Reduction of Engrams (500628)
Date: 28 June 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
The subject for today is the reduction of engrams. It is terribly important that you should understand the necessity to reduce everything you contact. By failure to reduce an engram, the patient can be placed in a state of restimulation which may cause him to do strange and irrational things. Although he was not rendered non compos mentis by a long way, suddenly he may get an urge to eat pretzels, or even when he’s normal or he’s mildly neurotic, he may suddenly pick up, pack his bag and go to Cleveland. So it’s necessary when one has restimulated an engram that one do something to relieve that engram. Now, when one has restimulated one and has discovered that it is not going to reduce, he should go earlier on the track to find a similar engram before it which is holding it up. And by walking backwards down the chain, find the basic on that particular chain that he has touched and reduce that, even though it doesn’t erase. For heaven’s sakes, reduce it.
If the engram which he has touched or any engram which he has touched has in it intensity of action—that is to say, a person’s muscular reaction is great to it and so on—that will deintensify in any event. And the deintensification of it will take away its aberrative force. But in any event, one must reduce what he enters in a case. You have all watched some explosive actions on the part of preclears when they entered an engram. Now, it’s very desirable to erase an engram or reduce it when the person is in his own valence, has full sonic and has all perceptics present, including emotion. Now, that’s very desirable. But that is not absolutely necessary. And you may touch an engram which causes the person no great reaction. The patient may lie there straight out, not in his own valence, but lies there. He is getting word content, he is getting some very mild somatic. He may even be getting no somatic at all. He may be lying there with no manifestation which would encourage one to believe at all that he was going through an engram which was of any importance. Don’t be deluded into leaving that engram in place. No matter how slightly you can get into it, for heaven’s sakes, reduce it. Because if you don’t, you have restimulated it. And having restimulated it, it will be very active when you bring him up to present time. So don’t leave engrams scattered all over the track.
If you’re running a type of case which produces no manifestation and just runs things off in a monotone, doesn’t seem very interested in the engram, there’s a good reason for this somewhere in the case. And you’re trying to find that reason. But if you miss finding the reason and you do contact another engram which is very mild, no intensity, don’t make the error of leaving it and going on to something else. Reduce it.
In other words, you could jump all over a person’s time track, hit five, six, eight engrams and then bring him up to present time and he may have no great psychosomatic reaction from it. But if he has no psychosomatic reaction, he’ll have a psychic reaction. The thing didn’t go into the muscles in the body, it came out in terms of thought. One mustn’t overlook this fact.
Just because a person doesn’t come up to present time with his right arm aching or scratching himself is no reason to believe that an engram hasn’t been put into restimulation. Because you see an engram goes into restimulation in two ways: one, as a psychic command, and two, as a psychosomatic ache, pain or illness. Don’t neglect that psychic angle.
Yesterday a gentleman was run by one of our number present who had come out here from Cleveland; that is to say the gentleman that was run had come out from Cleveland. And one of our number here ran him into five, six incidents and said, “Well, there was no manifestation in the incidents” and dropped them there.
A few hours later I got word that the patient had packed up and was flying home in a rather strange frame of mind. An engram had been touched in the case which commanded him to go home. So he did. He’s going to come back next Sunday. In a few days it will settle out. Any engram will settle out, touched in reverie. But there is no reason to stir up a case.
Now, in this particular case, although nothing seemed to be reducing, the auditor definitely should have picked up the manifestation somewhere. The auditor ran over an engram twice and decided to leave it because it wasn’t reducing. That’s not enough. That isn’t really enough to develop an engram—two runs on it.
Even if he believed that an engram was not going to reduce after four or five runs—and I think one of these engrams he touched didn’t reduce after four or five runs—he shouldn’t just leave the subject of that engram. He should immediately find the engram underlying it. It’s important, it becomes urgent at that moment that he find an earlier engram on the same subject which will reduce. That becomes very urgent.
The auditor in this case had his hands on the sperm sequence, ran it twice and neglected it further. He had there what might have developed into a real basic on it. And I am going to talk some more today about the sperm sequence. But that was run only twice. Now, it should have been run four or five, six times to find out what was going to happen, because that is obviously very early in the case. You should find out what it’s going to do before you leave it.
Let me caution you with all gravity on this that you can do a case a great deal of harm by failing to reduce what you have contacted.
Male voice: What happens if you’ve finally gotten basic on the chain, fine—all right, the person runs over it, runs over it and runs over it. It’s a long grind. It doesn’t compute.
Well, if you get basic on that chain you’re going to get it reduced.
Male voice: It doesn’t compute.
What doesn’t compute?
Male voice: The condition doesn’t compute.
Are you asking patients to compute their engrams?
Male voice: Not necessarily.
It doesn’t matter. Does the somatic disappear on this one that you’re speaking of?
Male voice: Yeah, somatic disappears, but still no erasure.
Somatic disappear? You have just confronted a reduction. That is a reduction. The words do not disappear, it may not mean anything.
Male voice: . . . an erasure. If all the words would . . .
What?
Male voice: Would—all the words erase?
Well, of what are you speaking now? Now I have lost the question.
Male voice: No, this is the same thing. You have reduction of somatic but no erasure of words.
That is a reduction. I refer you to the text. That’s adequately covered in the text.
Male voice: But then if it were a basic it should erase.
No. Don’t make this error. Get the somatic off of it. If the words are still there and if you can’t get the words to go, you have achieved a reduction of an engram. This means that those phrases occur earlier but a similar somatic is repeated only a very few times before this. As a result, you will have reduced the aberrative effect of it. Now, you’re looking at a reduction there. That is a reduction and that’s perfectly valid. You are not as early in the case as you can get, not by a long ways. But you have placed that engram in a situation where it cannot reactivate. And it won’t reactivate, either.
Now, there are three things here you must know very, very well. One is erasure. When you see an erasure, it is not possible to mistake it. It may be that the engram erases without the person being in his own valence, without his having had a very severe somatic and yet after you have run it a few times the words begin to drop out on you. They vanish. But they don’t vanish on a recessive basis, which I will discuss in a moment. They actually go.
Now, the general manifestation of an erasure is a recounting, yawns . . .
Male voice: Are the yawns necessary then for an erasure?
Oh yes, you’ll get yawns. Either that or you don’t have the basic stuff out. Now, you’re talking again about a recession. Now, you get yawns off of it and then you get laughs—most of the time, most people will—and then you get a disappearance of it and a rather confused state on the part of the person because he knew something was there and now he can’t pick up all the words again. He can tell you more or less what was there and what kind of an engram he was running but now it’s gone. That’s an erasure.
If you carry an erasure out with a person in his own valence and where you’re getting some somatic on the thing, the thing will erase down to a point of even knocking out the visio. [gap] . . . then you knock out the visio, you—of course the visio on all prenatals is blackness, and you get little white squares with it; that’s a real erasure. The person will actually see little white squares. And if he has a little phrase left in it that you haven’t gotten, there’ll be a black square left where that phrase is. This manifestation is very common.
Now, the next point there is a reduction. In a reduction the somatic disappears, the discomfort disappears, the person is no longer concerned with it, but the words are still present. This means that you’re working just a little bit late, but a reduction is valid therapy.
Male voice: If he is curled up at that point of the reduction does he straighten out?
Oh, he may stay curled up, he may straighten out, it doesn’t matter. You’re placing too much importance upon curling up and jumping around and agonizes—and flipping into other valences and so forth. These are all manifestations but they are not necessarily part of an erasure or a reduction.
Now, the next step is beating a thing into a recession. You can recount an engram into a recession where the personnel disappears, where everything more or less just disappears and drops out of sight. It goes. That engram will have to be addressed again. You can take almost any engram and beat it into a recession by just grinding, grinding, grinding on the thing. There are no yawns. There is no relief. There is no laughter. It’s just a grim grind. You’ll notice it very easily.
It is possible in an erasure, when basic-basic is not out of the case, for the entire incident to disappear rather easily—particularly when there have been muscle jerks and manifestations in it—to disappear, deintensify, words all gone and for no yawns to come off. This means that the first moment of unconsciousness has not been contacted in the case. There’s still unconsciousness on that one you’ve just run. The unconsciousness will have to come off of that thing eventually.
You see how it follows, then. So you can get what is actually an erasure—it’s everything is erased in it except the unconsciousness, the yawns. You go earlier in that case and you’re going to find a long series of yawns. When you get those things off, the unconsciousness will come out of the later one. This is a strange aspect of the basic area. The unconsciousness is pretty thin, if you can get the thing to erase without it.
You’ll find this most ordinarily in patients who are delivering a great intensity of muscular action, who curl up in a ball and so on. You’ll occasionally get an erasure in the basic area without a yawn, with such a manifestation. [gap] Let me advise you as to the state of an engram. Well, you touch it, mild somatic, doesn’t seem to be troubling the fellow. You have left something out of your calculations if you say, “Well, we can safely leave this.” And that is that a psychosomatic illness may not be severe when one is returned to the incident. The somatic may not be severe. But that somatic brought up to present time—the aberrative effect of it when brought up to present time multiplies greatly in its severity. A migraine engram all the way back on the track may be producing a fairly mild headache. If you brought that person up to present time suddenly with that migraine headache you would have a beautiful migraine headache.
Remember, it’ll work exactly the same way with the aberrative effect. So the fellow has this engram and it says, “I want to go home. I have to go home,” it says. Well, he doesn’t jump up off the bed immediately and pack his bag and go home. But now we bring him up to present time. We turn him loose, he walks around in a circle for a little while and then he suddenly says to himself, “You know, I have to go home.” And now he does go pack his bag, go climb on a plane and fly seven hundred miles to get home. And then when he gets home the thing has settled out and he says, “What the hell am I doing here?” So he’ll let a few days go by and he will come back. Well, it’s all very good for airline business, but it’s not good Dianetics.
Male voice: At one point there, in running over an engram like that, particular phrases in there that appear to be the type of phrase that have aberrative content such as “I don’t know” or “I’ve got to get out” or something else that . . . Is there value in running the engram along to that point and then going over that period several times and then continuing on, or is it more valuable to go over the whole engram . . . ?
An engram can be treated in three ways. One, you can run the engram consecutively all the way through, just one for one, straight on through. You will find that this is very efficacious if the person will go on through the engram all the way through to the back of it, all the way through again, all the way through again, all the way through again.
The next method which will pay good dividends is to pick it up at the first phrase, knock it out with the initial impact. Pick up the next phrase, knock it out. Pick up the next phrase, knock it out. When you get to the rear end of the engram, it’s gone. You erase in sections, in other words.
The third method is to send the somatic strip along the course of the engram to the bouncers, the denyers, the misdirectors, to the holders, and knock each one out, deintensify each one so that you can then go through the engram smoothly. That is also a valid technique.
Male voice: Often it’s necessary to do that before you can go through the thing It sometimes works that way, particularly if you’re working a case where you have a hidden engram that you haven’t been able to discover yet and you’re just shooting holes in an engram to make it possible to gain access to the one you really want. If you do this, by the way, if you just shoot holes in an engram, for heaven’s sakes go back to the beginning of it and recount it consecutively through again. Because there’s a lot of aberrative material you haven’t contacted.
Male voice: Something that’s been causing a little trouble for me, if you have a patch in an engram that does not have words in it . . .
You have a patch in an engram which doesn’t have words in it.
Male voice: Yeah.
Yes.
Male voice: During labor.
During labor.
Male voice: Mother is laying there, there is a certain amount of pressure and what not How much sliding through that can you do? How quickly can you tap through it . . . ?
When an engram has gaps in it which has no word content . . .
Male voice: Yeah. . . . you want to know how fast you can go through that?
Male voice: Yeah.
Well, remember that there’s noise in it, probably. There’s tactile, there’s visio, even though the visio is just black . . .
Male voice: But you still don’t go through it only one time, do you?
No. You can sweep through that rather rapidly. And that is why a thirty-six-hour labor can be reduced in let us say an hour, or an hour and a half or two hours. Because maybe the word content is not great. But you’re still sweeping through the thing very swiftly.
Male voice: Even though you re sweeping through that, that does reduce.
Oh yes, yes, just sweeping through it reduces it. You’ll even get yawns off of blank spots in it and so on.
Male voice: Jim was saying you could ask the somatic strip to get all the high spots . . .
Who got you into birth?
Male voice: I don’t know.
Who got you into birth?
Male voice: It’s been this way for about a day and a half now.
Who was the last person that worked him?
Male voice: I think probably—Don worked me last night, but . . .
Who was the person who worked you into birth?
Who are you working in birth? Ah! Ah! He worked Ted in birth and then his own wasn’t picked up and here he is with a running nose. Okay. Somebody had better set this up. Why don’t you run birth out on him, Greg? Nobody’s taken you into birth then, and boy, you must have one that’s really ready to go to develop a cold just by running somebody else in birth. That thing must be all set. You told me yesterday you were about ready to explode, isn’t that right?
Male voice: Yes.
Yeah.
Male voice: Explode out into the daylight.
Yeah, explode out into the daylight, undoubtedly. All right. Next thing I want to talk to you about is the sperm sequence.
Second male voice: Now Ron, before you leave reduction, you used the term “reduction of phrases’ before, [gap] Will the patient feel tired or. . .?
What are you doing here? You’re not running an engram. In other words, you haven’t found the full engram, you just found a phrase?
Second male voice: Well . . .
You could go all the way down the bank on the phrase “I don’t know” Second male voice: That’s what I meant. Something like that.
All right. You can just run on the phrase “I don’t know” until you find an early “I don’t know” that’ll erase. When you find that early one that erases, you run the whole engram. Don’t just run “I don’t know.” Second male voice: Is that all right to just . . . ?
Go down the bank on “I don’t know”? Oh, absolutely. You will find a lot of early engrams that way. Now, what you’re talking about is . . .
Second male voice: But Yd need to come back on it . . . is stripping. You come back on it, you’re trying to come back on the whole case. Once you go down on it and erase the bottom one, you’ve deintensified the whole chain of UI don’t knows” to a large degree. Don’t go back up it again.
Male voice: This business of just pounding “I don’t know’ into somebody—I’ve seen it done around here and I . . .
Well, there was a case the other day . . . Any auditing, by God, is a matter of using your wits. This case that’s been coming in here for personal therapy which had a chain of “I don’t knows,”—a chain of them, somatic on them, and they went right on down the bank and evidently got to the first aI don’t know” . . . Did you get the first UI don’t know”?
Second male voice: I got the first one I could find and boy, it sure made a difference in the way the case runs.
See? You can go down on an “I don’t know.” Second male voice: There’s still some in there . . . But just pounding “I don’t know” at a person is no good because there may be engrams in there that say “I don’t know,” but the person may not know, too.
Male voice: Not only that but you may have someone that’s always saying something or other and may have so goddamned many in there . . .
You can still find the first one.
Male voice: You can?
Sure. If you keep coaxing it back. The person says, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” And then we go back, “Let’s get to an earlier ‘I don’t know.’” The only trouble is you may have an “I don’t know, stay there.” At which moment you’ll lock the person up on the track by “stay there” having been reactivated but not having been touched. So watch the fact that the person is still moving when you’re going back down the track this way.
Second male voice: That brings up another point How much of the area around the “I don’t know’ is . . . ?
It varies with patients. Some patients will grab twelve phrases away. And some will grab none away.
Male voice: When running just one phrase like that “I don’t know,” how do you know that the patient’s moving earlier? Do you ask them or just tell the somatic strip to go earlier?
You keep telling the somatic strip to go earlier and the patient can tell you if there’s a different somatic appearing. But if the person is not moving, they’ll normally tell you too, if you tell him what you’re trying to do for him.
This is something in which you must get practice, in which you must pick up your skill, is recognizing an engram when you see it, finding out what it’s going to do and then doing what has to be done for it. If it’s not going to reduce or erase, don’t sit there and beat it to recession. Just go find an earlier one. You’re going to find earlier material.
Male voice: Supposing this is something that develops where you cant get the earlier material You’ve restimulated one higher up and you know there s an earlier one and you just cant get it You mean what do you do then? If this upper one is only going to beat to recession?
Male voice: Well, in other words, it’s sitting on an earlier one.
Sure.
Male voice: You’re trying to get the earlier one.
Sometimes you’ll have to run that one which is just going to beat to recession two or three times in order to spring the earlier one into sight.
Male voice: Then the only thing to do is come back to the one higher and beat it into recession.
You spring the one which is earlier. You spring the engram similar to it which was earlier. And you will find that the engrams above it which have a similar content will have deintensified enough so that you can leave them alone at that time.
Male voice: No, I didn’t mean that, Ron, I mean that you run him into an engram, you know it’s sitting on earlier material.
Yeah.
Male voice: You try to drive him down into the earlier one. For some reason you can’t. All right. Then you got to come back to the original one and restimulate it and beat it into recession that’s the only alternative. Because you cant get the earlier one.
Well, you’re posing there a problem of the skill of the auditor If you’ve excited an engram to a point where it’s now holding him solidly on the track somewhere, you’d better find the holder and you’d better knock the holder out. If you can’t find the holder, then knock out a denyer and then find the holder. And get him moving earlier. But you can do that.
Male voice: How do you knock out these holders when it’s holding him in an engram and you want to go earlier? Just keep repeating it until it reduces and then that’s just the end of the road?
Yes. If a person’s going to be held on the track, you can take enough intensity out of the engram in order to get him moving earlier. You watch this carefully and you will see how it operates. The only way to see it operating is just go ahead and do it. If you have a case which is not going to behave at all as you’re working on it, there are reasons why it won’t.
Now, if this were just a simple mechanical matter of finding an engram and going earlier, it would take no brains to audit it. But it does take brains. There are other computations in the case which will hold it up. You’ll find there are all sorts of things that can hold a case up. But when you get ahold of an engram, don’t just touch it lightly and go off to something else. If you’ve got hold of that engram, do something to it. And if nothing can be done to that engram—and by the way, you can find out by running its first phrase what’s going to happen to that engram.
Hm?
Male voice: How do you tell that?
How do you tell what?
Male voice: How do you tell about an engram s first phrase?
Well, there’s going to be a somatic on that first phrase. If that is an engram, there’ll be a somatic on it, if you’re going to contact it at all. Try and run that first phrase. Just roll it a few times and find out if it recedes. Find out if there’s intensity on the engram. If there’s intensity on the engram you can always take off its tension.
Male voice: And if there’s not?
Hm?
Male voice: If there’s not on that first phrase?
If there’s nothing, the first phrase isn’t going to do anything, it’s just going to sit there.
Male voice: And the whole engram?
Hm? The whole engram probably will. That is a method of testing. All of these things are things which you have to use your judgment on. But that’s just a trick.
Another thing which I don’t think you’re doing is realizing the extent of cooperation of the somatic strip and basic personality. They’re cooperating with you. The file clerk and the somatic strip will cooperate with you to the limit of their ability. But if you get the somatic strip locked up someplace on the track, it can’t move, then it hasn’t stopped cooperating with you, it just simply can’t move and it’s up to you to find out why. And if it has suddenly stopped moving there is a reason why it cannot and if there is such a reason you can do something about it which will start it moving again.
Now, here’s another thing: you can take a case and go into it and do this to it and do that to it and jog it around this way and knock it around that way and send the somatic strip someplace and then decide that isn’t what you want and send it someplace else and that isn’t what you want either and go earlier and run one twice and then suddenly decide it was maybe birth after all and go up to birth and about this time the file clerk and the somatic strip will stop cooperating with you. That’s a factor you must recognize is there.
If you mishandle a case at its entrance, the cooperation will slack off until suddenly the patient will not cooperate with you at all. In such a way you will spoil the case. You have made it very difficult for yourself or for another auditor to unravel this case. It can be done.
Male voice: Then what’s the best? Just let the case settle out?
Let the case settle. Let the case settle and next time go into it and do something sentient about it. But you can actually—the file clerk and, you might say, the somatic strip will go on strike against you because you’ve gotten the case all stirred up, you aren’t using the computation, the combination necessary, you haven’t asked for their cooperation, you’ve just jarred into the case, hammered around on it, driven it in some direction or other, gotten it restimulated and then gone off and left it.
Male voice: There s also the possibility that many times there s an engram which tells the person to go on strike against you.
Mm-hm. But you will be able to overcome that engram if you have not antagonized your two allies there, the file clerk and the somatic strip.
Male voice: But these manifestations, they’re very much alike many times.
You open up a case fresh, brand-new, and you start to run that case with good sense, and the cooperation starts picking up and it should go on a rising curve. It may not be very great at first, but the second that the file clerk and the somatic strip know that you’re going in there and you’re approximating it the way they’d like to work, they’ll go on cooperating with you right straight along. But if you go in there into the case and mess it all up and get it into a fine state of restimulation and don’t do anything about it, if you overlook the obvious combination necessary to resolve the case; if you haven’t asked for the cooperation, but just drive the case from here to there, it’s an actual fact that the file clerk and the somatic strip will just say “No!” finally. They’ll quit.
Male voice: How do you verbally ask for the cooperation of the file clerk and the somatic strip?
Oh, the file clerk knows all about it. Now, the file clerk knows all about it. “Now, the file clerk is going to give us the incident; now we want the incident that is necessary to resolve the case” or “We want the incident necessary so that we can undo this particular bundle of engrams” and so on. “And now the somatic strip will go to the beginning of that incident and let’s roll it.” [gap] Now, the file clerk and the somatic strip are your allies. They will work with you, right straight on through. But you’ve got to treat them as allies. You can’t give them two orders consecutively, for instance. You can’t say, “All right. The file clerk will now give us the incident necessary to reduce before we can reduce birth” and having said so, never send the somatic strip there to the first phrase but simply say, “Oh well, let’s go to some late-life painful emotion.” Well, the file clerk’s pulled one forward. It’s waiting. Now you tell the person “some late-life painful emotion.” All right. We go up to the late-life painful emotion and it’ll still work with us—go up to late-life painful emotion and we don’t find any emotional discharge there right away and we say, “Well, let’s go to conception now. The somatic strip will go to conception.” We’ve gotten two incidents, there’s two commands not carried out and nothing done about them particularly. We didn’t run that late-life painful emotion, we just took a glance at it and we said, “Aw, that’s no good. Now we’ll go to conception.” Well, you send the fellow to conception, you run it twice, run it into restimulation and then all of a sudden say, “Well, maybe we can get birth now.” So we say, “Well, the file clerk will now give us birth. No, no, no. Let’s go to that first AA.” And about that time the file clerk and the somatic strip are going to close down on you just as cold as an icebox. Bang. They’re going to say, “To hell with this bastard.” Or give him a command like this, “The somatic strip will go to the first part of this engram. All right. Now run the phrase, ‘I don’t care.’” Well, that is not in the first part of the engram. So the somatic strip’s gone over here and you want a phrase run over here. So the somatic strip has to adjust back over to this phrase again.
In other words, you’re giving two consecutive commands. All you have to do is remember that as far as the file clerk and the somatic strip are concerned they can only do one thing at once, one thing at a time. And know what you’re going to say to them, know what you want them to do and then give them all your help and assistance in doing that thing.
Male voice: What is the characteristic of the file clerk? If you asked him verbally to cooperate, that is, asked the file clerk verbally with the word “cooperate,” would that imply that the file clerk is not cooperating? That’s what I’m driving at. You can’t—it’s just as though you . . .
You know the file clerk can’t talk to you?
Male voice: Well, I know that he cant, but all I’m asking for is the characteristic, and Campbell when he asked for the correct phrase, that implies that the phrase is not correct Now, if the file clerk’s working to begin with, if you ask it to cooperate with the word “cooperate,” will he also imply that . . .
No. Don’t ever ask the file clerk to cooperate, the file clerk is either cooperating or not cooperating. It isn’t something you ask for.
Male voice: You take it for granted that the file clerk is cooperating unless you . . .
That’s the point I’ve been trying to make, is that they will cooperate beautifully.
Male voice: Ron, after you ask the file clerk for information, how long a period should you wait?
If you’re sending a fellow back down the track, remember it takes five, ten seconds to get there. No longer than that—five or ten seconds.
Male voice: And how long can you afford to work in there with the file clerk on that incident, ten minutes?
Ten minutes?
Male voice: I mean if he doesn’t bring up that one out of the . . .
Ten minutes!
Male voice: Well, say you start in and you ask the file clerk for some information at this time, you want the phrase or something and apparently you re getting nothing back because it’s not ready to lift for one reason or another. How much time . . .
Ten seconds.
Male voice: Ok And you want to know how long it takes the somatic strip to get from one part of an engram to another part of an engram? Three or four milliseconds.
Second male voice: If the thing isn’t handed up, then what?
Hm?
Second male voice: If the thing isn’t being handed up within ten seconds after you’ve asked for it . . .
Male voice: It’s not ready to come up.
It’s not ready to come up. So just nullify the command. Say, “Well, that’s all right, we don’t have to have that now, then. If it’s not ready to come up, we don’t have to have it. Let’s take up what is ready to come up.” This is a cooperative endeavor. Never set it up that the file clerk and the somatic strip are under your absolute command. You are cooperating with them, they are cooperating with you. It’s a cooperative endeavor. They will do all they can to help you. And you must do all you can to help them, very definitely. If you ask them to do things which they cannot do, don’t suddenly assume an unreasonable and commanding attitude toward them.
They will give you the engram and the patient quite often will absolutely refuse to touch it. You’ll see this. “Oh, I’m not going to go through that again.” But they’re right there . . . [gap] You don’t suddenly run in repeater technique because that changes the position of the somatic strip, that changes the place of the file clerk. You’re suddenly saying, “Well, let’s go off to something else.” He may be talking off of an engram fifteen removed from where you are, or part of the bundle.
All right. You’ve got him right there. You say, “When I count from one to five, the first phrase of this engram is going to flash into your mind.” “No, no, no, no, no!” “All right. The first phrase is going to flash into your mind when I count from one to five.” Don’t make the mistake of believing the file clerk and the somatic strip are verbal. They cooperate with you quietly and unspokenly. The engrams will talk. And when you have somebody back down the track someplace, the engrams very often do talk. But as far as what the patient’s got to say at that moment, invalid material. To hell with it.
I’m not going to go through this one again. I’m just not going to do it. That’s all there is to it. It’s just too tough, it’s not ready to come up yet. Not ready to come up yet.” And you know damn well it is. The guy is jerking and he’s jumping and so on, there’s tension on the thing. The file clerk’s sitting right there holding it for you. The somatic strip’s right there at the beginning of it, right where you put him. “All right. Let’s roll.” “No.” “Well, just give me the first phrase of it anyway.” You are actually working on a trio. Let us consider the first of the trio a rather recalcitrant little boy, which is the aberrated personality. And it is of very low voltage when the guy is way down the track, no voltage at all. So you’re working with this rather querulous sometimes, or tantrumesque child, if you want to consider it that way. But that doesn’t mean that lying right underneath that is horsepower. Because they’re there. The fellow’s saying, “No, I’m not going to go through this engram. Oh, that’s too painful.” And “You’ll never get me into a situation like this again. Yakety-yakety-yakety-yak.” That’s not the file clerk and that’s not the somatic strip. If they’re cooperating with you, if you’ve gotten cooperation out of them, you can run that engram. So you see, you’re—actually three things, the auditor, the file clerk and the somatic strip are closing in on aberrated personality. And the three of them, working properly and in cooperation can really make hash out of aberrated personality.
Now, as far as flash reply is concerned and so forth, you can get some kind of an imperfect connection, relatively imperfect, usually pretty good but not absolutely good because it may come out on a demon circuit and get filtered. The flash reply. Now, that is as close to talking as the file clerk will get. He’s got lots of data, he’s got lots of computer to work with, even in a psychotic.
Male voice: The girl I was running yesterday had—I sent her down very early in basic area, I think it was to the beginning of a cough chain, and immediately as soon as shed gotten there she started crying “Oh no, I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to go through this.” And I just told the somatic strip to go to the beginning of the incident and roll it She started crying and she actually wept and said she wasn’t ready to go through it And she went right on through it Yeah, that’s right.
Male voice: Without any trouble. And this was solely what shed go through.
Yeah. That is the point there. You have to assume, because it is true, that a case which has not been thoroughly loused up (at which time you’ve got a pretty bad tangle on your hands), thoroughly loused up by somebody telling the somatic strip to go one place and the file clerk to go someplace else and saying, “Well, he doesn’t want to roll this now, well go off to something else/’ But if you’ve gotten a case which is just normally hard to run, where the auditor has not been very, very bad, you assume a perfectly correct thing when you assume that the file clerk and the somatic strip are positioning right where you want them. And if you overlook the fact that they are, it’s something like going out to fight a war and telling the territorials that they should attack on the left and then changing your mind and after they’ve had a six hours’ hard march to get around on the left flank and tell them, “Well, we decided that you go over to the right.” About that time the territorials say, “Huh-uh-uh, oh yes.” Well, they’ll go over on the right maybe once or twice or three times.
Now we say all of a sudden, “Well, you lead the shock troops.” And then we say after they’ve gotten into the attack a little ways, we say, “Well, no, I—I—I don’t know, we can’t trust these people anyway. We don’t know where they are or anything like that. Turn your machine guns on them from behind.” It would look like that to the file clerk if you had really led him astray. So he no longer has any confidence in you if you do that. But it’s a matter of confidence. You know at the beginning of a case that the file clerk and the somatic strip are going to do their level best to do everything you want them to do the second they get an inkling of what you’re doing. They’ll do that even on a psychotic, a homicidal maniac or something like that. This guy may be growling and snarling and screaming and so forth. His file clerk and his somatic strip will work with you.
It’s an astonishing fact. It is an incredible fact that there is such a level of cooperation in existence. It’s part of the whole principle of affinity that they are in such existence.
The other little portion here I want to mention briefly is this new technique of putting a person in a pleasurable sexual moment without getting a recounting of that. Don’t ask him to tell you what he is doing. You have put him in a pleasurable sexual incident, by this you may be able to reach his own conception. If you can reach his own conception, run it out as an engram, see what luck you’ve got. Run it out two, four, six, eight, twelve times, it doesn’t matter. But see if you can develop some pain in that engram. Get him earlier, to the ejaculation. And then—this is a little research project for you—see if you can get him around being the ovum. See how much track you can open up there at the bottom by starting a case—starting a case with the sperm sequence. See what happens.
I’ve always gotten the sperm sequence somewhere along the line of a case. I’ve always treated it as an engram. I’ve always reduced it. But if we could start in a case like this, that will be basic-basic. Usually in trying to reach it, it is found to have numerous bundles of engrams around in it. I’ve always considered that possibly we were running “coitus and . . .” Let’s make a good, solid test on it and find out whether or not by relieving it we don’t achieve an erasure right at the beginning of the case. This new technique’s very interesting.
Male voice: Ron, as a further portion of that research project, might it not be possible to bring that sperm dream right on up the chain?
Don’t call it a sperm dream, call it a sperm sequence.
Male voice: Sperm sequence. Bring it right on up and bring it right on up the coitus chain once we get into that, if—unless it takes too long to run at least two or three of the coitus engrams right on up that chain. I mean, wouldn’t that be a possible research . . .
Yes, but the first part of that thing, let’s just see if we can’t erase the sperm sequence as basic-basic as an independent thing. If we can do that we can shorten therapy.
Male voice: Are you stating the case opening or a case that’s already been run?
Any case; any case. (Recording ends abruptly)