnesia trance, you are throwing the case out, in terms of time, to about three times as long as it will take in reverie. It may look infinitely desirable. It may be so nice to put the person into an amnesia trance and run him back to the earliest moment of pain or unconsciousness. He can find it—maybe, he’s pretty weak—but he’ll find it eventually and he’ll run something out on that. Usually people in amnesia trance talk pretty slow. And when they’re slowed down further by colliding with an engram, it’s pretty lengthy work. And furthermore they whisper, too. After you’ve tried to catch the words of somebody who’s whispering like that for a while and you’ve beaten your brains out trying to coax him into things—he can’t compute worth a nickel. As a consequence you have to do all of his thinking for him.
Furthermore, you are putting in constantly, whether you want to or not, no matter how careful you are, you’re putting in positive suggestions. And as a result the case takes a long time, works very slowly, and it follows the curve of getting worse at first, usually. And then it gets a little bit better and it follows along in its own plane and gets up just a little bit and then it gets a little worse. And you’ve got a slow, slow rise. Right at the end of the case, the person gets well almost all at once. He is suddenly no longer hypnotizable. It’s almost impossible to hypnotize a Clear. There is another method of doing this. You can knock the person into an amnesia trance. You can get him to dream. Take the dream, find out what that dream is depending on in the reactive bank, find the incident about which he was dreaming. Run that incident out-take all of it out that you can take out. Then wake the person up—up in present time, bring him to present time and take him back to the incident again. And that incident will now behave faintly like you hadn’t touched it. And you run the incident out again. But this time it’ll go away.
Male voice: How about using hypnosis for the purpose of getting information with the case?
I’ve never had it very profitable. Because if the patient won’t surrender to hypnosis—I mean, won’t surrender information, why, normally you can’t hypnotize him.
Male voice: Sodium Amytal will . . .
Yes, and any time you want to work an Amytal case, why, that’s fine. But I’ve worked my last one. [gap] Oh, you mean—talking about people who drop accidentally into amnesia trance and you have to run them there anyway? Female voice: Yes.
Oh, sure, you’ll discover them. They just work like a dream, too. They just work fine. Only they get better awfully slowly and everything you say to them is a positive suggestion.
Female voice: Let’s say, for instance, that you were running a case late at night and has a tendency to be sleepy at the time. Would that have any effect?
No. A break of the Auditor’s Code at that time can be almost fatal to a patient.[gap] You watch a patient go back down the time track, and when he hits an engram his analyzer goes boomp. So now, if you have the patient in a deep trance and his analyzer is already way down and now he hits an engram, it doesn’t go just boomp, it goes baaaaugh! So when you’re running down the track, don’t confuse an hypnotic state with reduced analytical ability because of the effect of an engram, I’ll give you a test. I’ll give you a test that’s very, very simple. Watch the person’s eyeballs. You will find as they lie there that the eyeballs under the eyelids—his eyes are closed—under the eyelids the eyeballs will hunt. They will go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. They will hunt, underneath. You can see the bump of them on the eyelid, and they’ll be wandering. Don’t mistake this for the fact that a preclear returned back down the track will often think he is looking around and he’s reading the words! And I’ve had them, by the way, they’ve got all their engrams on teletype.
Male voice: What does the hunting indicate?
The hunting indicates a hypnotic state. [gap] . . . well, you can. I’ve noticed this, and when I find a person is taking my statements literally—if I say, “Go on” and he says, “Where?” why, I suspect at that moment he’s dropped into an hypnotic trance. If a person is going to drop into an hypnotic trance, though, he’s going to drop into an hypnotic trance very, very shortly after he enters therapy. You’re not going to make many mistakes that way. You’re not going to find it easy to work him out of that trance, either. You’re going to have to work him where he is. The motto is, work him where he lies. If he drops into a half-hypnotized state just by closing his eyes, work him there. The reason why we were using the count of seven was because it did attract people’s attention a little bit better. But just running a long series on merely closing the eyes, we have found no failures. And we were doing something which was unnecessary. Further, by counting to seven we sometimes fell right in on top of somebody else’s hypnotism.
Male voice: What kind of shape are people in—I’ve seen a couple who wander around in practically a perpetual potential immediate trance. You just look at them and bong (snap) Yeah.
Male voice: Just the least suggestion and it takes full hypnotic effect Lots of people do this. People wander around in—there are two states there—they wander around regressed back down the track someplace but not in a real trance, or they wander around in a trance which is a real, slight hypnotic trance—permanent trance, permanent light trance. Or they do both. They’re not only regressed back down the track so thoroughly that it’s obvious and also are in a trance—that person’s in pretty bad shape. And strangely enough, these people cannot be hypnotized. The reason they can’t be hypnotized is they’re already asleep. Everything said to those people sometimes is engramic but they may be sitting in a moment which says, “I can’t believe anything you say” and they’re hypnotized so nothing goes in. Got a buffer, but they’re still in a light trance. Everybody’s more or less in a light trance until he gets up to a damn good Release. That’s a fact. Hypnosis, as far as I’m concerned, is a good anesthetic. But even though you pick up an immediate accident of a few minutes before and you take what you can out of it with Dianetic therapy, give it first aid— this will aid its healing but it won’t get around the fact that it still hurts like hell to have a needle shoved through you.
Hypnotic anesthesia, when we know Dianetics, is a highly beneficial thing when it can be used. One would certainly prefer it to any current anesthesia if it can be used on the patient. It’s not bad at all. But it should be so tricked out that it can be recalled after a certain period of time. You can put a time tag on it. And you could say, “By July 21,” which is at which moment that you know the patient is going to be pretty well healed up, and “July 21 you will be able to remember this and remember everything that happened.” July 21, 1950, let’s say. And it’ll spring into view at that time. Now, by therapy, hypnotic therapy, it’s no great trick to flash back to the moment and lift the suggestion through. One should do that too, lift the suggestion.
You could install a canceller. You can install a canceller previously and you can lift the canceller after the operation, but you have still installed something which you will find on the track. And remember, you said you were going to run a series of those so we would know exactly what the effect of installing a canceller as anesthesia would have so we could work out an optimum use of hypnosis in anesthesia. Because it is a good anesthetic if we know Dianetics.
Male voice: Ron, you know that pain came back, boom, just like that, he . . .
Yes, he did this to a chap. His hand was torn and he hypnotized him, put in a canceller—a pain shut-off and a canceller, sewed his hand up. Woke him up, sewed his hand up. You did wake him up?
Male voice: Oh yeah.
Yeah, woke him up, sewed his hand up. Fellow’s got no pain in the area, so on. This is a standard run on hypnotism. He’s got no pain in the area. But at the end of this session of sewing the hand up, why, he pulled the canceller on him and bowl the pain turned on right then. Which is quite interesting. Now, in a month or so when you go back over that I’ll be interested to know how much of that pain shut-off was effective. Because it is an engram. When a person is lying on the couch, the only pains he has are restimulated pains. A person may have had asthma for forty years and a session of it every week. But when you get the original cause of that asthma, you have in the next forty years only the locks. And the things said to him at that time are not—in other words, that pain, carried over, does not create new engrams. That all goes out.
In such a way, when you have a patient in therapy and you install a canceller just to make sure, you’re treating somebody who has no immediate injury, whose pains are restimulated pains. As a consequence, all of that blows out. But in a case of actual injury, there is cellular retention of whatever is said in the surroundings. The hypnotism will undoubtedly be there, but what effect it will have and what new effect it will have to produce, that’s something else. This we’re talking about now as a research problem.
I do want you to keep in mind that if you run into somebody that you know has been hypnotized, that you had better take an exploratory of the hypnotism, find out how aberrative it was and find out how much was in it.
Male voice: Question, Ron. Some of these people I’ve seen personally you can stand in front of them and say, “Do you see me?” “Yes.” “All right Look into my eyes. When I count to five, I’ll disappear.” You know. That kind of suggestibility. Is something like that engramic?
Oh, yes. Yes, very much so.
Male voice: I mean, in the sense—is the origin of that hypersuggestibility engramic?
The origin is an engram.
Second male voice: Ron, how can you possibly hypnotize a Clear? You said it would be almost impossible but if there was no engramic background, how could he possibly be hypnotized?
Well, he sets up a demon circuit that says, “I’m hypnotized.” Male voice: But he does it himself Sure. You say, “I’m going to hypnotize you” and he says, “All right. All right.” So he sets up a demon circuit that says, “Okay, I’m hypnotized and all the words coming in are going to produce a terrific effect upon me. Okay.” He’ll hold it as long as you want him to, but after an hour or so, why, he may decide that that was all garbage and just pick up the whole circuit. In other words—and you go take him back along the track and everything, he’s got it all but it was all in conscious recall all the time anyway. It’s interesting.
A Clear, by the way, can install a pain shut-off in himself without much trouble.
Male voice: How long will that take?
How long does it take to install one in himself? (snap) It’s pretty quick. Awfully quick.
Second male voice: Well, you can do that by autohypnosis.
Yeah. He can install another circuit that controls the somatic mind or the fluid flow.
Second male voice: Don’t do it, by the way. I’m a result of some experience in that and I don’t want anybody to ever try it.
Male voice: You mean—autohypnosis?
Second male voice: Yes, I tried it on myself. I installed a numbness in my left arm. Had the most beautiful case of angina you’d ever want to see. Right up into the chest, boom.
You see, when a person is using autohypnosis, he is liable to use engramic language to himself and he’s liable to pick up things which he has in the bank in order to apply to himself. As a consequence, his autohypnosis is a self-restimulative process and it can really fix him up swell.
Now, if anybody ever comes to you and says, “Please give me the following positive suggestion . . .”or if you’re working with a patient who does trance easily and he wants you to give him a suggestion, don’t give it to him. Under no circumstances give it to him; because the desire for that suggestion is dictated by an engram and you will succeed in laying in a lock. And if it goes on top of a sympathy engram, you’re going to just have a hell of a time before you can release that thing.
The language that he wants reinstalled in himself is straight out of an engram, so you’re just doubling up on the thing and making that engram and the later suggestion inaccessible to yourself. So don’t do it.
A young man came to me one time insisting that I drive him crazy, and when I refused to do so said I was hedging about Dianetics. This young man pestered me and pestered me. It was something like handing a hand grenade to a bunch of Zulus, so to speak, as far as this was concerned. He wanted me to do it. He had been hypnotized many times; he wanted me to install this suggestion in him. We were a little bit into therapy in Dianetics. And he begged and he fussed and so forth so finally I gave him a hand grenade with the pin pulled. One, I wanted to know if the predicted result would take place. So I said, “Well, all right. I’ll give you the suggestion.” He wanted this suggestion put in: “I can remember everything which has ever hurt me in my whole life in present time so that I myself can then run off the engrams myself and deintensify them myself, and so be able to administer therapy to myself” So I said, “Now, what do you want installed ?” And he said, “I want you to say that anything which has ever hurt me in my life, I can remember in present time.” He wrote it out. I threw him into a nice, deep trance, I gave him a full routine, gave him the suggestion, tamped it shut on the end, wiped the whole experience out of his mind, wiped out the experience of his coming to tell me that he wanted it done (all in the bargain), woke up this patient and had a psychotic on my hands.
He was crazy; he stayed crazy for quite a while. I was awful busy, didn’t have much time to work on him, and I wanted to find out if this thing would settle out or something else would happen. But nothing settled out. The poor guy goes around all the time running engrams: “I’m killed, I’m killed, I’m stuck, I’m caught. I’m stuck, it must be in there somewhere. Yeah, that’s it! Oh, that’s that horrible pain in my shoulder! I’m stuck, I’m stuck, I’m stuck. My God, I’m stuck. Oh, ‘I’m caught,’ it is. ‘I’m caught,’ it is.” You could see him on any street corner or any place that he was hanging around, or sitting on the front doorstep, and he’d be running these engrams. That was all he did (vocal). And of course he never ran one out. He restimulated practically every engram in the bank. He had himself in the finest state of restimulation you ever wanted to observe. He could run them out himself, he could. Oh, yes. So, finally he came back and confided to me that because he had a couple of bad spots in the past, he didn’t want anybody else to know about it. But now he was desperate and he threw himself upon my mercy, now he was going to tell me all about it, so he proceeded to. And I worked with him I guess off and on for, oh, I don’t know, must have been ten, twelve sessions. [gap] . . . it was really nailed down. Now, I want to tell you what was underlying that suggestion. As I got down the bank and really threw the thing into full gear and finally pulled the thing up, “If anyone remembered everything which had ever happened to him he’d go mad!” That was the engram underlying it, but the computation was—that was Grandma—and the computation was that if Mama went crazy, Grandma would take care of her.
You can recall the engram bank with perfect safety once it’s gone. You can recall it in chunks as it is going. But don’t try to recall it all at once. Now, it’s possible that an engram could contain this whole thing to such a degree that you would find everything that ever hurt a man in present time out front. And you will discover that, and when you discover it the person will be in an institution.
That’s all I want to say about hypnotism.