Opening the Case (501124)
Date: 24 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
It should interest you that the computation of a case is of number one importance in that it gives you the mechanical basics and a method by which you can take a set of factors in the case and understand the case, rather than attempting to go through just the routine of putting a person in reverie and sending him back down the track, and, “Well, he didn’t get anything,” and bringing him up to present time. There’s a big difference.
Now, this chart. tells you how to compute, in other words.
There’s no—and let me stress this—there is no difference here, no variation in Standard Procedure. Your teaching here has been along the lines—these same lines—this just gives you a method of computing the state the case is in.
Now, you take repeater technique. There is probably nothing more destructive in an inept auditor’s hands than repeater technique—or you might call it “right-back-at-you technique.” Now, the right-back-at-you technique is highly destructive to the preclear’s pride and so forth, and actually lays into the case a communication break lock. Now, understand that. The right-back-at-you technique. The fellow says, “I can’t get anything,” so the auditor says, “All right, repeat ‘I can’t get anything.’” He as a human being has told you “I can’t get anything.” Yes, it may be out of an engram; but when you have said, “All right, repeat ‘I can’t get anything,’” you have told him in effect that he hasn’t any thought of his own about it and that he isn’t communicating with you. So it becomes doubly important or doubly destructive. And when you tell him, “Go over that ‘I can’t get anything,’” you are also breaking down his reality, because you are saying, “You can’t think,” which is part of his reality. This right-back-at-you technique is of practically no real value.
See the Accessibility Chart in the previous lecture.
Now, there are two divisions, here, to a case: one of the divisions says (see how I can stress this) — the division of the mechanical trouble with a case and the statement trouble with the case.
The language has gotten into the engrams and as such is very important in the engrams. That’s the statement side of the case. Statements can be in engrams which accomplish practically all the trouble that anyone could figure out: “I can’t see,” “I can’t feel,” “I can’t hear” — these statements. So there’s the statement side of the case.
The fellow says, “I can’t get at this, I can’t get into it.” The auditor is assuming that all that’s wrong with this case is a statement, whereas about 80 percent of the trouble with this case is over here on the mechanical side of the ledger. And the mechanical side of the ledger has to do with the mechanics of mind operation: too much emotion on the case; person invalidated too often; the mind’s effort to reach this and that in the case; the way engrams are stacked up and crossed over and scrambled just in terms of other perceptics, other perceptics besides statements. For instance, a piano playing hasn’t any words in it and yet sometimes an engram will contain a piano playing. It is just a perceptic of sound. And it doesn’t say, “I don’t like music,” and we notice that this preclear does not like music. And he just doesn’t like it, that’s all. And you say, “Well, let’s go over this phrase, ‘I don’t like music.’” You’re assuming immediately that it’s over here on the statement side of the case. About 80 percent of what’s wrong with this case is over here on the mechanical side. It’s another perceptic; it’s the perceptic of piano music that he is objecting to. It restimulates an engram.
Now, let’s just wipe out language and everything it means for a moment, as far as aberration is concerned. Let’s just take up language and set it over here and abandon it for a moment as aberrative. And we’ll find out that we have left on the case pain, tactile and numerous other factors, the whole category of the perceptics and we have the mechanics of mind operation. We can have too much emotion over here, all the rest of this material. We can have invalidations. As a matter of fact, a person can actually have, without any recourse to language whatsoever, invalidations.
Let’s take this as an invalidation. The girl is cooking a cake and she’s very proudly going along and she’s cooking this cake, and of course she’s getting flour on the floor and so forth. She’s cooking the cake and there she’s just cracked her second dozen of eggs. And Mama comes in, takes one look at this mess, shoves her aside and goes to work cleaning up this thing. Not a word said, you understand. That’s an invalidation.
The action says, “You have no place in this kitchen. You can’t bake a cake,” And furthermore, it says immediately, “I haven’t enough affinity for you to be tolerant of your actions.” And as a result you’ve got a mechanical situation, right over here. It hasn’t any language in it. Now, that’s a perfectly valid lock, perfectly valid lock.
Now, here is a fellow who is knocked down. No words in this engram, either. The fellow is knocked down and somebody else comes along and kicks him; and here are the sound of shoes, here is the tactile of being kicked, the pain of being kicked, the kinesthesia of being kicked. Somebody else walks along and kicks him some more and somebody else picks him up and slams him into a chair someplace, cuffs him a couple of times, then they walk away. Well now, there hasn’t been a word said, but there’s an engram. This engram’s got physical pain in it, it’s got an affinity break in it. This person couldn’t talk back, nobody tried to reason with him in any way, he had no purpose for being there, he was helpless, and so you get a break right straight across the boards. Now, you can understand how that as a mechanical engram would, in itself, give a person a certain hostility. And so the next time that he’s tired and he hears a foot scuff or he hears the sound, it is human beings kicking him. You understand? So that engram is restimulated.
A fellow walks up and here’s an automobile accident, he looks into the door and here he finds his wife dead. Not a single word said. She’s dead. There is the physical fact of her death. There is a grief engram, but it doesn’t say, “You have to feel sorry.” You understand?
Now do I begin to make a little sense with it? Because we’re talking about just the mechanics of mind operation.
Now, a fellow can’t go back down a track—on his own time track that is supercharged with emotion—and be inside himself all the way back down that track. That is a mechanical inability to do so— mechanical inability. It isn’t a statement, because we’re just abandoning statements for consideration for a moment. The thing is just too highly charged, that’s all.
Now, you try to get off the charge, and let’s say that every time, as a little boy, that he started to cry, somebody came up to him and hit him. Didn’t say a word but just came up and hit him, bang! He starts to cry, bang! That’s a control circuit on a mechanical level. This person is saying, “You can’t cry,” but he isn’t—nobody is saying it.
Now, you see how engrams work?
Dogs, for instance, have very full engram banks, and they have never rationalized a single word in them. The words in them are just that much more sound. See how that is? Did you ever see a neurotic dog?
There are lots of them. Neurotic horses, psychotic horses. Well, there’s no language in there that says, “You are crazy.” The horse is just crazy He gets crazy on a mechanical level He’s been beaten and punished and sawed around and manhandled and mauled one way or the other, and he finally gets up to a point where he’s crazy. And you get on this horse and you start to run down the road—you want to beware, by the way, of riding horses that are on some of these beautiful stables and so forth where these people have—they just “love horses,” and you go out and get on one horse or something like that and you’ll find yourself, about half the time, riding a horse that’s nuts. They ride him with—nobody around there really knows anything about horses; they just “love horses.” And you get on this horse and down the road he starts, and wham! He’ll run right straight into a tree, head on. Then people look at you and they say, “Well hey, what’s the matter with you? Don’t you know how to ride this horse?” I’ve had this happen to me about three times, by the way. Well anyhow, that horse is crazy. He isn’t crazy because—you didn’t say something to him while you were riding him that restimulated him. It was just the fact that he had weight on his back, the kinesthesia of having somebody on him and the tactile of having a bit in his mouth. These things were enough to restimulate this engram.
We’re dealing with twenty-six perceptics. And here’s language over here as just an incidental. It’s one of the special perceptics of sound. It s a special aspect of the perceptic of sound, I should say, and it’s a special aspect of the perceptic of sight.
It may interest you that read words, read off of a page, are occasionally much less aberrative than words which are heard, because there is a mechanical force to the sound of a voice. There is actual sound waves to the voice, whereas this other—sight waves—they seldom glare enough. But if you get a big electric sign which is glaring up there, you will very often get a very heavy impact off of a read word.
As a matter of fact, we pulled a circuit out of a guy one time who was standing there in a penny arcade with his hands on an electric shocker machine. And right up above him was this sign which said, in effect, “Learn to control yourself.” And it was in neon lights! So another thing happens there. You occasionally will get a computation on a case which says that the written word is aberrative and the spoken word is not, something like that. Therefore, everything a guy reads becomes aberrative, but things that are spoken are less aberrative. Showing you the difference of selection. Speech is a specialized portion of sound and sight and that means that it is a subdivision of two of the twenty-six perceptics. That’ll give you some sort of an idea of the relative importances.
Now, it so happens that our language gets rationalized by the analyzer and goes back and reevaluates engrams and they are restimulated. And we deal so much with speech, and so many people are so worried about speech, and these actions are translated so easily into speech, that speech has a special aberrative value all its own. And you understand that speech is learned by mimicry and the observation of action. That is the way people learn how to talk. A baby hears the words get out and sees somebody leave, you see? And then therefore learns, when this is seen several times, what “get out” means. Or somebody says, “Get out” to the baby and boots him out, so that’s what it means. Of course, you realize that it is a special sound which is accompanied by something going out. And there’s kinesthesia and there’s tactile and there’s visio and there’re all sorts of things mixed up in the definition of this word get out Word means an action. Now this, reappearing down in the engram bank—a person knows it here—the earlier engram gets restimulated mechanically. You’ve got the mechanics of restimulation.
The mechanics of restimulation belong over here in this mechanical level. Any sound or any perceptic can restimulate an engram, not just speech.
Now, we get over into the mechanical aspect of an engram, we’ll find out that a person is kicked, let us say, and knocked out. Knockout occurs. Next point of the knockout is well, again let’s say footsteps. Maybe some music playing off in the distance and maybe a car driving up the street somewhere and so on. That’s the total of the engram.
Now, this person goes on maybe for a long time without that engram being restimulated. And one day he’s very tired and he hears some footsteps like that—or let’s say there was some onion soup cooking when he got kicked. And he’s very tired one day. A person has to be a bit weary for an engram to key in. Therefore, it’s tough to key in the first one because the kid’s analytical awareness is very high. But as engrams cut in, his analyzer, as its standard state, cuts down more and more and more until engrams are awfully easy to restimulate. Because the engram bank only restimulates when the analyzer itself is attenuated in its awareness. You understand that and follow that easily. It’s attenuated. So, the first one’s awfully hard to cut in and the next one’s a little bit easier and the next one’s a little bit easier. So you get these key-ins. Sometimes kids go till they are four or five years of age before they get any engrams keyed in. And then after that they start into the dwindling spiral and after a while get to be adults. (audience laughter) So this person is tired and he hears some footsteps and he smells some onion soup, just that. We don’t need the car or any of the rest of the perceptics, or actually the kick. We just get two factors suddenly. Persons tired, analytical attenuation down, and all of a sudden this person feels very nervous. He feels he should go, or do something, and he can’t quite focus his attention on what is wrong. Actually that’s the trouble with engrams is they don’t tell the analyzer what to fix the attention on. So the person’s attention scatters and he knows something is wrong in the environment but he can’t find it and so becomes nervous.
After that, when cars go by that sounded like the old car, he has a slight awareness. But it’s a sort of a fear of the unknown because he can’t focus on what it was.
Now, that is an engram keyed in, and after that any perceptic that’s in that engram can key it in some more. You see now that there was no speech in this.
Now, this would be very serious. Now we start to add in the speech and we find out that this engram would have been much more serious if it had had a “Stay there” or a “You can’t feel anything” or something like that in there. Now we’re adding in the statement side of the engram, and that’s why human beings can evidently go crazier than horses. Because the statement side can be run in over here on the mechanical side. And now we’ve got the two and it just compounds the felony of a person’s sanity. So I hope you can appreciate from this that the statements shouldn’t be your main point of concentration.
It happens that this whole society is just a little bit aberrated on the subject of language. It should be. English is one of the finest aberrative languages, I think, that exists, except for Japanese. Japanese is very homonymic, it is just crowded with homonyms. And its slang is something to wonder at, and it’s worse than English. But I think that the English is right next step up. Because anybody that says—oh, heavens, I won’t start going into English as an aberrative language. It’s just gorgeous. All of its clichés state other things when taken literally. You see, you take any one of its cliches literally, and they mean something else, so the language is a sort of a double- or triple-talk language. To the reactive mind it means one thing; to the analytical mind it means another.
Now, if you’re going to de-aberrate a language, by the way, you would fix it up so that its literal meaning and its analytical meaning were identical. That’s right. And if you did that, if you did that so that no analytical phrase, when read literally, would do anything but differentiate—for instance, you take English and its pronouns: I, you, we, they Boy, the generality, the lack of differentiation in pronouns! Actually, a language should be built on the basis of exactly defining every pronoun. “I,” if a fellows name is George, should probably be George-ay. His personal pronoun is George-ay And when somebody is speaking to him the phrase would probably be George-ee. And if you were speaking to this whole crowd, why, you would address one person in it and you would say Georgeee-plus. And in this fashion you would get a relatively unaberrated language. But the pronouns all by themselves in English are very serious. So we can get such things. So we’re dealing over here with the mechanical side of it, divorced from language, then we put the language on top of it. But let’s keep them divorced for a moment more. And here we have this person who was kicked, and then we get the engram restimulated, and then one day this person has a dog kicked to death before his eyes. All right, there is a grief. That’s his dog, so forth. Not a word said along this line, you see? Now, this early engram which had to do with kicking and with footsteps and the same perceptics, they appear in the killing of the dog, and there is a grief charge. Now, the level at which this could operate—this first engram could operate—was about so high. You see, it wasn’t supercharged, it just had some pain in it and so on. But now we get a grief charge there, and the intensity of the engram, the charge-up of the engram, comes way up here, way up.
Now, if we take off the dog’s death in processing, the tension on that engram goes back to where it was before. Now you see why you take the charge off of the bank? You see why you take off grief charges and the rest of them? It’s mechanical.
Here is an engram of somebody being kicked and with certain perceptics in it, and then here’s a grief charge that has similar perceptics—a grief moment—and it intensifies this engram way up here, brings it up from five volts to five thousand, just like that. Boom!
Now you see, then, actually no pain has taken place in this second engram but it is a terrific loss and there is physical pain on which it can append. There has to be this first engram. The dog being kicked to death later on, if it couldn’t latch on to an early engram, would be an incident which would be taken apart more or less analytically. A person would feel bad about the dog being kicked, but a person wouldn’t get a psychosis or a neurosis as a result thereof. He would just have a reaction to the dog being kicked, and after that he probably would not react because of having had that happen. But he would say, computationally and otherwise, “I don’t like dogs being kicked, and that was an awful good dog, and I think I will go get another dog,” In other words, he could stand up to it. But having that physical pain on it, it supercharges the lower engram.
That’s why you’ve got to get off these affinity, reality and communication breaks—engrams off the case because it takes the tension out of the bank. We’re still talking over here mechanically.
Now, the statement side of the engram comes over here and compounds the felony, let us say, by, after this fellow has been kicked and the perceptics come along and then his dog is kicked to death—has “You must not cry,” “You have to control yourself,” “You have to be a big boy like Father.” Well, that’s a valence shifter and a shut-off and so forth. So you walk into this case over here and you find out about the dog and you find out there’s probably an earlier engram in there that this thing is appended to—find out about the dog, but nothing happens over here. You try to go through this engram and nothing happens. You try to run the thing through because it’s held down by a standard type of circuitry. Now, that’s circuitry: “You can’t cry” and “Why don’t you be a big boy?” and so forth—circuitry; and that suppresses this charge. So you, as an auditor, try to get this charge to blow so the bank will deintensify, and it just doesn’t blow. Now you’ve got to find out why it doesn’t blow. And you find out “Who in your family didn’t like tears?” “Who in your family didn’t like to cry?” and so forth. And you trace this thing down and you finally find out the dominant, as we will call this person. And we get the dominant and we try to find how early we can get this phrase occurring in the bank, and we deintensify it there. We deintensify this phrase and then we come over back to this engram. And we haven’t just abandoned the thing, said, “Well, fine, we’ve got this fellow’s emotions turned on.” There is only one reason you’re trying to turn these things on, is so you can get the five thousand volts out of this situation over here. So you get this thing and you knock it off on the basis of “you can’t cry”—we’ve got that off of the thing. And we’ve got, “why don’t you be a big boy like Father,” and we’ve got the worst of that off of the case. And we come back over here and we address the moment when the dog was kicked to death; and yow-yow-yow-yow-yow, the fellow cries, you get an emotional response, and right down comes the case, five thousand volts down to five volts. See? Just like that.
This means the bank is not as highly charged, so a person can go back down the track more easily. This is so significant that you will find that there is no psychotic person or severely neurotic person in existence—unless it is by the virtue of having had his brains hacked up or shot out or something—but there’s no inorganic insanity or severe neurosis in existence which didn’t get that way through a dominant: a person trying to dominate the other individual or trying to dominate other individuals. In other words, people who are seeking to control other people. There is this dominant. And the worse the dominance, and the heavier it is, the more liable was the individual to psychosis and neurosis. Because that’s the circuitry. That’s what keeps the bank charged.
If the person, for instance, could have seen the dog kicked to death and then just sat down and cried and cried and cried about it, he would have deintensified it right there, would have deintensified it right on the spot and gotten off probably about eighty, ninety percent of that charge, leaving only about ten percent for you to pick up afterwards. [gap] You see, he has a very tough bank because it’s been supercharged by all this emotion which is inaccessible to him, having been curtained off by circuitry. Now, I hope you follow me on that. It’s a relatively simple point. So when you start into a case and the fellow says, “I can’t get into that,” give him the benefit of the doubt. Don’t go over into statements. Look at it from the mechanical side of the case. This has to do, mostly, with the mechanics of mind operation.
Statements—the wording of the statements and so forth—are important about in this ratio. You could resolve a case—let’s take an auditor who will pay attention to nothing but the mechanics, and an auditor who would pay attention to nothing but statements, and let’s find out which one of them can resolve the case. And you’ll find out that the auditor who—this is a rough case—who pays attention to nothing but statements will not, and the auditor who pays attention to nothing but mechanics, will. Now, that’s the difference between these two things. This does not say that statements are not important.
Now, let’s divide this up again. Here we have the statement part of the case, the words in the engrams, and here we have the mechanical existence of engrams. It would be impossible, you see, to separate these things completely, we’re just hypothetically separating them. I’m just trying to give you a weighted importance, the relative importance of these two things. The auditor, for instance, who paid attention to nothing but these mechanics—the charged bank, the physical pain on the bank, the perceptics and so forth—the auditor who paid attention to nothing but that would have a better chance of resolving the case than a person who paid attention to nothing but the statements. Actually, to resolve the case you’ve got to pay attention to both. [gap] . . . to coax you, now, to pay attention to these mechanics of the case, of a supercharged bank with grief, and all the rest of it; to the existence of the engram as something received personally rather than out of valence; the value, for instance, of picking up automobile sounds and pianos and so forth out of engrams. The importance of them, because they’re all sounds.
Let’s take the statement side of the thing now and add it in to make it a complete picture.
Don’t ever, when somebody says, “I can’t get into it,” don’t ever do this trick of saying to him, “Go over that, ‘I can’t get into it.’” Because you’re laying in a lock. You’re really messing this guy up. Why don’t you kick him, instead?
Now, it is true that a person who begins to know he has engrams will begin to look for these engrams’ reaction in his awake speech, but as an auditor don’t coax him into it. Give him this break. Assume willy-nilly—assume (and this is relatively true) that in present time, with his analyzer on, that he does not talk out of his engrams. Just assume that. And don’t ever throw at a guy the fact that he is talking out of his engrams. Don’t ever try to convince anybody he has engrams, because you’re working right at the heart of insanity when you’re doing that. So don’t do it.
Now, it’s relatively true that a person who is in present time and walking around, even when he is stuck on the track, and he is walking around doing his workaday-world work, isn’t reacting to any enormous extent out of his engrams. Sure, he’s got the pip; and sure, he feels he can’t sit down and write a letter to anybody; and sure, yeah, he isn’t doing so well; but just leave him alone as far as his having engrams is concerned. Don’t try to assert, yourself, control over other human beings because you know they have engrams. That is an Achilles’ heel and it works both ways. That is an effort at controlling another human being, to try to convince him that what he is doing, he is doing out of and because of his engrams. You are invalidating him as an individual. You are saying, “Aha, you haven’t got any ideas of your own. You’re nobody See? You only talk out of your engrams. You only get these ideas from somebody else.” And you could work on a person and probably wind him up in an insane asylum. Do you get the idea what a dirty trick it is? All right.
It’s a worse trick to feed the fellow’s statements back to him in processing for purposes of repeater technique, because at this moment he is depending on you as an auditor. You’re in solid communication with him. You’re trying to punch up to him the reality of his past life, and so you’re supposed to feed back his engramic commands to him? Nuh-uh. You don’t have to, to get processing done. It’s not necessary.
You circumvent it like this. He knows he’s going back after engrams. What you do is to consult his file clerk. You don’t say, here’s—this is wrong: the fellow has just said, “I can’t get into it.” You don’t say to the . . . [gap] . . . the file clerk will probably say “Yes” because it probably is, but it very possibly is about twenty-two engrams up the track from the one you want, so you are evaluating to pick that phrase up that the preclear has just used and feed it back to him. You’re evaluating. You’re preempting, then, the duties of the file clerk.
No. The way you do it is you say to him—this is right, now—he’s lying there, and he says, “I can’t get into it,” and you think that it is a statement that’s keeping him from getting into it. So you say to him, “The file clerk will give us the phrase which is preventing an entrance into this. And when I count from one to five that phrase will flash into your mind; one-two-three-four-five.” (snap) And the fellow may or may not come up with, “I can’t get into it.” If he does, his file clerk gave it to him. And if he compares it to what he just said, he usually says, “Ha-ha, I was talking out of an engram.” You don’t punch it up. Don’t tell him, “Oh, yes, yes, you were.” Nuh-uh. Let his file clerk work with him on this score, and he won’t mind it a bit. You see how that is? Because the chances are pretty good that the phrase that’ll come up is, “There isn’t any door here,” not, “I can’t get into it.” Now, you’re taking the straight dope, now. You’re getting the actual material that is in the engram you’re trying to reach by getting the flash from the file clerk. If your file clerk isn’t working, there are other ways to go about this.
Yes?
Male voice: Ron, once I get in there though, once in an engram and the fellow says something quite often the auditor will know that this phrase is in the engram.
Mm-hm.
Male voice: It will seemingly be analytical.
Mm-hm.
Male voice: What about this sort of case?
Want me to replay the tape?
Male voice: Are they actually in the engram?
The person is actually in the engram. That’s just what I was trying to cover. He’s actually in the engram, and he tells you suddenly, UI can’t get into it.” All right, he’s informing you analytically that he can’t get into it. The chances aren’t even fifty-fifty that he’s talking out of that engram. The chances are very good that he is talking out of an engram that’s someplace else on the track, and that by making him repeat that, you’ll jump him into another engram—completely aside from the fact that you’ll lay a lock into him by forbidding him to speak, you might say, by saying, “Nothing is coming out of your analyzer, it’s just out of your engram bank after all, you bum.” There goes affinity. You won’t get much processing done that way if you keep on doing it.
Now, I have made some experiments during the past two months of trying to find out how necessary it was ever to pick up the preclear’s words and feed them back to him. And I discovered that the latitude which has already been used on this subject is, even at its narrowest, is not justified by the results because you can get a flash back from him, and you very often get an entirely different phrase that explains the whole thing. It’s true that a man running through an engram is more likely to use phrases out of that engram than he is out of his own analyzer because his analyzer is shut down. You see? The analyzer is shut down. And so the reactive mind can come through much more easily when he’s in the engram. All right? So, you can just put that down as bad practice.
Once in a blue moon you will find this fellow, when you are working without a very good file clerk and—I mean, the file clerk can’t get through very well—and he’s just having an awful time and he’s staggering along on the thing; you know that he has just used the phrase because he is obeying it, and it says, “I can’t talk,” something like that. And he told you a little bit earlier, “I can’t talk.” But he’s used maybe fifteen or twenty phrases since then; you fish back to the one he used before that you know explains this, and tell him to go over, “I can’t talk.” The chances are he won’t connect it with what he said before. And usually when I’m working with people these days, I pick up a phrase several phrases ago if he hasn’t come up with it. I don’t use it consecutively. I don’t pounce on him. I let the phrase go by. I know, for instance, this person habitually says, “Oh, I don’t know, I just can’t see about it, I just can’t see that.” You know, this habitually. And all of a sudden the fellow’s visio goes off while he’s running this engram, sort of. He had a visio of one sort or another and the visio went off. And you say all of a sudden to him, “Could it be the phrase ‘I can’t see that?’ and—give me a yes or no.” And the fellow says, “Why, yes!” You can add this up, but what I am trying to prevent now is the pouncing which is done by auditors on preclears, both in the present time social concourse, when one says to the other, “Oh, you’re just talking out of your engrams; you know that’s in an engram,” and “Oh, I don’t know, that’s in an engram” and so forth. That’s bad manners, bad Dianetic manners—very bad. And the other one is trying to prevent the auditor, when he’s got the preclear on the couch, from feeding him back his own conversation. Because the first thing you know the preclear is going to go into a relative state of apathy. And a case can be halted in its progress forward by too much of this sort of thing and too much use of repeater technique. So you get what I’m talking about. The chances are, the trouble with the case is mechanical anyway, unless you’re shooting for circuitry.
If you’re trying to get out basic area engrams and this person has an awful time all the time trying to get phrases through, and you think you’ve got this case in a shape to erase it, no, you haven’t.
Usually, if you can get the person into the early basic area and in his own valence, he’ll thereafter just run right straight on through the engram in his own valence. He won’t bounce, he won’t get misdirected. None of the action phrases will really have any effect upon him, because he’s listening to two people who are quarreling or he’s listening to Mama complain or something, and he understands it for what it is and it just goes on and he listens to this voice through a couple of, three or four, five times, something like that, and it’s gone.
Being out of valence, however, when somebody says, “Get out,” why, he gets out because he isn’t well differentiated as to himself and other people. He’s got himself confused with Mama, so he’s in Mama’s valence.
What is insanity? Insanity is identification, too close an identification. So an identification of himself with another person makes him react to commands given to the other person. You follow that?
A person is being dragged along a hospital corridor and the nurse says, “You’d better go back after it,” and she says that to an intern. And the fellow—lack of differentiation tells him immediately—he thinks he’s being talked to (he’d have to be pretty well out of valence not to recognize this); he promptly goes earlier on the track. He has to be out of valence for that to happen.
In other words, action phrases are only action phrases when you’re working people out of valence. Should give you some sort of an idea. But they’re terribly important, to watch those action phrases, because most of the people you run in the early parts of the case are out of valence. Okay?
What?
Female voice: Ron, I have a question. Is a chronic psychosomatic out of valence . . .
Pardon?
Female voice: . . .all the time? A chronic psychosomatic? [gap] I imagine that a person who was solidly in his own valence would have a rather hard time getting a chronic somatic and keeping it. But practically nobody is in his own valence, because pain, all by itself, can knock a person out of valence.
Here is your mechanical side again. You want valence shifters, so on? Pain itself is a valence shifter. Grief charges are valence shifters all by themselves, without any valence-shifting command. You see, none of the aspects of the mechanics of mental operation could be created by language alone. The mechanical aspect of the mind, in its operation— bouncers, denyers, all the rest of this stuff—has its approximation, has its actual beginning over here in mind mechanical operation, and the words merely designate some point of it. And then the person in the society, through learning the language, has agreed that this means this mechanical thing over here in the physical world. And so he’s agreed that that means that, and when he gets this statement over here it approximates that. But just by a valence shifter, you couldn’t turn a person into somebody else unless the person had a mechanical gimmick in his mind that let him turn into somebody else, anyhow.
There are plenty of horses around in some other horse’s valence. There are plenty of masters around that are in their dog’s valence. I meant that in reverse.
Female voice: Well, it works both ways.
Yeah, it works both ways. As a matter of fact, I would never advise anybody ever to own a bloodhound or a Pekingese.
Okay now, what I’ve tried to tell you this morning is simply this: that Standard Procedure is as it is. It is unchanged. There is Standard Procedure. It is just as you’ve learned it. I have not given you any points which are not in Standard Procedure. These points are in Standard Procedure. But Standard Procedure, as outlined, did not teach you to compute on a case. Now, this outline tells you how to compute on the case, so as to know when to use the various points of Standard Procedure.
I have advanced your knowledge of Dianetics to the point of being able to look over a case and know where to enter the case, know what point. You ought to be able to take this chart, and you ought to look it over and look over your preclear, and with other data which I am going to give you in subsequent talks on this, look over your preclear and say, “Oh, well, this case starts there.” See? “This case starts there.” And you look over this one and you’d say, “Well, aha, this case starts here.” Oh, it’s got lots of grief on it, no particular circuitry, and wham, “This case starts here.” Or you look at a case that’s just a little bit tougher and you say, “Well look, we can start this case right here. We can start right in breaking circuits, right now.” We see that this fellow is supercontrolled. We ask him, “Do you ever cry? How did you feel when your father died?” and so forth. “Well, I guess I felt pretty bad but I didn’t cry about it.” As a matter of fact, he’ll look at you and a couple of moments later, his chest is going heave, heave. And you say, “Suppression of affinity, reality, communication. Engrams. Circuits.” So we start this case here, start it by getting circuits. We can’t get any circuits? We have to start breaking a few locks. “When was the last time somebody told you you were a liar?” Fellow says, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I—nobody really ever . . . Oh, yes, my wife. Yes, she’s always saying I’m a liar.” “Let’s remember the first time your wife said you were a liar.” Down the track he goes on Straightwire, and the first thing you know, tock, tock, tock, tock, you start knocking out a few of these things. You are knocking out communication break locks, just knocking the locks off of this case. And you just ask him various questions about that. “When was the last time somebody told you you were blind?” “When I was blind? Well, nobody’d ever say anything like that to me. You . . .” “Come on. When was the last time somebody said that you just couldn’t see anything?” “Oh, couldn’t see anything—that’s my boss. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, my boss all right.” And bing-bing-bing-bing-bing; up come some attention units, see? Another attention unit in present time, because that is, of course, another communication lock: he can’t see. Remember that communication is perceptics. So we get this—this is where we start this case, then. We start it by breaking some locks. And after a while we’ll get it to a point where the guy can remember some circuits. We get him to remember some circuits, we’ll run some. And we’ll shoot some circuits out of the case, and then maybe we’ll get some of these off.
All right, but maybe we say to the guy, “When was the last time somebody said to you you couldn’t see anything?” And the fellow says, “Mm-mm. Mm-mm.” He’s deaf, dumb and blind, this guy, you see, and nobody’s ever said these things to him. Oh, yeah?
You work with this case a few sessions, or maybe even just one session, something like that, and you see that he is pretty badly occluded. Well, let’s just see if we can get some memory off of him. “Do you remember the house you lived in when you had measles?” And the guy says, “I never remember where I live.” “Well, do you remember one of your schoolteachers?” “I never remember people.” “Do you remember a comic-strip character?” “I never remember people.” “Who am I?” “Oh, you’re Joe.” “Well, you remembered me. So you can remember people.” “Ha. So I did. Ha. Yeah, that’s right.” Straightwire entered on that echelon. And if you’re talking to somebody and you say, “Now, what did you have to eat for breakfast?” And the guy keeps on going “A-a-a-a-a-a.” And you say, “Well, now, how do you feel?” And he keeps on going “A-a-a-a-a.” That guy is out of communication. So you enter his case up here above this point and you just ask him about this and that, and maybe you pick up a matchbox and give it to him, or maybe you offer him a cigarette, or you sit with him there; or he’s going like this, “A-a-a-a” so you go like this, “A-a-a-a.” Yeah, that’s right. And the guy looks at you and he says, “That’s wrong with you too, is it?” And you say, “Yes, I’ve been troubled with that most of my life. It’s hell, isn’t it?” Trying to jockey in there and get any contact. Or you sit down, to take a worse case, and you say, “You know that epizootic which you have consistently? I think I could do something for that.” And he says, “Yeah? Well, doctors are no good.” “Well, this isn’t medicine, this is Dianetics,” and so forth. “Yeah, one of them quack things.” And you say, “Well, I think something could be done for this.” “Aw, what the hell are you talkin’ about? Nobody can do anything for this. That’s my epizootic.” Well, you’ve got a job of reaching his personality, because he’s not there. He’s an accessible case only to disagreement. So you talk to him awhile and you finally find out that he is violently interested in horse racing. So you say, “You know, I won five bucks on a horse once.” And he says, “Yeah, you did?” And you say, “Yeah, it was out at Tanforan, and the horse’s name was Heartbroken.” “Oh, old Heartbroken! Oh, yeah, that horse! You know, once upon a time—I won twenty-four bucks on Heartbroken one time! It was back in the spring of 1925.” You’re in communication. You go along the line a little bit further— you’ve got to work this for some time, possibly, see him on many occasions—and the first thing you know, this guy is accessible to Straightwire. There’s where you enter the cases. So this is actually a chart of case entrance. When you do it well enough, this is what you’ll get.
All right. I want to go in tomorrow, into some various lines on this.
I want to give you the definition of all circuitry. I want to give you the scales of reaction of affinity, reality, communication engrams and locks which I worked out for your special benefit. And in such a way I will show you how to spot in a case what its actual average tone is, in spite of the thing that it acts in a different way than it looks like it’s acting. In other words, I’ll show you how to get past the deception, the social deception which so many people offer, to find out what is the actual state of this case.