Manifestations Which Assist the Auditor (500721)

Date: 21 July 1950

Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard

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Okay. It may surprise some of you to learn that there are mechanisms and manifestations within and without the human being which assist the auditor. I hope that this isn’t a surprise to as many of you as it might be.

According to an occasional sad letter I get, out in Podunk somewhere, John Jones auditing Richard Roe has found Richard Roe stuck in present time, he says.

The publisher left some quotes out of the book, by the way That’s stuck in (quote, quote) present time (quote, quote). And then it says down in the text, present time, (quote) present time (quote, quote). And then the person who edited the book—it went out so fast it wasn’t checked.

It’s impossible to get stuck in present time. How could a man be stuck in present time? He could be stuck in an engram which had the words “present time” in it, he could be stuck somewhere on the track, but he could never be stuck in present time.

Sometimes you will find a person stuck in an engram which has a bouncer to tell him to “go forward,” get away as far as he can get and stay there and keep on going. Yeah, and it will give the manifestation of “stuck in present time.” You try to get him back on the track, of course, and he just is bouncing.

Some of these people that I’ve picked up have moved into the future some distance on this, by the way. You give them an age flash and they’ll say—they’re actually twenty-two, and they’ll—say, “What’s your age?” And the fellow will say, “Forty-nine.” And you say, “Well, what’s going on?” Get him to close his eyes and sometimes you get his illusion of the future or his actual vision of the future, I don’t know.

Just talking at random here right at the beginning, I have, by the way, carried one case, I mean, one prognostication, which I was very careful to take down over a period of three years. And in its generalities—this person was merely sent up the track to various dates ahead, various months and dates ahead. And I took notes on what the person had contacted and what was happening. And I’ll be a son of a gun if in its wide generality—the events are transpiring.

It’s interesting that in one place they were going to take a move down by the seashore and there was going to be a certain kind of tree there. But he was merely there in the future reporting that he lived by the seashore with a certain kind of tree growing, and that they had a child that was four months of age, and et cetera, et cetera. That happened—that such-and-such a thing happened with regard to a business and that such-and-such a thing happened with regard to a car, and all the time protesting, “This isn’t true, I’m not trying to tell you anything. You’re forcing me into this.” “Well, all right. Let’s go through it again.” And that sort of an argument taking place all this time and I just jotted the things down. And in their wide generalities these things came true. When you’re dealing with the mind, you have to be, shall we say, open-minded.

Male voice: You want to explain something else at this point?

What?

Male voice: A one-week-old exists, who appears to be on the end of a television boom, twenty-five feet behind, fifteen feet above the ground, following his mother and father around.

Who is this?

Male voice: Me, this afternoon. (laughter) Out of valence.

Male voice: No, sir. At this time I wouldn’t admit that. I’d say I was one week old and I was one week old. And I could see in color chrome. And I know I saw it.

Okay. Okay. Who processed it for you?

Male voice: Mrs. Towner.

Well, in Dianetics there’s an awfully good motto for anyone to follow, and that’s “Be surprised at nothing.” That happens to be the motto of an old Southern family and it shows this enormous rook, big crow—rook—sitting on top of a little tiny castle. And the scroll underneath the thing in old English is “Be surprised at nothing.” And I think that could very well be adapted for Dianetics.

I want to talk to you now about what you can expect as auditors in a preclear. The things which—about which I’m going to tell you, exist in everybody, but in various ways, which I will also cover, become occluded or go on a strike. There are certain mechanical things that people have. The first one is what we’re calling in Dianetics the somatic strip.

Now actually, the idea of somatic strip came in, in the early days of Dianetics, from “motor strip.” But when you use “motor strip” you get a person into too many automobile accidents. And it’s a restimulative word. “Somatic” is not.

What connection this has actually with the switchboards or the little men hanging by their heels, rather, on either side of the brain, I’m not prepared to say. But we postulate that these switchboards contain the motor mechanisms which register various parts of the time track.

All we mean when we say “somatic strip” is that portion of the organism or that appendage to the organism, interior or exterior or wherever, which locates moments of time for the individual. This means strictly that it is under the orders of the auditor ordinarily, and that under such orders it can go relocate incidents.

It is a time traveling mechanism, and in addition to that will pick up pains and synthesize other perceptics. Called “somatic strip” just so people would get with somatics. At one time it was thought there was some very definite cross between this and the—well, actually it was the motor strip and the sensory strip.

There’s a motor strip/sensory strip switchboard combination on either side of the brain. As I said, little men hanging by their heels. There are four of them. You take a rat, for instance, and the rat hangs by his heels in a rat’s brain. So you have this little miniature rat as far as the nervous outline is concerned.

You trace it on impulses and so on and you find the picture of a rat upside down, one here, one here, and then inside of it the sensory rat. Out here is the muscular rat. And it’s very amusing, it really is a rat. It looks like a rat, it’s a sort of a body plan mechanism.

Now, in a rat nothing is very exaggerated. In a man, however, the tongue, hands are very exaggerated, extremely so. Traced out, it makes an interesting picture. You can go and get a book on neurology and look up this diagram if you want to. You’ll find it fascinating.

However, that’s structure. We’re not interested in structure. I’m passing by it as a datum about as important as the number of whales killed off the coast of Newfoundland in the year 1802. But its genesis, the name, was the thought that the muscular strip had a contact with time. So we call this the somatic strip. It will move in time under the command of the auditor. Everybody’s got one of these unless it’s been cut out of him by an accident or something of the sort. Even then he might have one, I don’t know. But you should expect always to find one.

Now, this thing happens to work whether the person consents to have it work or not. In a case which is working well, this does not in any way interrupt. You tell it, as an auditor, to go somewhere and it goes. And then the preclear is quite surprised to find himself at the age of four with Mama pulling his hair out by the roots or something of the sort. You tell it to go to such and so. Now, it will go in terms of time. “The somatic strip will now go to February 16, 1914.” All right, if the somatic strip is working well—its under the auditor’s complete control and orders—it will wind up on that date. Due to the inability of people to contact reality, it very often misses. Often it won’t move. Sometimes it gets mixed up with a holder or a bouncer and every time it tries to move in on the engram it holds or bounces.

We can see this much more clearly by postulating the fact that it is a large number of attention units, the bulk of the attention units of “I,” which come under the direction of the auditor. When an engram is restimulated, the somatic strip has hooked in some sort of muscular activity into the moment of the engram.

Now, it should be considered as a sort of a multiple pointer; when it’s working at its optimum it will only go to one place at one time. We differentiate this very sharply then. When we tell a patient to go somewhere and address him directly and say, “You will now go to such-and-such,” there is something of a confusion there.

Here’s the patient trying to go someplace but stay on the couch. Now, you might by saying, “The patient will go someplace,” restimulate an engram somewhat, so we just detach the thing and we get better results. We say, “The somatic strip will now go . . .” And because he will wind up in these places he suddenly perceives, if he is working well at all, that the somatic strip is under the auditor’s control. And this is a matter of great surprise to a great many people. And it’s as though he himself had nothing to do with it. And as a matter of fact on an uncleared “I,” that somatic strip just wanders according to restimulation of this and that. It goes up and down the time track. It isn’t stable. But under the hands of an auditor it should go exactly where it is supposed to go.

Now, once it goes there and starts to sweep through an engram, it is equally insentient and equally unrational. It isn’t thinking. You start it sweeping through an engram and it will go right on through the engram.

I’d like you to envision the somatic strip as something which you guide and order, and treat it as though, for instance, you were driving a car. You drive the car down the street, and you turn the car. Now, after you’ve leaned on the wheel of the car if you didn’t straighten the wheel out, the car would keep right on going in a circle. It’s the same way with the somatic strip. You start it through something and it’ll keep right on going.

Now, a somatic strip which is really working well can be started at the beginning of one year and can sweep right on through the days of that year just on a single order and wind up at New Year’s Day of the next year, clickety-clickety-clickety-click, without any recognition of any single moment by the preclear.

Similarly, a somatic strip can be started through one end of birth and can be requested to go right on through birth. It’ll proceed to do so. It’ll do so best if you count the time for it. And it will go right on through birth and all the somatics will turn right on. As it goes on through birth they’ll turn on, they’ll turn off, they’ll do everything they’re supposed to do and the somatic strip will sweep on through.

If the person perceives no part of the perceptic of birth beyond the fact that its various somatics are turning on, but doesn’t seize upon the voices which are also speaking in birth, then the individual doesn’t get stuck in the incident.

You want to be very cautious as you do this. Don’t keep calling his attention to anything in the incident. Don’t try to pick up any of these somatics. You could send the person through a tonsillectomy, through this, through that, through an operation. You could send him through late-life moments of unconsciousness that he “knows very well,” (quote, quote) that he has no contact with whatsoever.

His somatic strip will go right straight on through. Just count the time. He’ll get the moment that the knife went into the appendix, he’ll get the somatics of this, he’ll get the movements, kinesthesia, everything. The somatic strip will just swing right on through the thing. You can count off the time. You can mark it off on a watch if you want to. And you can say—just to keep the thing from going through minute by minute, count the minutes for him. And the somatic strip will very obligingly sweep from minute to minute. “It’s one minute now, it’s two minutes, three minutes, four minutes after the knife was inserted, five minutes, six minutes, seven minutes, eight minutes, nine minutes after the first cut, ten minutes, eleven minutes, twelve minutes” and so on.

The somatic strip will go right through. That will happen in a person who has everything normally shut off. And that is something that some people find very interesting. They don’t believe anything is happening in their cases, they think themselves incapable of experiencing any strange phenomena.

Tell the person to close his eyes, tell the somatic strip to go to the beginning of his last operation at the moment, let us say, they’re putting the mask over his face. You ascertain—the fellow just could remember that he had an operation once—the moment they’re putting the mask over his face. “Now it is one minute after the mask is over the face; two minutes, three minutes, four minutes, five minutes.” (sound of deep breathing) And he’s going through all the muscular reactions and so on. And then he feels the first stab of something and then he feels the straps holding him down, and he’ll go on through the thing, sweep him on through. But don’t stop that somatic strip or suddenly neglect it. Remember that an automobile—you tell the somatic strip, “The somatic strip will now go through birth.” It’ll proceed to do so. Only it’ll only go through birth. It’ll just keep going through birth. There’s no therapeutic value in its going through birth, but believe me it can make a person uncomfortable. So you turn the wheel of the automobile, the automobile will travel in circles. Just that way with the somatic strip. It’s a very, very strange mechanism. So we have started the somatic strip going through this person’s operation, he’s getting somatics on the thing, you bring the somatic . . . You can time it, by the way, and if you know nothing about the length of time operations take and your patient knows nothing about the time they take either—it’s not in either one’s education. A surgeon can stand by and criticize, if you please, the skill of the surgeon who was operating; say that the fellow was either very good or he was very fast or “My heavens, it took him nineteen minutes to get out the adenoids, horrible.” And you can get someone who was not schooled in Dianetics, some surgeon, he will become so fascinated watching this patient that he will run off the time to himself and give you comments afterwards about what kind of an operation it must have been. So you run the somatic strip right on through the thing, remember to bring the poor guy to the moment he woke up out of the operation and then bring the—you’re not bringing him—the somatic strip up to the time he was all well. And then bring it up to the time when he was happy and cheerful. And then bring it back up to present time.

Because remember, it’s an automobile that when the wheel is turned it’ll just keep on going. The second that you let go the controls of it, it will do what it has been doing. The patient can’t grab control of this somatic strip, for all that we tell him he can pull out of anything he gets into.

He can’t grab control of his somatic strip till it’s thrown up someplace in his vicinity in present time. Then of course it will move right on as it’s intended to move with present time, with of course in an aberree various starts and dives as things become restimulated. That’s the action of the somatic strip.

You ought to experiment with it some time. You will have some very, very interesting manifestations. Take a patient whose operation you have never been able to reach and run him through the operation. Of course if he’s very seriously frozen up on the track, the somatic strip is not working well. But if he is just a little bit free, this sort of thing will take place.

It is quite startling to him. I would never, for instance, put a newspaper reporter into reverie. I would just tell his somatic strip to go back to the last time he broke his neck. And then just leave it there until such time as he was willing to write a nice story. (laughter) Male voice: Wouldn’t it be better to put him in birth?

Hm?

Male voice: Wouldn’t it better to put him in birth and then bring him back?

Oh, well . . . The best way to put a person into birth if you’re really viciously inclined is to put them back into birth and then let them watch some perceptics. Let them pick up a few perceptics so these perceptics themselves are becoming impinged upon “I.” And you’ve got it turned on nice and strong now, turn it on stronger, then tell the person to open up his eyes, (audience groans) Of course he’s right there.

It’s not going to hurt him any. In two or three days it’ll be back up to present time. Meantime he will have had a cold or something.

Male voice: Within a week.

It’s very uncomfortable. You found a week in your case?

Male voice: Yes sir, I did.

He must have had a call-back in it.

Male voice: I think I had a holder.

Now, should give you some idea of the actual power of the auditor. Many people when they’re auditing sort of just halfway believe what’s happening. And so they don’t think it makes any difference what they say or what they do “because it isn’t going to work anyway.” You go out through the land and you start looking over patients who at the moment are being branded failures or very tough cases, you’re going to find an auditor who “didn’t think it happened” and who would say, “Well, the somatic strip will go someplace or other” and then say, “Well, we’re not getting anyplace now” and start talking to the fellow about the time he had a birthday when he was five.

Of course, your somatic strip’s gone down here and sweeping down through here. And now without telling it to do anything, without guiding it, all of a sudden you start the fellow in at five. Of course maybe he says, “Well, what happened to you when you were five?” And the fellow tries to tell him and he says, “Well then, oh, nothing very important then. Let’s try for some prenatals. All right.

Let’s go to the first time.” Now, maybe the somatic strip is back under his control again and maybe it isn’t. He’s not controlling anything particularly because he doesn’t think he has any control Actually his ability to control analytically the patient is very slight. But the ability to control the mechanisms which handle engrams is very great. You neglect your own power and neglect to know the extent of your own power when you are auditing, you’re going to get bad cases.

Now, that is the somatic strip. You want to make the test on this some time, go right ahead. It’s a good test to find out how solidly frozen the somatic strip is in a patient.

Male voice: I’m just curious as to—you take your reporter as an example here, and let’s say you’ll say “somatic strip” to him, well, well, how much would you have to define the term through to him or in order for his analytical mind—in order for him . . .

Oh well, just tell him, “Well, the somatic strip is that mechanism which goes places when we tell it to. You don’t have to pay any attention to it one way or the other. It’s just that mechanism.” Now you’ve given that mechanism a name so that it knows who you are. And then you say, “Well now, it will go . . .” I’ll show you, for instance, “The somatic strip will go to the so-and-so,” and run it through.

You can even say to the somatic strip sometimes if it’s working very well, “It will just continue to sweep through this incident. And when it gets to the end it will go back to the beginning again.” And the person will do it.

Female voice: Well, let’s say you get the exact phrase in an engram, that won’t in itself erase the engram, just . . .

No. No . . .

Female voice: . . .the working of the somatic strip, . . . the somatic strip can go through and through and through and through and it won’t erase. It’s “I” contacting the perceptics, it’s the pain being reexperienced, it’s the whole thing that erases the engram.

Male voice: Ron, I’ve been working on a theory that it’s rather dangerous to tell the somatic strip to go over a repeater phrase anywhere in the bank because doesn’t the somatic strip kind of chase through everything that has that phrase in it and turn it on?

Sure. But the somatic strip follows down the time track. You don’t have to even know it’s there, actually. Dick Saunders the other night thought up a good one in connection with that.

He says, “You know, it’s a funny thing, we’re using natural mechanisms which have existed for a very long time.” He said, “Now, you’ve seen people in life, say, somebody comes up to him and says, ‘Well, you remember Jack Miller.’ And his friend says, ‘Miller? Miller? Miller, Miller, Miller. Oh yeah, I remember Jack Miller,’” That’s repeater technique.(laughter) Male voice: That’s repeater technique, but I mean if you tell the somatic strip to go along to contact the engram . . .

Well, you can reinforce it. You can reinforce the repeater technique. But actually if you just tell the person to start repeating something, the somatic strip will start following down anyway Of course, if you’re telling him to repeat something, you’re throwing in the whole mechanism. You’re not just telling the somatic strip to go.

Male voice: I know.

That’s why using repeater technique from present time is something you have to do rather gingerly. You start using repeater technique on holders and you’re liable to stir up five or six holders in the bank. He was only in one to begin with, and now he’s in six-Yes?

Female voice: When he tries to get out of a painful somatic and he comes to a pleasure moment, what if he still cant get out of the painful somatic even though he . . . But you perceived the pleasure incident?

Female voice: The pleasure incident has been perceived. And how thoroughly perceived is it?

Female voice: I don’t know if I can answer the question but surely there were somatics from the actual previous incident coming through.

Mm-hm. If you’re run through a pleasure somatic that is really thoroughly contacted all at once, it will very often shuck off the somatic. But that’s very often, not always. All right.

The way you use this somatic strip then, it’s under your orders. You send it where you want it to go. Now, a somatic strip is normally not under an outsider’s orders. It is under the orders of the insider, under the orders of that portion of basic personality which is designated the file clerk. This is the second mechanism which assists the auditor.

The file clerk. I’ll get around to basic personality in a moment— take up this file clerk, just a strange phenomenon that aids us a great deal. The file clerk is not a thinking thing, but it is an answering thing, so long as the data is present. Don’t ask the file clerk to predict, but you can ask the file clerk to count. You can ask the file clerk for yes/no answers and normally you will get them.

If you ask the file clerk, “How many times do we have to go through this engram again to erase it?” he may say eight or nine or something.

He’s guessing. Because you’re asking him—or you’re getting no answer at all. You’re asking him something he has to think about and he’s not a thinking mechanism.

He doesn’t know his Dianetics. He does damn well but he still doesn’t know his Dianetics. You can ask him, “How many engrams of this type are earlier than this in the bank?” (snap) And the flash is five. If that file clerk is working well, that’s five. But after all, he can count them: one, two, three, four, five. That’s fine.

You can give him, actually, a flash on this order: I’m going to ask your file clerk for a number. Now, when I snap my fingers, a number will flash into your mind. How many engrams do you have? (snap) Male voice: Get a number up in the thousands.

The number was in the thousands. All right.

Male voice: It wasn’t a . . .

All right.

Male voice: . . . it said six thousand . . . But it was an order of magnitude.

Now, a file clerk would answer a question like this. And he will also answer questions like this: All right, Miles, now a yes or no will flash into your mind when I ask you this question: Is basic-basic out? (snap) Male voice: No.

There’s your flash response. The file clerk is the author of flash responses. Actually it is his business in the thinking apparatus to forward through the answers to computations which are being run on the hidden circuits. And there are plenty of hidden circuits in the mind. They are hidden as far as “I” is concerned, not from the fact that they have to hide. They are masked circuits.

When you stop and think of the number of computers which are busily going in the mind, how many computations are being formed, it becomes a rather astonishing picture. The file clerk forwards the data to “I.” His smooth operation is to tell “I” the answers. He does not tell “I” the answers vocally, normally, but merely forwards the data and the conclusions up.

Now, he can work on multiple circuits and he can work toward many computers. You might better consider him a file clerk who is chief of the file clerks, because all of these are information furnishers. They use their communication systems to come up.

They’re attention units actually which are down next to the standard banks—that’s the easiest way to understand them. And the master attention unit of the lot, or the boss attention unit of the lot—unless the mind is all clouded up with circuitry—will shoot through the information. And he will shoot through accurate information.

Once a person gets out circuitry, you can ask the file clerk some sort of a question like this. Now, actually it seems like this would require computation. But it doesn’t.

What is the number of separate functions the mind performs? (snap) Anybody get a number?

Male voice: Twelve hundred.

Second male voice: Six thousand.

Third male voice: Eighty-seven.

The file clerk will forward through some sort of a number like this, he’s (snap) done a count. Now, how do we know that these numbers aren’t different from mind to mind? And of course we can’t check immediately unless the file clerk is Clear.

Male voice: Ron? I got a rather clear answer to that, 2 to the 35th power.

Two to the 35th power. Okay.

Now, you see the question happens to be asked in a rather indefinite way, so that there could be very many indefinite functions. But when you’re busy looking at a graph, where you’re trying to postulate certain boards in the mind which would be check boards, you can ask the file clerk questions like “Are they all there?” And so you get an impression of—you don’t get sonic or anything, you just know suddenly that you’ve omitted a couple. So you look around to see what they are.

Now, a good navigator navigates more or less in this fashion. He takes his sight, he does all of his computations, he’s very, very careful with the whole thing. He adds it all up toward the end. And just before he finishes adding it, he knows whether that computation is right or wrong. He knows.

That’s the best navigator that knows that. And he knows more or less down the columns when it goes wrong. If he cannot do that, he’s actually a liability to the ship he’s navigating. That principle is so well established in navigation. It has been well established in navigation to my knowledge since the days of Columbus that there is an instinctive yea or nay coming up there.

Now, it works this way in many things. We have what is known as intuition. It is immediately presumed when someone is talking about intuition that he is reading minds or going into the future someplace or getting some sort of a telepathic answer. Perhaps telepathy may be some part of the computation. But to name the whole process any one of these things would be a mistake. Actually when one begins to check up on the mind and find out how many things it observes, how many data have been assembled on any one subject at any one moment, he finds out that an enormous amount of observation has taken place. So the file clerk, running off the computers, has received conclusions usually already on various things. And one suddenly knows intuitively that something is amiss or that something is this way or the thing should be done that way.

It’s a conclusion which has come forward, whap! The best and most reliable of these conclusions are yea-nay—are conclusions when a person has asked a question of existence which can be answered in terms of yes and no. “Will number 36 win, Hot Biscuits?” And you get sometimes a feeble “Well, maybe” and so on, no data to amount to anything. Once in a while somebody gets what he calls a hunch. A great big “yes” will come through on something, some question of that sort. And he’ll put his money on it and sometimes he’ll win.

This sort of thing is what drives gamblers crazy. It does, it drives them crazy because they start to listen to voices after a while. They don’t realize that they had data on what they were doing.

Now, one day I was down to Tijuana and my wife was standing behind me. And she was telling me “put them on number so-and-so, number so-and-so, number so-and-so” on a roulette wheel. And then I would bet on these three numbers, bong, bong, bong, and one of those numbers would come up. I thought, “This is peculiar.” Swing, and I’d bet on number, number, number, according to what she was saying. One of them would come up. And I thought, “What have we got here, a seer? Something of the sort. All right. I’ll keep betting.” Well, it was only a dime roulette wheel and yet the first thing we knew, we had about fifty bucks sitting over there in chips and it started on up from fifty bucks. Well, at this moment everybody else noticing this luck started to ride the numbers with me. And I had started looking at this wheel, wondering why it was doing this.

My wife had done some sort of a computation along in this order. The wheel was out of balance. The ball was being thrown in the same way each time. The wheel was so much out of balance that it was—she had watched it for about five or six spins and then she had noticed that when it had hit in three numbers on this side (she hadn’t figured this out, by the way) the wheel next time would tip and you’d get three numbers over here. And then it would get the matching three numbers over here. And it was getting the matching three numbers over here. And it was going consistently that way. The wheel was warped, you know, out of balance. So she had watched this happening, and without knowing why it was happening she was getting (quote) hunches (unquote).

We had a nice Christmas anyway, because I pulled out of there with the fifty bucks. But the point I’m getting to you is the complexity of computation which the mind will do.

The mind has been very grossly maligned. One is taught arithmetic in school and he’s taught that he does it all on the front board. Education is most magnificent in its consistent belief that everything is done on the front board, or if one stores the memory banks sufficiently full, that one can then think.

These—neither one of these are true. When I say, “Do it on the front board,” I was drawing this scale of right-wrong here, the mind sort of adding up the computation and following it. You can follow a computation, but when you follow one like that it is so slow, so pokey. Computation is done fast, milliseconds proposition. Conclusions will come out fast. Now, there are all kinds of computers going on. And when a person is taught to distrust his own conclusions with regard to things, then he really starts to make mistakes, big mistakes.

The mind is pretty well designed to run automatic. Well, that’s a little bit off the subject, but not very far. I’m talking now about the mechanism which forwards data. This is a very simple mechanism you can postulate as an analogy. It comes up from standard banks and it comes up from conclusions and the engrams are available to the file clerk.

You get down against the standard banks with a person who is in amnesia trance and you’ll find he has full somatics, full sonic, full everything. He’s just full on, if you can get there. Of course you can’t get him there if you’re just dropping him into an operation. He just goes out. But if he’s fluid on the track, you get him into present time, you drop him back down into amnesia trance, he’s got everything in amnesia trance. It’s awfully hard to get a person into that position, however. You have to really work if you’re taking just a flat series of cases and testing each one. You have to use drugs and other things in order to bring the person into this situation. But once the attention units which are all the way back down the line—the attention units which are up against the standard bank are reached and the attention units which are “I” are no longer in contact, this person gets full sonic. The amount of therapy which this will deliver is very, very small.

The attention units down against the standard banks are quite able to contact all these things all the time anyway. But what they aren’t able to do is get through to “I” with them. So naturally, amnesia trance and the rest of it, it’s working back of “I” way back there and you’re not getting anything that is therapeutic.

Oh, you can run engrams, you can do all sorts of things. Of course you wake him up and he’s terribly excited about them. It has the added disadvantage of the fact that these units are very few and, you might say, although they’re probably the same units as in any other part of the mind, they’re weak.

In short, they don’t push well into the early parts of the bank, they don’t undo computations well, the person doesn’t think well and the chances of restimulation are enormous. And when restimulated in this fashion an engram does not die out in three days.

When you do this kind of work you have to do it perfect every time and that’s impossible in Dianetics. The consequence, it sounds awfully fine to say there is a part of the mind which has full sonic, full somatics, full everything else, but “I” is out of contact with it.

You can pull this trick, by the way. You can run a person in amnesia trance and then run him wide-awake back down to the same incident and it’ll be loosened up so that you can run it off. You’d think it was nice to locate incidents that way. Well, it isn’t. They come up just in the order they’re supposed to come up, but they run off very slowly.

A person talks about like this, usually: Mmm . . . And the auditor listening to one of these boys run, see, is listening like this. Really got his ears strained, just whispering, barely whispering. And the engram runs through . . .in. . . about . . . this . . . rate . . .of. . . speed. [gap] When you’ve been through this with a person a few times, you go through one engram where Mama is a monologuist and it takes you two hours to get through the thing once. And the actual time of the engram was five minutes. You see some of the factors that come in?

Hypnotists used to try to work this field and this is very common with them. The slowness of recounting is peculiar to the early part of the bank, the prenatal area. The earlier you go, the slower it gets, usually. These are just observations but I’m showing you what we have lying there.

You can postulate that it looks something like this. Here are your standard banks, here’s some attention units. Here’s a whole bunch of circuitry running in like this, [drawing on blackboard] Here’s “I.” Well now, here’s “I’s” time track, starting here and going up here, and here’s these time tracks—actually would be the same time track here. Actually this time track runs all the way up, throughout. But here would be depth of trance, see?

This is very shallow, little deeper, little deeper, little deepen. You get in here in the middle, you just go straight into the engram bank. Then you get down here into deep trance and the fellow can freewheel on his various circuits. This is an analogy. When you open up a brain you will not find a cone like this in it. Yes?

Female voice: Is there a slowing down of reaction of speech the earlier you get, in relation to the speedup of metabolism when . . .

Who knows? I would say offhand that time moved very, very slowly for the embryo and moved quite swiftly for the man of seventy.

Female voice: Because . . .

I don’t think it has anything to do with the fact that time moves faster or slower, but I think his . . .

Female voice: Metabolism. . . . recording of it—I wouldn’t use the word metabolism, we don’t know. That would be latching it down. I don’t know that this stuff isn’t engraved on the thinnest of thin air. All right. This sort of a setup here, when he is back here—here’s your file clerk. Let’s say this is your boss file clerk. And here is “I” up here. Oh, this is the memory, straight line stuff, what a person remembers. But this is a full, strong, adult memory. This is not a duplicate of this bank. This is just as much as the person has of it. Actually there’s memory storage all around here, conclusion storage and computers and everything else. Well, here’s the boss man, you might say, the “I” of the standard banks. He is basic personality. We can call him “I” because the person gets down there, he still has identity. Only this identity right up close to the standard banks is more or less, if it were souped up considerably, the personality of the individual as he will be when he’s all on top and the reactive bank is out.

This personality has likes, dislikes, ambitions and every other thing. These are the attention units lying right down here on the standard banks. Sometimes a person has so many engrams that the file clerk units are just all in here and there’s the file clerk. Well, you can still get down there and you can still ask him questions.

Don’t ask him to do any predicting, because he’s got too few units here to do much computing and he doesn’t have enough concourse with circuits in a—when you’ve got him down to that stage, you’ve shut off all the circuits above him. He can’t do any thinking but he can do a lot of personalizing. That is to say, he can tell you what he likes, what his ambitions are and so on. That’s one of the ways you find basic purpose, by the way.

Of course all this is used in research. We absolutely don’t only frown but stamp on the idea of hypnotizing people for therapy for the excellent reason that any time you enter this bank here and go plowing down the time track very happily here, so on—here’s “I” clear out here—you have smothered a lot of material here and it probably won’t be able to erase, because it’s awfully hard to get down early with this stuff. So you get him into some kind of an operation up here, [drawing on blackboard] and then this thing goes into full-blast gear. Although it appears that mild back here, by the time it gets up here it’s really strong. You follow me? All right.

Here’s your file clerk then, it’s your file clerk flashing data through to “I.” Flashed it through here, wherever this “I” happens to be on the time track. “I” will go up and down the time track. Units will go up and down the time track right with “I.” A little bit difficult analogy to make on two dimensions, but you can see what it is.

Now, the file clerk has, in addition to everything in the standard banks under his control, he has also every engram in the bank potentially at his control. But the only engrams he can reach in the bank are those which are uppermost.

Now, as the file clerk would look at the bank, he would see that thing which was principally blocking him from obtaining material. And he’ll look it over, and he sees this higgledy-piggledy pile of something or other, and he’ll pull one off the top of it or off the bottom of it that is ready to go.

He can get this one separate. So he’ll look it over and he’ll get one separate and he’ll throw it forward in time. He’s quite smart about selection and delivery of answers.

Now, the only thing which can keep him from operating, nothing keeps him from selecting the engram, but this can keep him from operating, being frozen at an age level, being frozen all the way across. Which is to say he’s got an engram, he’s got hold of this damn thing and all the information he could forward through comes out of this engram.

He tries to forward through the fact that one should think about this. This conclusion that he has on file here says this requires thought and computation. He starts to forward this thing through, goes into this circuit like this and so forth and gets over here and arrives at “I.” When it gets over here to “I” it’s somewhat modified. No thought has been done on it but an awful lot of reaction.

Now, the flash that you get through from a file clerk when he gives you yes, no, and so forth, should come through on a straight flash wherever a person is in the bank. The concentration of attention units are constantly over here, [drawing on blackboard] carry this flash forward at the dictate of it.

Hard to show you this in two dimensions. If there’s any confusion about it, let me know.

Now, a lot of things can interrupt this in the way of circuitry, “I can’t tell you, I am afraid to tell you” can interrupt it. But this isn’t the file clerk going on strike, this is the file clerk forwarding the data as asked for and then he keeps going up against the occlusion demon. The data doesn’t come through. He’ll try to put it through.

Now, it can be postulated that the file clerk will stop working with an auditor. The auditor messes up the patient too much, the file clerk quits sometimes, I’ve seen this. No other explanation for it except—the patient’s not stuck on the track or anything—the auditor’s broken the Auditor’s Code, something of the sort, the file clerk asking for an engram, “Nuh-uh,” You don’t get anything. Blank, But if you work the patient for a short time in straight line memory the file clerk more or less gets reassured about the fact that he’s perfectly willing then to put out the data and he’ll start working again, I’ve never seen one stop permanently but I have seen one sag in his activities, I just throw that in in passing because you’re going to see it sometimes when you get a patient that somebody has worked for many, many hours on, where the file clerk has quit. It’s up to you to reassure this patient and work with this patient until at last you have the confidence of the patient, which is to say, the confidence of the file clerk.

The patient may appear to you to have every confidence in the world in you, the file clerk has quit. If you go over it a little bit you’ll find out that the file clerk doesn’t like that word Dianetics—got him into birth once and never got him out. So here’s your standard banks, hopefully available, and there’s this file forwarding system coming out. To draw anything like this on the blackboard as complicated as this really is—complex in terms of quantity and numbers of units but not complex in terms of principle, the principle’s easy.

The file clerk then functions to assist the auditor. The auditor must not let him down. The file clerk gives you an engram, he gives it to you in the confidence that the thing is going to be treated in some fashion. Sometimes he has to be rather reassured of the fact the thing’s going to be treated. So you run the patient through the time they cut their finger You run them through the time they cut their finger a few times, and well, fine. And first thing you know, why, heck, they’ll give you the time they practically cut his hand off. And then they give you the time they practically cut his arm off. Then he’ll give you the time he practically died.

Oh, this guy’s working all right. We’ve led up to this. The file clerk however doesn’t know this about Dianetics. There’s one thing—he follows Dianetics, he just thinks Dianetics is wonderful. He’d track right along with Dianetics. As a matter of fact, the principles of Dianetics have been built as a parallel to the behavior of the file clerk and the behavior of the somatic strip and the filing system.

Therefore using these we have a parallel system. So of course they agree with it. Because it’s the system they use all the time. See, we’re not using anything very strange or something which was just invented. We’re using something that goes on and works all the time.

If the file clerk and somatic strip won’t work—we’ll take the usual case where they’re stuck on the time track, and so on—if they won’t work, it’s as if the file clerk had already offered up an engram to be recalled or something to be done about it and then nothing was done about it. It’s as if in the absence of an auditor something was flung forward.

Actually this isn’t the case, but the thing is there and quite often it is there so thoroughly that it has sonic on the moment of the holder in it. Or it has a sense of smell on the moment of the holder in the engram. The engram is right there ready to be run, or it is the top of a series of engrams and you’ll have to get the first one in order to run all of them. But they’re all being handed to you. Sometimes you’re handed a whole chain of engrams, sometimes just one engram. The file clerk will hand you engrams. You tell the file clerk what you want, he’s got an idea of what you’re doing.

You’ve run through some pleasure moments, you’ve given the patient some practice. The file clerk all of a sudden says, “Nya-hah! Here we go. My God, at last we get this thing out of here,” and we get these channeled through. And he really starts to work. Well, now “I” may be in such a highly aberrated state through circuitry and so on that “I” hardly knows what’s going on. And yet the file clerk knows what’s going on and will work with you.

Now, this is another thing that spooks people occasionally, if they stop to think about it. Very few people really stop to think about this. You work with the file clerk, you are cooperating with the file clerk. You can even tell him he’s a good fellow and so on and you get better work out of him. And so you’re working with the file clerk and you say, “Now let us have the next moment of pain or discomfort required to resolve this case.” And the file clerk will give you the exact moment that is required, the precise moment. He’ll select the one which has the greatest aberrative value as far as the case is concerned at that moment. And he will start to clear out the engram bank for you and you can just let him go on pitching engrams out. And as long as he’ll sit there and pitch out engrams, as long as you will sit there and reduce engrams, he will keep right on working with that.

Occasionally sooner or later a person gets a little bit hot . . . [gap] . . . he’ll keep sending out engrams. Now, it so happens that as he throws these engrams out to you, your role, as far as he is concerned, is to make sure that the somatic strip does what it is supposed to do. He’s offering this engram.

Now let’s make the somatic strip go to the front part of the engram, go through and reduce it and reduce it and reduce it and reduce it. The file clerk sometimes has various problems, such as five engrams all lashed up on one somatic. Now he’ll offer the whole bundle. He can’t do anything else. But he wants to be unchained, you might say, and you’re supposed to run out those things. And you can run one this way or run that one that way, or there’s an engram there someplace that he’s offered you. And the only real trouble you get into is when you ignore the file clerk’s offering. Then you start to get in trouble, get in trouble from two sources. The file clerk is liable to quit on you. And the other source is you get stuff restimulated so that you freeze up the track. That’s the danger in repeater technique.

That’s working at optimum. The file clerk offers you the exact engram required, the somatic strip goes to the precise point on the engram where it’s supposed to go and sweep the engram out and you reduce it. And you sweep it out and you get it all the way down, all the perceptics out of it that you can get, it no longer has any charge on it, then you can go to something else.

The file clerk doesn’t know that you have to get the first engram. He’ll keep on offering you late engrams as long as you ask for late engrams. As long as you make no criticism, he’ll just keep trying to unburden anything after the age of four, five, ten—he’ll give you all sorts of things. And he’ll start pitching you lots of data. It’s as though a lot of the prenatal material is buried from sight. As soon as he becomes aware of the fact that it’s there, he says, “Holy Christ!” He’ll really get it. Start him all over again. He’ll start picking that stuff up. But, if you just use the phrase “Go earlier” or “the earliest moment now available,” or something of this sort, coaxing him early, you’ll eventually turn up with the earliest stuff he can give you.

Now, he’s quite well aware of material down to postspeech. Evidently the nervous system or the contacts or something before speech are not too good, they’re not too solid and they are seldom being used on the circuit which he uses.

It’s as though back down here on the early part of the track we get a little special prenatal engram bank that goes up to speech, contains birth and so forth. The file clerk, sitting here, is below the level of attention which he uses ordinarily. But this damn thing is going up like this, see, circuits, out of this prenatal bank. He doesn’t know why the hell he can’t get through. He’s trying but he’ll offer you this one, this engram [tapping on blackboard], he’ll offer you this engram and this engram that’s sitting over there all misfiled or that one or that one or that one. His attention has to be called more or less to the existence of this. Now, if we’re working for tests to validate whether or not prenatals exist and sitting back and thinking very solemnly, “Now, let’s see, if I tell him to give me engrams, eventually a prenatal may come up and therefore we will find the prenatal engrams . . .” And a lot of people are doing this. It has a validating point of view, they’re not trying to get into therapy, but they’re trying to test Dianetics, and then they write in and complain that they never discovered any prenatals. Well, damn it, this stuff has been in operation for—this type of technique in hypnosis, using that, right down here against the bank, that’s been around for an awful long time; the fact that you could run up and down next to the banks in amnesia trance. Nobody knew that you could run up and down out here. But they knew you could go down here.

Once in a great while somebody would get back into the prenatal bank, somebody who had amnesia trance. Of course he’s rapidly and hurriedly invalidated it after that. He’ll say at this moment, “Ah, this sort of thing can’t be allowed to persist because if it persists then I’d have to face my own prenatal bank and get out my own engrams. Let’s just avoid the whole thing.” I think society as a whole was practicing tacit consent. But you coax him, eventually he’ll start in and you look down here and you’ll find the sperm sequence. “I’s” usual reaction is, “Holy smokes!” And the file clerk’s reaction is, “Huh. That’s what it was!” And he’ll run it off.

Now, I have put the prenatal bank at this part of the standard bank mechanism. You understand this is an analogy and I don’t know that this belongs. This is not necessarily the bottom of the time track. It never has been necessarily the bottom of the time track as far as I was concerned because when I was researching, long time ago, I was hitting stuff before conception, well before conception. [gap] Female voice: If you send the file clerk back to an engram, must you also send, as a separate entity, the somatic strip . . .

Mm-hm.

Female voice: . . . to run it . . .

Mm-hm.

Female voice: . . . or otherwise you won’t . . .

The file clerk will give you . . .

Female voice: . . .get the somatics turned on?

The file clerk will give you the engram, the engram’s sitting right there. But if you suddenly start to run this thing and say, “Now, what are the words that occur to you?” or something like that, fellow’s liable to start into the middle of the engram. Or he’ll start into the tail end of the engram. And you don’t want him in there before you get the beginning of the engram. So the optimum is, you ask the file clerk to furnish you with the engram. And you ask the somatic strip to go to the first part of the engram. Actually it goes to the part of the engram it can reach. There might be more engram earlier than the somatic strip can get.

Because of the depth of unconsciousness which exists at the first part of an engram or at the center of an engram, the somatic strip gets lost, its attention units fall to pieces. So you send the somatic strip to the first part of the engram and get a flash phrase. And you get that flash phrase and you make the fellow repeat it two or three times and bing In a case that’s running normally, the somatic will start to turn on then, not at first.

One of the reasons why people don’t reach these prenatals is they say—they can even say to a person, “Let’s go into the prenatal area.” A person will happily and engagingly go into the prenatal area, maybe run off a pleasure moment, maybe run off just lying around, slopping around in the amniotic fluid.

I’ve had lots of psychiatrists do that. I haven’t told them to get anything, I haven’t sent them after engrams. I’ve just told them, “Let’s go into the prenatal area.” And the guy sort of hunches up, he says, “It’s wet, it’s warm. Must be my imagination.” (laughter) If they say it in too critical a tone, I almost always locate the AA that made him a psychiatrist.

I said that with malice aforethought for this reason. Because in three psychiatrists I have found an engram which read just exactly this: “But dear, I’ve got to get it out of you. I’ve got to get it out of you. You’ll just be in terrible shape if you go on with this thing that way. Now, tell me about it. Now, what are we going to do about this thing? We’ve got to do something about this.” Male voice: Ron? You ever succeeded in locating the engram that makes a guy want to be a Dianetic auditor?

No, I’ve never seen it tied down to engrams.

No, I’ve thought it over several times, wondering why. I’ve seen engrams however that made people want to be Dianetic patients. (laughter) [Tapping on blackboard] One of the remarkably beautiful things, though, about this whole computation is (and here we’ll get on to the rest of this, something more serious)—you see all these units down here and you might say this collection of units which is riding forward in present time, because this bank rides forward in present time all the time, here in the standard bank. This “I” is always going forward. He’s right up in now and in present time all the time.

That’s not true of “I” over here, “I’s” been parked down here, down here, and all sorts of things. In a psychotic state “I” gets down there. But in a psychotic, these “I’s” are still riding up forward in present time. There’re not many of them.

Part of “I” over here can get held in an engram which triggers on the track, as we’ve been talking about. So we call this basic personality. The attention units are not being influenced by engrams up against the standard banks. That is the pure, unadulterated personality. “I” here is the pure, unadulterated personality plus demon circuits and valences and aberrative commands and psychosomatic illnesses. So here is “I” which is above all this baggage. So when a person gets cleared, you’re actually seeing this “I” reinforced, minus all of this excess baggage. And you get a very strong, marked personality. And the way it changed in the individual is ordinarily not instantly perceivable. Now, I’ve seen some basic personalities that were awful tough, mean characters. I mean just on their own hooks, the sort of guys that had a fairly tough attitude toward life.

Also, “I” is as well, just as this “I” is, the product of education, viewpoint, environment. You can’t take somebody who was raised over on the docks at West Street2 in New York and expect that this person’s educational background will mellow him down to a point where he will have a great appreciation for, for instance, somebody who won’t stand up and fight.

Now, you could take all the engrams out of the bank and he still will have very strong, decided opinions on the fact that somebody declines to put up his dukes. You see what I mean, there’s several factors involved here. There’s genetic personality, there’s other personalities. All right.

We’re talking right now however about what assists the auditor. This “I”—we represent him as being the file clerk, one of these units—is not aberrated. And this “I” wants to be cleared, solidly and unmistakably. And never make a mistake that he doesn’t.

You work with any patient long enough, no matter how recalcitrant he is, and you will find out that as basic personality starts to strengthen up, for instance, first it’s like this [drawing on blackboard], then you get lots, and it gets lots more, and lots more furnished through it and it’s getting better concourse here. Then you get more units free. And you get more units free and you get more engrams and you got more units free. More units free. And we get over here to Clear. You’ll find out this thing has sort of marched so that your concourse between the bank and the front part of his mind is straight, positive and quick. But “I” is trying to extend this thing because it’s the duty of the units up against this bank to forward information to “I,” to forward conclusions to “I,” and if they can’t get them through, they try to get them through in some other fashion.

They sometimes strike engrams, go into demon circuits, all sorts of things. But they’re trying to get through with information. Well, they’re also trying to get cleared. There is in every patient below perhaps the level, not of consciousness, but below the level of awareness of awareness, being aware of being aware. Back down below, people are just aware. But “I” is aware of being aware.

An entity, which is actually just the rest of the person, that wants to be cleared and wants to have free concourse, he’ll do a great deal. He will use almost anything possible in order to get cleared. He will even use engrams to get cleared. After all, he’s got his hands on all this data back here. And the auditor—you’ll find this with one auditor around who has more skill than other auditors, “I” will start toughening up for every other auditor in the place except this one, and waiting until this one will run him. That’s no great problem, you just let other people run him until all of a sudden one of them persuades “I” to have confidence in him. And then the person will run for him and he’ll drop this other computation. But if an auditor kicks the patient out of therapy for some reason or other, because this aberrated “I” up here, aberrated personality was so mean, so vicious that it was a great strain on him to run him, something like that, and he suddenly stops his therapy, oh boy! What starts in back here! This fellow has pleaded and begged, “Now, please stop this therapy because, you know, I don’t want to get rid of this stuff After all, I’m happy as I am. I’m sane, after all I’m perfectly cheerful and so on. I get along fine in life, you understand! I’m calm and I don’t want to have anything more to do with Dianetics. You understand?” And you say, “All right. Okay You win.” Let it go a few days. And the next thing you know this “I” is liable to go round the neighborhood saying, “You know, the last time he had me on the couch he tried to, you know, after all . . .” So eventually you will get hold of this patient and you will say, “What the hell’s the idea?” And the patient will say, “Well, I just, you know, I—it doesn’t matter, but anyway I . . .” You say, “Well, do you want to come back and go into therapy again?” “Well, yeah. I get kind of mad when you don’t work on me.” So you take him back in and, boy, straight out of the book practically, the patient—I’ve had this happen, time after time—the patient will sit right down and be just as vicious, just as mean, just as ornery as before. But basic personality suddenly picked up the circuitry and wound it forward and made the auditor go to work. Put-up job. “I” will do this. That is obviously the source of it, because it has such great sentience. The engram tries like hell to protect itself, if you can consider the engram as having any personality. As you look at it, it looks like it’s protecting itself. And “I” is trying to kick them out but he will choose some weird and peculiar ways to try to kick them out sometimes, as though a computation had been done on this level.

Male voice: Ah, one question here, Ron. Once a case has started moving, can you consider that any effort on the part of the preclear or any statement or action to stop therapy is dictated by the engram bank? Or is an honest protest against very bad auditing.

Male voice: Yeah. I mean I’m taking that into account. But I mean where you’ve got a good auditor on the case?

Oh, the guy’s auditing well and all of a sudden the case bogs down, so on. And it’s true, that the engram bank has suddenly gotten something into restimulation which says, “No more therapy.” A demon circuit has started talking about—“If I get rid of it, I’ll lose my mind. This treatment doesn’t work, I know it doesn’t work. I’ll just go crazy if you take it away from me,” that sort of a computation.

Male voice: I’ve seen that kind of deal a couple of times from the outside, I mean where I was not involved. And it was a good auditor and yet the guy went out and started getting drunk every day.

Uh-huh. Well, the auditor was kicking something into view. If you watch the case over a period of time, you would find out that whereas the person may not have been in therapy, he was keeping very close reach on the auditor. Did you find that in one of those cases?

Male voice: Yes. And all of a sudden the auditor, if the auditor had done something like move out of town, you would have found that patient right on the phone making sure he knew exactly where he was going. And he might have found out a short time later that the new town to which he had gone, the patient had gotten a job there, because that happened to me. Happened to me with two cases, patients that worked sporadically, they would work fine for three or four days, then they would all of a sudden say, “Well, no more therapy, no more therapy.” And I wouldn’t touch them for a week or so and they’d wander up kind of sore because I hadn’t called them.

Male voice: Yeah.

Basic personality gets very unhappy if the auditor doesn’t move through to kick out those objections, too.

Male voice: Ah, this thing about basic personality, you say the fellow who varies his—each side is modified by education, his viewpoint in life modified by his education and environment and he becomes Clear and he’s still a vicious character in terms of four dynamics and can this . . .

Oh no, he’s not a vicious . . .

Male voice: . . . and can this be modified by—can this be modified with this more easily?

He is not a vicious character in terms of his four dynamics. He will not try to destroy this or destroy that unless, let us say, he is a Bongo-Bongo savage who has been educated to believe that everything outside the world of Bongo-Bongo is savage monsters.

Male voice: So well still have generals who will remain to be generals and want to try to bomb Russia?

Uh-uh.

Male voice: See? I mean, in other words, will the data refile for use in the equation?

Oh yeah. Your four dynamics will come forward. But remember that you’ve got people in the world who think that the world ends at the end of the plain. Very limited. The second that you show them a little bit wider horizon they will accept the wider horizon.

Don’t expect that a Clear—the process of clearing is a process of reeducating. It’s a refiling of existing education.

Male voice: New education takes place more easily though.

Sure, oh yeah. A new education takes place but now you have to have a new education if you’re going to change the viewpoint of. . .

Female voice: If he were Stalin he’d still be a communist?

Hm?

Female voice: If Stalin were cleared, he’d still be a communist?

Yeah, probably still be a communist but I don’t know how he would conduct communism. He would probably conduct it in a much different fashion than he’s conducting it. These are idle guesses actually, idle postulates beyond the point that you know very well he wouldn’t indulge in an atom bombing. That is so antipathetic.

Now, you could even get somebody who was cleared indulging in atom bombing, if they figured out the end of the world was going to be there if they didn’t, but you could still have an aberrated enough set of data that that would take place. You understand how bad data can be in the standard banks? Because it can be bad.

Well, want to show you there that you have somebody working with you. Don’t ever feel lonely when you’re working with a raving maniac. There’s somebody else present.

The file clerk and the somatic strip will obey you, the file clerk will work with you. It’s up to you to keep the somatic strip mobile so it can continue to obey you, and to keep the file clerk happy with you. You neglect those two points, you’re going to miss out on some therapy on somebody.

If you aren’t aware of the fact that those two factors are in existence, the case is going to stall down on you or you’re just not going to get anyplace, and if you snarl them up, why, the loss to you is very great.

Now, there are other things which assist the auditor. Once in a while you get an accidental engramic assist. And they’re quite amusing. One time I ran across an engram, a very, very long engram which had on its very end, “All right. Go through it again.” (laughter) It all compared very nicely to the text, it was the logical thing to say, but the person was running down to the end of the engram and they weren’t running this last piece of it, and going up and going through it again and going up and going through it again. “All right. Let’s start at the beginning and go all over it again.” I found in a fight engram one time which did the same thing. Only the fellow started at the exact beginning of it and would run through. I just sat there and watched the thing roll for about an hour, no effort on my part whatsoever.

Now, that is on the lowest possible line. You will have one which will occasionally say, I’ve got to get rid of it, I’ve got to get rid of it, I’ll lose my mind if I don’t,” or something like this. And this, when it runs as the basic computation on the case, is a case that will run like wildfire. And after you knock that out you would think the person wouldn’t keep on working with you. But this isn’t the case. Then he really works fast. But you could start right in at the beginning of the case. You have these various computations which are working with you. But that is no reason to preserve any of them. They work better when they’re out. But they will assist you as long as they’re in, that is to say, they aren’t going to buck you solidly as long as they’re in the case. They go along with the auditor. The engram accidentally is headed your way. The file clerk will push it forward and feed it through and it’ll keep right on rolling up.

This is quite amusing, the lengths that this computation will go in a case. But never mistake the next one I’m going to tell you about for that assist, engramic assist computation. You needn’t pay much attention to auditor assists out of engrams, but you’d better pay attention to the case that is helping you too much—an “I” who is helping you too much. Get wary of it. If he is being very anxious about what is going on and he’s trying to give you this and that, he’s writing you notes, honest to God, I—one fellow that I was treating twice a week was walking in with sheaves of notes. He was doing nothing all day at the office but writing notes, writing notes. And he was writing “It’s probably this, it’s probably that, it’s probably something or other.” And he’d wind up there and he’d have this stack of notes and he’d give them to me. He had a stenographer, by the way, and she would occasionally type them. And you had this enormous amount of data which was being presented continually to the auditor.

Now, at any moment that the auditor became sufficiently dimwitted to pick up and use any part of that information, he was at that moment being guilty of an auditor ineptitude. Don’t use a conscious-level information the preclear gives you. Once in a hundred, it will be correct, but you can’t tell which is the once in a hundred. So you’re going to make ninety-nine mistakes.

This means a specific thing. It means that the basic personality is not satisfied with the computation the auditor has gotten on the case.

The second the proper computation on this case is entered, at that moment these notes will stop. The patient will cease to be anxious about his therapy and will go along with you easily, quietly, efficiently That’s something for you to know, something for you to remember. It’s very important. I’ll give you an example of this. Here’s a case where the somatic strip and the file clerk had both stalled. By a great deal of persuasion, with the auditor working hard against demon circuits, the preclear could be persuaded to go into an engram. But actually what one was doing was battering right into the teeth of an engram to get anything out of the case. Slug. You’ll have to do that sometime to break circuitry . . . [gap] You’ll have to do it but it isn’t very nice going. It means that there’s a flock of demons, circuits interrupting your address to the case. Here was a case whose time track was something like this. Here was marriage, here was conception, [marking on blackboard] In here, in the most aberrative area, the basic area, were a number of family get-togethers and pronunciamentos and “Oh dear, this poor girl, what is she going to do?” Here was about the first missed period, by the way. And he came up here to a dogleg, and from this moment appeared to be conception forward, until you looked right here, right close to it, and found out that there were a lot of contraceptives being used. And you looked closer and you found an AA lying right there, by context.

This was a very confusing case, by the way. Everybody was loopy in the case, in the whole family. And they all talked in negatives. You know, instead of saying, “You can be sure,” why, they would say, “Well, you can’t be sure,” in a sarcastic tone of voice. Everything all reversed all the way up through the case, very interesting. They make backwards engrams because the sarcasm’s missed. All of this sort of thing.

Well, when we got up to here, which was birth—what I mean, in the case when we got up here, here was a nasty accident. A very nasty accident of Mama going slam into the table. By this time she’d made up her mind the child was going to be born, there’s nothing we can do about it, feeling very sad about the whole thing. And here was birth. Here was a dental operation, nitrous oxide, at the age of about three years. I always exaggerate the size of the prenatal bank. Actually in a lifetime, in terms of aberration, this is present time of forty years, that’s birth and that’s conception, [drawing on blackboard] Anyway, here was this nitrous oxide. The child was stuck in the nitrous oxide and had gone on being stuck in the nitrous oxide practically from there on out. And here he was about forty-five years of age, he was still stuck in the nitrous oxide. He’d lost all of his teeth and so forth, they had more or less rotted out as a consequence. Mouth somatics continued.Here was another nitrous oxide. I’m showing you about what the bank looked like. Now, this case was entered here. By the way, it was an experimental case and that engram was broken with Charcot mirrors. The mirrors were let flash in front of the case in a dark room. The case wouldn’t move on the time track for anything. It’s a stunt you can use sometime. Four lady’s handbag mirrors mounted on a phonograph record, a candle stuck in the side of a portable phonograph. A piece of cardboard back of the candle. So as the patient sits there, he isn’t seeing the light of the candle but he’s seeing the candle reflected in these four mirrors in the form of a, well, a four-sided plane here. And the thing is the phonograph record is spinning. The record is at different slants, so that you’ve got this effect, like a photometer. That’s a crude approximation of a Koenig photometer.

Don’t make any great practice of using it, because it’s very hard on the auditor. He’s there listening to information. And this flashing light going all around the room and so on is very bad. There actually should be—somebody should build a little rig that’s about this big that’s got two filaments in it. This thing is a covered mask, goes over the ears. And lights go flash, flash, flash in there. That would do the same thing. So anyway, here are the mirrors, spinning mirrors. He watched these mirrors and all of a sudden began to shriek. When a patient is caught badly on the track and he’s quite close to a psychotic break, if you start penetrating the engram in which he is held and you get some remarkable pyrotechnics sometimes, he’ll scream and he’ll become terrified and so on. And he’ll dredge up a phrase or two each time he does. And then you try to make him again, he’s gotten control of himself once more, and he gets pulled in. It’s just as though this thing is pulling him in. And bang, he’ll come out with another phrase and bang, and finally he’ll desensitize an engram. Long, sorry process. This person was about that far from being a psychotic, institutional case. So that was the first engram in which he was held. When that engram was released, we went immediately to birth. He was also latched up to some degree at birth. Started birth at the beginning and ran him through to the end, the beginning to the end. Nothing much happened in birth, but we had to free it. And this prenatal showed up of Mama running into the table. Bang, he goes into this prenatal, he runs it out and it erases. It’s floating clear of the rest of the bank. You will occasionally find an engram doing this. It erased clean. Not there anymore, unconsciousness came off of it and so on.

Obviously, however, it was a very late prenatal because Mama was complaining she might have killed the baby, she might have hurt the baby, she was quite upset and alarmed. So here she is complaining. Once this was erased, birth went out. Birth erased in the case. This nitrous oxide erased.

Now, I’m pointing up this case because it was not very usual. But you will find this case where occasionally—here’s the file clerk and so on. He’s got three engrams sitting here more or less tied on to each other but floating free of the rest of the engram bank.

Don’t be too amazed, every few patients, if you run into one of these floating engrams.

Just run it, it erases, unconscious comes off. Don’t ever make the very foolish error of supposing that there isn’t anything ahead of it, because you’ll find the main bank ahead of it, earlier.

With all this erased, by the way, we erased the birth out of a lady the other day. Sue was running one that was floating off the bank, wasn’t latched onto anything earlier, no cross connections. So anyway, got this out. By this time you think the patient had been working like a charm because this manifestation took place: We got a false four line charge off of the case all the way up and down. The patient laughed his sides sore for about seven hours; just laughs, everything was funny.

Naturally he’d been living with all this terror all of his life and here we’d eased the terror, and we just start saying words to him: “I’m killed,” we say to him. “Ha-ha-ha-ha,” only screaming roars of laughter that just about break him to pieces. You’ll see that in cases. Don’t be upset when it happens. The patient has not gone crazy.

Sometimes they won’t stop laughing for forty-eight hours and even the next three or four days. Somebody will accidentally say to them “dead” or something, “Poor old Joe, you know he’s dead.” The fellow goes “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” “What’s the matter?” And the guy’ll say, “Dead, ha-ha-ha-ha!” Everybody’d look at him like he’s a little bit touched in the head. But this fades out. Terror seems to go off in a laughter line charge. It’s good, brawny laughter. It isn’t the giggles, “he-he-he-he,” the goat bleat of the hebephrenic. It’s guffaws, solid.

You can sit around and read a newspaper to one of these guys when he’s started this way and you just about tear him to pieces. You say, “The Japs touched the,” you say, “the Japs have sent reinforcements to something or other,” pick up an old newspaper, and “twenty-thousand Americans were killed.” And you go on and all of a sudden the fellow says, “Ha-ha-ha-ha!” “What’s so funny?” “Well,” you say, “Americans”—he says, “Americans!” And he’ll combine the rest of the phrase and hell say, “Americans are the God-given people” or something of the sort. This is out of some political speech he was listening to in the prenatal bank. All the words are popping up into sight. Don’t be deluded. They are not clearing. But they are popping up into sight.

After this happens a case will run fair. And after this happens you’re not liable to get a psychotic break. It’s actually as good as a grief discharge. You’ll see this, so I mentioned it to you. We got that off, line charge, he laughed, and in this particular case it was only a seven-hour discharge, didn’t amount to much, not a good solid one.

He would never get psychotic again, but in trying to run down into the bank and run off the rest of the engrams we started into real trouble. Now we were running into the main bank. And it was just like having the enemy’s skirmishing forces suddenly wiped out in front of you.

Just about that time you’re congratulating yourself that you have won the action, and suddenly the main command, the right wing and the left wing show up. Only they’ve got howitzers and there you are sitting with a broken tommy gun. That was about the way it looked on this case because this case was really tough.

Here was a nitrous oxide lasting about five hours, and including a total exodontistry at one sitting. What butcher did this I don’t know because his name was not in the bank, and the case came up to a Release. I could have carried it on to Clear but didn’t. And aw, that was a gruesome operation, all full of talk, talk, talk; everybody stands around, they talk about politics, they talk about the maternity ward, they talk about how nasty children are and they talk about the automobiles in the street, the various kinds of automobile and whether they like them or not and have they been to the movies lately and where have they been going and get into arguments.

The dentist had a vicious temper and the whole temper valence out of this thing was the temper valence this person was manifesting afterwards. It was a tough engram. This one was there holding him, too. But every place I’d go on the track, try to go to here, try to go to here, try to go to here, and try to go to here, I could erase an engram occasionally off of this case and get a little bit off. But the case would write me notes, notes, notes, stacks of them, all kinds of computations, “The reason I think this is happening is because . . . It’s painful emotion. No, it’s not painful emotion. It’s because something or other. And after all my little brother was awfully mean to me and my family did punish me. But I think it’s the swimming accident I had, I’m not sure but I think I was drowned. Why don’t we go into the swimming accident where I was drowned? Maybe birth didn’t erase after all. Let’s go back and check birth, I’m sure it’s in the prenatal area. Now let’s go after some painful emotion, late,” I had another patient there, I used to use patients just—well, I’d get a case down to a pianola state of erasing, why, I’d just let another patient sit there and run the bank, I had to, to save time.

Well, this fellow, in the hands of a patient, so on, would just rear up, get up out of bed, “I won’t have anything to do with it” and so on. Very nervous state, I didn’t yet know about the existence of this as an aberrative engram. But this engram had to be stripped phrase by phrase for five hours’ worth, all the way through. It took two months.

Picked up the first phrase out of this exodontistry. Go over it two or three times. Run the phrase back down early to get it into the early part of the bank, wind up in the basic area. Erase the phrase here in the basic area, come back up to the top and run over the phrase here, find it here, here, here, here also. Erase it again here. It wouldn’t erase but reduced.

Now we got to the next phrase. We do exactly the same thing with the next phrase. This is what is known as stripping an engram of phrases. To do this, you do not run the engram all the way through at one sitting. Shoot it full of holes if you have to, to get holders out of it. But here is the patient not moving on the track, with only a little handful of attention units to run up and down the bank for you and you’re shooting basic area. And you’re shooting here, and then you’re shooting here. And then you’re shooting up here. And then you’re going back down again, [gap] . . . a thoroughly sloppy job the whole thing was. The only reason I didn’t know it and couldn’t predict it—but right here in the engram was, “Control yourself, you’ve got to control yourself. You’ve got to get a grip on yourself. Now, get hold of yourself. Now, you’ve got that good grip on yourself. Now, get hold of yourself, goddamn it,” And three teeth came out with one process, wham, wham, wham, pain going into each one of those self-control things. So we had demon circuitry all over the case out of this. Fortunately it stripped up to here. It took two months to strip it up to there, stripped out of there. All of a sudden went down, circuitry out, went back down into the basic area, erased quite a bit in the basic area, and knocked some painful emotion off the case through here.

I was so tired of this guy I said, “You want anything more done, you’ll have to get one of your friends to do it. You’re a Release.” Male voice: Ron, can I ask you a question about that?

You betcha.

Male voice: It’s my impression that if you took, deliberately, and drop him down into basic area and going back to this point, you re liable to pile engrams up around that last late-life incident.

Uh-huh.

Male voice: What do you use to safeguard that he won’t do that? I’d like to try that, about what you just said.

You just slug. You try not to restimulate an engram too much. You just take the single phrases. You try to get as early as you can with this single phrase. Sometimes you’re lucky and land right there.

Male voice: Well, you have to run it through to get that out.

Yeah.

Now, when you go down on stripping an engram, just as an aside, you can get this phrase which is “I don’t know” and you run that all the way to the bottom of the track. You only try to hit it here and here, and then the bottom of the track.

Now, “I don’t know, I can’t tell” may be down there at the bottom of the track, “I don’t know, I can’t tell you.” Erase that as an engram. Erase everything you can find around that, before it and behind it, and get a clean erasure. Then you can start back up again and start this one.

That is stripping an engram. And by God when you have to do that, you’ve got trouble, plenty of it.

Male voice: In that case where he was held in that first operation . . .

Hm?

Male voice: In the case where he was held, at the very beginning of the case.

Yeah.

Male voice: Did you run the engram or just take out the holder and take it down to the bottom?

You mean held here? [tapping on blackboard] Male voice: No, no, the first exercise.

Here?

Male voice: Yeah.

Did I run this all the way out like that?

Male voice: Well, did you take the holder out and run it down to the bottom?

No. No, this one—I said these were three engrams that were all off here. This one wasn’t latched up on this one, for some peculiar reason. This thing was hanging free. These were three free engrams. These made a group of engrams, all of which went out. But the second—now, here’s the point I was trying to make. Stripping an engram there is added incidentally, I don’t want to pile too much information on you in a hurry. This process is one which you will very rarely have to employ. But it is a last resort and usually left for exodontistry, nitrous oxide exodontistry.

If you’ve got a late nitrous oxide exodontistry, the case absolutely refuses to resolve in any way you can think of, you’ll have to start in at the beginning of the case and start stripping it. It’ll work. Sometimes you can just deintensify some part of that engram. And you don’t have to go through so much trouble. Something that you’ll learn by judgment.

Here’s the peculiarity of this case: here he was writing notes, writing notes, writing notes, writing notes, worrying, walking around all the time trying to run his own engrams, all that sort of thing. Now, it wasn’t when I got this out that he stopped. It was the first time that I says, “Let’s go to the beginning of your total exodontistry.” At that moment BP said, “Well, at last” and stopped at that minute. The fellow became comfortable, calm, perfectly willing to go through sessions and be worked on in spite of the fact he had in restimulation self-control circuits.

Basic personality was so pleased, in such agreement with the whole thing it was willing to settle down. And up to that time it was just raising hell. But that was basic personality raising hell. “I want out, and you haven’t got the right computation on the case,” is what he’s saying.

Male voice: When you get the wrong reaction it won’t go too far.

That’s right. When you get the right computation on the case that manifestation will settle down. You’ve seen John Campbell around here ever since they gave him that drug; whoever is entering the case now isn’t entering it with the right computation.

The second they figure out the right computation on that case, it’ll settle right down. John will be walking around here perfectly mild as milk and so forth, not raising hell about painful emotion or anything else. That’s what’s got him right now.

Why, I happened to think, you have a case right there, right now, that is in one of these write-’em-a-note spins. Only his case is pretty well advanced, there’s so much taken off of it that he’s not writing very many notes. But he’ll sure tell the auditor.

Male voice: Yeah. And everything this patient tells the auditor is wrong.

Actually his case got shaken up and became disturbed, so basic personality is trying to get out, trying to get through. And it’s just managing to stir up all the circuits. [gap] . . . to tell you the difference between an assist to the auditor and a (quote) assist (unquote) when the patient starts handing you all of his computations and starts to be so cheerful in running off these phrases for you. That is to say, you’ll start into the case like this. Here’s a case that’s really full of circuitry, basic personality, you haven’t got the right computation on it, or no computation is gotten on it so far and you’ll start into the case, and you’ll start down the line and you say, “All right. Let’s go to the earliest incident of pain or unconsciousness you can now reach.” And he says, “All right. Ummmmmm . . .” “Somatic strip will go to the beginning of the engram. Now, what are the words that flash into your mind?” “I hate you, I hate you. I guess that’s in here. I guess that’s in here, I guess that’s in here. I guess that’s in here. I don’t know what’s next, I don’t know what’s next, I don’t know what’s next, I don’t know what’s next.” You can sit there and let him do it for a while. Don’t let him do it very long. He’ll run up and go all the way up and down his case, louse everything up in the bank. He’s been running auto half the time anyway. That’s control circuitry very definitely at work. But he’ll obligingly tell you afterwards, “You know what’s wrong with my case is — it’s the time I was drowned when I was a little boy because of Grandma’s kittens. And I’ve always had an association of the fact between birth and the time I was stuck in that pipe. And if you go back to the time my mother must have fallen over something in her early time when I was on the way, I think we can resolve the case because the painful emotion will come off better and I’m very, very sure that there is some painful emotion on there because I don’t remember my Grandfather.” And you’ll say, “Mm-hm!” You’ll actually find cases that will give you more advice and waste more time for you. When a case starts to run like that, do your very best by direct memory to find out what has really happened with this case with a minimum waste of time. Don’t let a patient keep running off a long, long dissertation on all the things that have happened to him in his life, because it’s not going to do anybody a bit of good.

Once in a while when you’re running off a grief engram, you will find the patient will try to give you the concept of it. Trying. You’d better let him give you the concept. Don’t interrupt him or smash him. But if he starts to say, “Well, this was the reason why I felt so awfully bad when my dog Bosco died” and he starts to tell you this and starts to tell you that about the case and is drifting off in some other direction, you get him right back on the beam again.

Sometimes they’ll run through a grief engram once and tell you why they felt so desperately about it in just a few words, spend maybe five minutes crying and talking to you about it. You’d better let them, because those are the conclusions coming out, evidently made at the moment. They kind of seem to be aberrative somehow. But normally, when the patient starts to go on and on and on and tell you all about it, tell you what’s wrong with him and what’s latched up here, starts to use his own repeater technique, does these other things; off with his head as far as that’s concerned. You get in there and run it.

By the way, the patient that will pick up these repeaters and start repeating himself are invariably—inevitably running on control circuitry, always. Now, that is not an assist to the auditor. The notes which the patient writes you is an assist only to this degree: it shows that you have not hit upon the right computation.

The amount of detecting which you can do by watching what he writes in his stories, watching phrases used in letters or watching even illustrations he gives somebody else of an engram, is of very little use.

If you have a number of letters from this person and if you wish to save some of this material, you may want to use it at the end of the case to check whether or not—if you’ve got this material when you’re clearing it and it may save you a little searching. But it’s of no great value.

What a person thinks about his own case isn’t worth putting in your eye. So there’s no advantage in that and it’s not an assist beyond showing you that a computation is present.

Now, these are the things then that are assisting you. I’ve given you fragmentarily the ways those things get blocked.

It so happens that on a higher philosophic level on engrams, you could say that engrams were most aberrative because they are communication blockers. Free communication with existence seems to be one of the prime requisites of man. Perception and communication. After all, if the outside world communicates with “I” through the channels of perception, “I” communicates with the outside world in the channels of communication, various methods of expression.

Those cases seem to be most seriously aberrated who have had their communication interrupted. If you go into child psychology, and you start looking over children, start to use Child Dianetics on them, you will find out by just knocking out what they can’t communicate about, you will produce a very marked alleviation in the anxiety of the child.

Those engrams which say, “I can’t see, can’t feel, can’t hear” are bad enough in themselves but they’re also blocks between exterior world and “I” Now, those engrams which inhibit communication to the exterior world are very aberrative. But remember that the exterior world and the interior world run on the same process. It is just as though, when you are in the engram bank, the exterior world has become interior in the head. And the attention units look to the engram bank instead of the exterior world sometimes and confuse the two.

The reaction of the individual to the exterior world and the reaction of the attention units to the engram are the same thing. They both act in the same way. Now, this is peculiarly evident in the behavior of the file clerk. Here is your standard banks again, file clerk, here is various circuitry. “I” is out of communication up here. He’s out of communication with here and this is the basis of the Freudian concept . . . [gap] . . . he said full recall equals full sanity. Freud never said that but we’ll give him credit for it.

He might have been better off had he said, “Full communication equals full sanity.” “I” has to be able to communicate back into the standard banks to pick up anything he wants out of the standard banks. “I,” as the units of “I” which are trapped back here, they aren’t aware of being aware, they’re merely aware.

These units and the awareness of awareness units have to be in communication. They have to be fully in communication for a person to be fully sane. This is what you are establishing. Showed you as you cleared the patient, you got more and more of these blocks to communication out. The engrams started coming out. And finally when you come up here you’ve got more and more file clerk, more and more engrams which you pick up, more units, more file clerk, stronger, more accurate response. Theoretically, and actually in practice too, you can have a person cleared up to this point and by this time the file clerk is so confounded strong that he just overrides the rest of the engram bank. That’s what’s happening when at first it takes nine recountings to erase an engram, then it takes five, then it takes two, and then you do it at one. And then they start blowing out when you look at them.

That’s what happens. These units get so strong that they’re just riding over the engram bank. And there is a point in clearing where the person appears to be Clear because nothing is in restimulation and everything is getting “rid over.” [gap] People bounce worse in other valences—if they’re out of valence they bounce worse sometimes. In a psychotic with a charged valence where “I” is completely out of communication, of course they don’t bounce at all. But the person—file clerk, in other words, as clearing progresses, as the case is relieved, is more and more and more in communication with “I,” stronger and stronger, more and more units, more and more power till at last it’s just like you’re playing a phonograph record there with the volume tuned all the way up and by sheer volume it’s carrying through the rest of the way.

I’ve seen sonic come on with the person still out of valence sometimes. With sonic shut-off still in the case, the sonic is on. It may not be on terribly clear, it may click off occasionally, but it’s still on. It’s not that all the computations shutting off sonic are out of the case. And it’s not that the person is completely in his own valence all the time. But it’s on. It’s just blasting through by the strength of BP, basic personality, and the file clerk.

Now, therefore in starting a case, we can say that, one, we’re trying to free all possible attention units as fast as possible. Free them quick. Direct circuit memory will sometimes free up attention units just by blowing out locks. Very often a case will start progressing just by blowing out a few locks.

Direct memory, the patient feels better, more attention units available, better able to move on the track. After a while—you may not have freed him, actually, from the engram in which he’s latched up, but you will have given him enough attention units so that he has some part of “I” which can move. And having some part of “I” which can move, he can now start contacting engrams.

You start moving him through pleasure moments. Pleasure has a very high survival. The mind is trying to obtain pleasure, trying to escape from pain. All right. It starts through, it demonstrates to him there’s pleasure in the past. Therefore attention units are willing to go down there. They’re willing to go back along the track. There’s pleasure back there. And more and more of them will go back and finally you may get the person’s perceptics turned on, in quite a few cases, just by that. More or less slue him out of his valence, demonstrate to him that life wasn’t too horrible and so on. This is actually what it’s doing and if the attention units will start picking up, “I” becomes increased in power.

Well, at first in a case, the file clerk may be pretty weak. The thing which is mainly holding him up is communication circuitry and control circuitry. Now, the first thing you have to hit, because Dianetics is Dianetics and you have to have an auditor, of course, is control circuitry.

That is interposed here because “I” is trying to get data from the file clerk. He’s trying to get data from the file clerk. And here is a circuit over here which has a false file clerk in it. “I am going to tell you what to do. You are going to listen to me. I am the boss around here. I wear the pants.” You see that kind of a statement in an engram—you get a piece of analyzer—data starts in from here [drawing on blackboard] on a flash answer: See, “I’m going to tell you what to do.” This is you and this is an interior entity, like a ghost or something that’s set itself up there. “And I am going to tell you what to do. I have to tell you what to do,” that sort of thing.

That’s the first thing that comes out. You can knock that out of a case at the beginning, two things: this aberrated entity here [drawing on blackboard] is no longer resisting you because you’ve taken the control mechanisms out of the engram bank.

This is where the control mechanisms belong, here. And a person does control himself from here. And a person wide-awake and analyzer not shut down can be told to control himself, and he will, from here. But if he’s got demon circuitry to the effect of controlling himself, [tapping on blackboard] this goes into restimulation. And this may throw him into a complete screaming fit as part of the act of controlling himself.

You get the difference between these two. So this is an interposition, then, between the file clerk and “I.” And now you start to get communication shut-offs. That’s an identity shut-off. Of course it’s actually true that a person is seeking his own identity as one of the first things he wants to do in therapy.

Next thing you get are these curtain demons. Demons are set up, “You never pay any attention to me. You never pay any attention to anything that’s said,” that sort of thing. “You never pay any attention.” Communication curtains. This stuff starts through from here, block it. But you can get, in the absence of valences—if they have had valence trouble you can still get the answers filtered through. Faint, uncertain, sometimes derailed, but they’re there. So the file clerk will put up—that interrupts the communication: these occlusion circuits.

Now, the occlusion circuits are always thinner down toward the bottom of the bank. [drawing on blackboard] As a result you can get through when “I” is regressed on the track here, file clerk here. If you can’t up here then that could be analogued like this. It gets thicker and heavier the more locks, if you can get through the thinner part of it. Okay.

You try to establish communication between the file clerk and “I.” That’s one of the things you’ve got to do. Now, you’re trying to establish communication between “I” and his own identity, so that “I” becomes his own identity. Get the person out of a valence, in other words.

If you could do those two things, deleting of course any further entities that have sort of set themselves up in the bank on a control mechanism, if you have free communication in this case, the case will start to roll in such a way that you can work it along the following lines. “The file clerk will now give us the earliest engram we now have to have to resolve the case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of this engram.” It’s there. You don’t question that it’s there. You know it’s there. You always assume that it’s there anyway.

Don’t invalidate the fellow’s somatic strip. Don’t invalidate his file clerk. Don’t invalidate his data. Don’t invalidate him. You assume that it’s there, so you say, “When I count from one to five, the first phrase is going to flash into your mind. One-two-three-four-five.” (snap) Even in a sonic case, because of the occlusion of unconsciousness and pain, those first phrases are not liable to come through unless you give it a booster. There, all of a sudden, is the auditor giving a booster charge to the file clerk. And he booms the phrase through. “When I count from one to five, the first phrase will flash into your mind. One-two-three-four-five.” (snap) He starts it. Now, in order to assist that phrase coming through, having recounted two or three times and the first thing you know, on a sonic case particularly and only, sound on the phrase will come through and then we can run it because the person is fixed and stabilized in the incident so we can run it through. Then it can be run through and reduced.

Now, that is optimum procedure. That is the way you want a case to run. You open up, you start into a case with a diagnosis, you have to take a crack at him and find out if he has any painful emotion. You try to get that off, you can’t get any right away, test his—whether or not he’s moving on the track. Tune up his perceptics a little bit. Start working with this file clerk and somatic strip. If they work, keep right on working with them. When they stop working, you’ll go into more diagnosis, trying to knock out circuitry and occlusions and so on. So when they work, they work and you let the case roll because the case will roll You assume they are working until it is very obvious to you that they are not working. You assume they are exactly where they are supposed to be until it is obvious to you that they are not where they are supposed to be. And you try not to tell the file clerk what he’s got in his bank any more than you would try to give advice to somebody on the subject of his engrams.

Treat him as an entity. Don’t invalidate him. He’ll give you data. Now, cases that were very simple at first sometimes in therapy have bogged down just because the auditor does not have confidence in the file clerk. His lack of confidence has a tendency to invalidate the file clerk’s data, snarl up the circuitry, give it more power and slow the case down enormously.

If you are going to work with the file clerk, you’ve got to work with him, and if you’re going to work with him, trust him. He’s still there. Even if he might be just banging up against all sorts of demon circuits, you’re trying to get him through to you. You can even talk him through to you sometimes. You can say, “Now, you’ve got a pretty good file clerk,” ask him not to pay any attention to what you say, “I’m going to talk to your file clerk. Now, you can come through. You can tell me what this is all about. Now, I want you to give me flash answers, flash answers, they’ll come right through. Now, when I snap my fingers I want you to shoot the flash answer through and maybe we can get this thing resolved.” Pay no attention to the preclear, see, as “I.” It sometimes baffles him, because the next moment that you ask the file clerk for something, it rides through on an express-train speed. Boom! You’ve got the data.

You want the case to work like a pianola case, plays itself, works perfectly until—as long as it does that, don’t fool with it. Don’t go in after special aberrations or get weird ideas about what you’re doing. Don’t do any evaluating for the file clerk to this degree of telling him what he has to give you next. [gap] . . . don’t say to the file clerk now, all of a sudden out of thin air you drag the computation: “I wonder if this is wrong with this person. It must be his tonsillectomy. The file clerk will now give us the tonsillectomy.” Don’t do that.

Once in a great while you will note a person bouncing in and out of birth. Birth may be ready to run. Maybe the file clerk is not working too well in the case. Maybe there is a tough engram that you can spot. But that’s only if the file clerk isn’t working. Now and only now can you use your computation. Your computations aren’t as good as the file clerk’s. The one thing he doesn’t know is how early you can get. The one thing he doesn’t understand is that you get to the basic end of the case and start running it, you will get erasures and the whole stuff will erase.

He’s happy as a clam, by the way, when he finds this out. He’ll feed you data, data, data, data, data. He’ll just go right on up the scale like you’re playing the piano. Zing As soon as he finds it out, he’ll give you everything you need. Then at that moment, of course, you start telling him to “give us the next earliest moment,” bing. “Next earliest incident, next earliest incident, next earliest incident, next earliest incident” and so on. I’ve run out thirty engrams an hour on a person on the road to Clear just on that basis. Working very close with the file clerk but insisting he give you the next earliest moment. Otherwise he’s liable to get too happy about the whole thing and give you something later in the bank, which I admit, if deintensified, would make the preclear feel much better. But you don’t want to slam it that fast.

That’s the only place where his operation could be improved upon. Otherwise it’s perfect.

One of these days I’ll probably find out that the way to do it is to follow him anyhow. I know this, however, that he has not a good, solid concept on “early.” He doesn’t know how early you can get. We don’t either.

I have, by the way, for three years, as I’ve mentioned to this class before, been playing tag from time to time with some kind of an early memory. I could slam and slug cases into clearing—the definition of Clear being what it is—sonics, everything would turn on. The fellow would feel good, he’d feel fine, a lot better than he’d ever felt in his life before, and so on. It would work.

We’re trying to make it work smoother and faster and we’re having some interesting time now running out preconception engrams. It’s very interesting.

I have to go into this with you sometime. However, we have a series that’s going to be set up. I’m just more or less testing the thing to find out how far it will go. If this thing improves cases, shortens the length of time it takes to run a case, will turn on somatics that have never been turned on before and so forth, then I’m awfully sorry to say that you are going to be finding that as part of Standard Procedure. But that isn’t saying that it is at this time. It’s being investigated only. I’ve tried for a long time to get some time to investigate this one. I give you this just as the concluding shot on tonight’s lecture. The state of this investigation.

I like to give people a little taste of what’s happening on research, not so much that they get dizzy, but enough to keep them interested on how far this thing can go.

I took a hard-boiled, hardheaded, unhallucinatory, sonic shut-off, somatic shut-off, reality shut-off case not too long ago. Took two, by the way, on the same day. And I said—I was trying to work a little gag. I wanted him to pretend he was dead. And I’d run into this other phenomenon. And I was actually thinking of it at the time, but I thought, well, we’ll try this on him and maybe it’ll work one of two ways. We’ll have him pretend he’s dead and then he’ll swing into the dead person in whose valence he is. And then he can tell us all about the funeral. So I said, “Go to the time when you were dead.” So he obligingly goes to 1797 in Sicily, when he was on a farmhouse in a farm and he was dying. He died with full somatics Now, I thought this was very interesting. Let’s go to an earlier death . . . Pardon me, not that one. I thought this was very interesting. I ran it once, he had some somatics. So I brought him up to present time, thought about it a little more and took another case. A very rough case, this one. And I said, “Let’s go back to the last time you died,” just out of that. Boy, this guy goes back down there around the fourteenth, fifteenth century sometime, and starts to run off a death with a head somatic. But it wasn’t reducing and it wouldn’t reduce. So I pulled this line on him. Everybody in the room sort of— choke. I said, “The file clerk will now give us the death necessary to resolve this case.” (laughter) And he did. He gave us another death, later, and we ran it several times, but it had a head somatic. Only it was in a slightly different position. And two somatics latched on each other evidently, so anyway we ran it out. It reduced, and evidently made the earlier one ready.

In other words, it was effective in doing something about the case. These incidents were more valid to both of these people than any of the data they had run so far in Dianetics. So a little later that night this same fellow I’d been running turned to a girl and started running her; tried to run her on the same thing. But it didn’t work that way. She went back to a time her child died in 1632, something like that, ’42, and starts speaking in the phrases of that day. “My lap is empty. My cradle is empty.” “What are you doing?” “I’m sitting here rocking the empty cradle.” And she breaks down and cries torrents of tears, and up to that time there’d been an emotional shut-off on this case.

Right away, because this was her auditor after all, and he was interested in those late painful emotion incidents, those tears were pouring like wine and up the track he takes her into this life and runs out a painful emotional engram that nobody had been able to touch before. Well, that’s altitude with a case.

Nobody’s taken her back down to find out what happened in 1632, of course. So her validity, her sense of validity on this incident; very high. Then we have Belknap, one of the professional auditors here—he goes back, and he’s using phraseology like “avaunt” and “have at thee, thou foul varlet.” Well, Burke Belknap, up to the time he ran that one off, is the sort of a case that says, “Well, I don’t know whether that was Tuesday or yesterday, but somehow or other I think I’m alive, but I’m not sure. It seems to me that I was born.” Let me see, “Was I born?” That’s the sort of a way he’s been hammering away enthusiastically at his data. “Now, is there a holder in this incident?” The file clerk says, “Yes.” He says, “The file clerk said yes, a demon circuit.” “Well, what did you get?” “Well, I got a yes with a little bit of a no after it.” “All right, let’s go to a holder.” “Get out, get out, get out, get out.” “Well, let’s go to the holder now.” “Get out.” “Well now, let’s go to the bouncer.” “I can’t tell, I can’t tell, I can’t tell.” So we run him back to this hunting accident and—he was telling me about it, I wasn’t there at the running. But he came in and he said, “You know,” he says, “that’s the first valid incident I’ve gotten so far in Dianetics.” He said, “Now, the first time,” he said, “that I was lying there and I—they tried to—I tried to get out of my body after I was shot. You know, I was shot and I fell down. The first time I tried to get out,” he said, “I had a hell of a time doing it.” He said, “I tried and finally managed it.” Well, he says, “The next . . .” and he was scared too, the boys reported to me, he was scared stiff going through the thing. And he said, “The next time,” he says, “it wasn’t quite as hard.” And he says, “The third time,” he said, “it was easy, nothing to it, no somatics on it.” “Ah,” he says, “the damnedest thing,” he says, “that was a real incident. This other stuff I’ve been running in this life, that isn’t real.” Which is very interesting. There have been some others, I could go on and repeat some of the others. Mr. Swanson went back and, check me if this is wrong, but I was told that he was going through a guillotine scene. You mind if I tell?

Male voice: Sure, go ahead.

He was going through a guillotine scene and had to come up into this life to have an attempted abortion run out so that he could get back and finish off the rest of the guillotine. The two were latched up. Is that right or wrong?

Male voice: A little bit wrong there.

A little bit wrong. I’m glad to have a straighter report. What?

Male voice: The point was, it went to a black mass in fifteenth-century France, then come bouncing back into present time and Papa screaming “Racial memories, absolutely impossible.” Very emphatic about it. He wouldn’t believe it, when I was up to that incident. Then I went to the guillotine scene.

Oh, I see. Okay, I got the report backwards. I’m not taking many of the cases, unless I run them myself. But what I have run myself— fortunately I have been long enough in Dianetics, fooling around with phenomena never before observed by human eyes, so that my hair has lost all its starch, it doesn’t stand up on end anymore.

If somebody is willing to run off walking up the steps with a knife in his back saying, “Et tu, Brute,” let him run it.

Male voice: Has any attempt been made to work the standard bank for details as you come back?

Yes. I made that attempt on both cases I worked. I’ve worked myself three cases to date and delegated a couple of them to be run, and the standard bank material is there. Now, I know myself, early in my own therapy I went back into several of these incidents. I had sonic shut-off, somatic shut-off. I guess I didn’t even have any confidence in whether or not I was alive. I went back and went through some of this material. I had brilliant color, three-dimensional visio and so forth. On an imagination level, I’d never had this.

I could get and wrote most of my stories and motion pictures by watching a black frame on the wall. I would just project the black frame on the wall as an imagination visio. But it’s flat. Obviously imagination.

I went back into this stuff and it was really full-bodied. And the data got invalidated on me. But I didn’t let it be invalidated. I said, “Well, one of these days, Ronnie, you’ll just have to go back and find out what the hell did happen at Shiloh.” But the standard bank stuff was present in these other cases. There is one there: signing the ship’s log; the last party before sailing, kissing the barmaid and the noisy stuff. And the long-stemmed pipe, clay pipe, and olfactory on the tobacco smoke and so on.

This, I’m telling you just in the light of—we’re researching. It’s too bad if it turns out suddenly that we’ve caught something else by the tail and that we’re getting something else that isn’t a memory of something. We have a piece of phenomena. We have to investigate it. This is not standard technique. It won’t be standard technique until it’s been very thoroughly processed and tested. But one patient of Doctor Winter’s who had a bunch of mysticism mixed up heard Doctor Winter talking about this; he told her about it bluntly. And she’d been coming to him for therapy and she got up off the couch and left, saying she would never be back because he was never to put her back into one of those incidents. She knew all about it. [gap] That’s the status of it at the present time. When we observe phenomena not before observed, it is perfectly valid to investigate it and to find out what it is and what’s happening, and that way we learn. By interpreting it properly, by finding something else, we are cutting time off, probably month by month around here we are cutting the time of clearing shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. Like one of these super-turned-off, super-dub-in cases will resolve without slugging in and tearing yourself to pieces trying to get at one life when you can clear him by hitting another one; okay, we’ll clear him.

By the way, nobody knows anything about how memory is transmitted or what the time span is or what time is or anything else. And one of the reasons I started back on this is a young lady present here postulated this fact: It is impossible to store memory as it is reputed to be stored. There’s too much of it. By computing it out carefully, one discovers one has enough memory to last three months.

I conducted some tests on this in 1932 at George Washington University physics lab. And Dr. William Alan White was quite interested in this, and he said, “Your figures have just invalidated neurology.” All right, they’ve had five or six theories since and they still don’t come in close to those figures, because there’s no way to store memory in the quantity that memory exists, unless you postulate something else outside the nervous system. Or unless we are working with some form of bioelectronics of which we are not even faintly aware. If this other one turns out, this time span proposition turns out, we’ll have a little bit better clue. The young lady had the theory that if one couldn’t record memories to the self, they might be recorded on his own time span. On what, she didn’t postulate. But we don’t have anything to record them on now, so it’s all the same to record them someplace else.

Male voice: They’re easy, just might have to run the prenatal engrams to these other lives out. (laughter) I’ll tell you this, it will work out as a computation this way. If this is the case and if one can reach these and if these are aberrative, then it means—because I’ve gotten unconsciousness off of one of these series—it means that one could go back to the actual basic-basic. And if that actual basic-basic was two thousand years ago, the thing ought to lift whwwf! And if you come up to the next lifetime and you can run the engrams out of that, they ought to lift, whwwf! And then present time engrams—so what!

Male voice: Nothing there.

Yeah, nothing there. I mean, it would be a faster process if you could do it. Because believe me, some cases are resolvable but they really break your heart.

Female voice: If you got back to basic-basic, the real basic-basic, you could clear the whole human being just like that’.

Well, the young lady has just . . . (laughter, cheers and applause) I give you Mrs. Benton and close the lecture, (laughter)