Research and Discovery-Part I (500629)
Date: 29 June 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I The education of a person into Dianetic therapy is a relatively simple task. If the person is studying Dianetics on a co-auditing basis, we have one problem. If the patient is simply undergoing Dianetic therapy and we don’t care whether he knows anything about Dianetics or not, we have another problem.
The first is different from the second only in that you can use all of your terminology and nomenclature at will. And the second is difficult only because all of your terminology is so much Greek to him. So anyway, we have then two problems within the same problem. You and I know that it is not difficult to audit somebody with the terminology and patter of Dianetics if he is studying it. We can leave it at that. But the second one does pose some difficulties. Belknap was up there yesterday with a young boy who is supposed to be a bad case of amnesia. Now, he had read the book. But he was still a little bit foggy on exactly what he was supposed to do. I used a little bit of the patter but mostly not. I didn’t depend on it. Well, there is—just demonstrating a shadow case, in between: not practiced, not skilled, but acquainted a little bit with the patter. Then we get the case who is wholly, utterly unacquainted with any of the terminology, who knows nothing about the reactive mind, who has no slightest concept of what a bouncer is, and as far as that’s concerned what a bouncer does or what a denyer does or what any of these things do. You will be amazed to know that bouncers keep on bouncing a person whether he knows they should or not. I say you would be amazed to know this as a joke, because three or four times people have said to me, “Well, these people think this is what’s supposed to happen, so of course, they let it happen and so on and they’re just fooling.” I worked one little girl one time, about ten years of age. The little girl had no understanding of it at all. And yet we were unable to contact the basic area because of the existence of this phrase, this one phrase, “I don’t know, it’s too early to tell yet.” Of course—doctor’s examination. And she couldn’t tell. And I just shot that at her at random finally and made her repeat it a couple of times and she brightened right up and told me about the whole thing. And I said, “Now, you see, you weren’t supposed to tell that. Who said so?” “Nobody told me I wasn’t supposed to tell that.” And we had quite an argument. Well, these words had had no effect upon her since—the moment they were contacted they ceased to have an effect upon her. Now, she was not instructed as to what effect they were supposed to have and as a result she didn’t understand what effect they had had. It went that way with that whole case. Somebody would say, “Get out” and we’d give the patient an age flash, and “How old are you?” And she’d say, “Eight.” And you’d say, “Well, let’s repeat the words ‘get out.’” And she’d repeat the words “get out” right back down into the engram again and give her an age flash and we’d get “two months.” And so it went with that case, up and down, up and down, up and down.
I have run cases who were arguing with me continually, trying to convince me they were in the prenatal area. And, I was just smiling tolerantly about the whole thing. “Well, if that’s what you understand, that’s what you understand. Now, I’m not trying to put any evaluation across to you at all. If you think you’re in the prenatal area, why that’s fine, that’s fine.” You know. And people would get very upset with me. And some fellow running through the sperm sequence—he has not been informed that the sperm sequence is there, he is merely sent to the earliest moment in life. Naturally, you would pick this up probably as birth. Most people, they would think that they would say birth, and they don’t. They wind up with the sperm. And they wriggle on the bed and go through all the motions and so forth.
Well, all that is slight digression but it’s just relative to the fact that people react to these things whether they know anything about them or not. Therefore you can use almost any persuasive patter which you like to secure the cooperation of the file clerk and the somatic strip. You can alter your lingo. You don’t have to explain to him what a denyer is or a bouncer is. But you will find it profitable, if you are going to work a case over a long period of time, to give them about a ten-word vocabulary in Dianetics. You’ll find it profitable. It is perfectly workable to use a side patter. But the words which you’ll find in Dianetics have, for the most part, been selected over a period of time. They’ve been selected and reselected and reselected. And any moment they can be selected again and changed. The selection of those words is based on experience.
There is only one phrase, for instance, I wish I could change in Dianetics and I don’t seem to be able to, and that’s “time track.” “Time track” means something to people, but there in 1911 there was an old cliché about “you’re off your trolley.” And “I am going to throw him off the track” and things like that actually occur in engrams. However, it is such a close approximation that it’s a tossup whether or not it’s best to retain “time track” and then pick up the things which throw him off the track, than to use something else which won’t demonstrate the existence of this word “track” in the case. The mind takes so readily to this analogy of track that it’s a hard one to discard.
The word “somatic” is used: an adjective converted into a noun, actually meaning “body,” because the use of the word “pain” is very restimulative, and furthermore pain does not cover the field. A somatic can be pressure, aches, so on, as well as real pain.
The use of the word “denyer” sets up a neologism which is not too suggestive to the patient. In the same way, a bouncer. I’ve only found the word “bouncer” in two or three engrams. Incidentally, it really bounced when you found the word “bouncer” in the engram! This was actually the word “bouncer.” Male voice: The real old . . .
The real old-time bouncer, yeah. “I’m going to be the bouncer around here” was one of them. And of course it went on to say, “And throw out these guys after they’ve stayed too late” and so on. Hubby giving wife hell about a party.
Male voice: When you asked for a bouncer you got Father!
Yeah, you asked for a bouncer you got Father, that’s right. “Misdirector.” A misdirector, of course, is a rather loose word. You could break that down into several subclasses. But you don’t find the word “misdirector’’ in an engram. I’ve never found it to date. And so forth. So these words have been brought together, chosen for their unrestimulative character. Therefore it’s quite legitimate for you to use them. They will not bring to the patient the idea that he is supposed to do something just because he finds one. That won’t come through. The point I was making earlier: he bounces whether he knows it’s a bouncer or not. So you’re not in any degree undermining the case by throwing these things in.
However, if you have a person who dodges badly—and those people do exist: somebody with an enormous amount of dub-in who is quite frightened of approaching any engram—you’ll discover him using the mechanics of Dianetics to fool you. The only trouble is, he can’t bounce well He claims he is in a bouncer, and he may even feed you back the wrong age flash, something like that. But he is right there in the engram, you can take a look at him. Or he is not in any engram. And you repeat the bouncer back a few times at him that he’s given you and you’re not getting into any engram. So there is a slight possibility of a person dodging, using these mechanisms back at you. He has been taught to dodge, you might say. This case poses, always, a very tough problem. And any ideas which any of you come across on the subject of how to knock apart a dub-in more rapidly, why, those ideas are very welcome. There’s a fellowship award waiting for the person who cracks that problem.
In the aggregate, then, it is usually time saved to educate the person a little bit. Explain what the terms are. It doesn’t take very long. Let him read the book.
Of course, in the case of the psychotic, you don’t have someone who can read and assimilate the material. And this is the one case where you will have to alter your patter. There isn’t any chance there to explain something to this person, to educate him with anything, and for the most part—most really inaccessible hard-case psychotics . . .
When you’re talking to his somatic strip and so forth, it’s the usual thing to say, “Well, let’s see if we can’t look at this” or “Let’s see if we can’t be where such and such happened.” And just vary your patter, put it through, more or less describe it to him what you want or if you have the engram right there in full play, that is easy. Just ask him to repeat it again, to say it again, to say it again, to say it again, to say it again. And the thing has a tendency to deintensify.
In fact, most psychotics can be clipped out of the psychosis just by hammering away with repeater technique. A rather endless task. I mean psychotics now who are relatively inaccessible and who are dramatizing an engram.
You will find many people carrying the label of “psychotic,” however, who will lie down, return to the incident, run through the incident from beginning to end, go right on through a full dress parade Dianetic session. That’s quite always wonderful to me. It’s wonderful the amount of cooperation which a psychotic will quite often demonstrate. Somebody will tell you, “This is the most resistant man, we just simply can’t do a thing with him” and you’ll say, “Well, I’ll take a crack at it anyway” and talk to the fellow for a minute. “Let’s see if we can’t find out who did this to you.” Ahh! That appeals! Let’s find the guy, the guilty son of a bitch. And first thing you know, he’s right in there pitching with you. And you get through one session with him without making him feel that he’s being ruined—two or three sessions— that fellow will really get in there and pitch! I’ve always been very heartened . . .
Male voice: Did you educate the patient?
Oh, yes.
This subject of educating the patient is one which can be made into a very large one. When we talk about education in any way, any form, we are going into Educational Dianetics, actually. [gap] We have a good grip on the science of the mind, we can produce results. But month by month, if we can’t produce shorter, better, quicker results, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves because we have here the tools of test and evaluation.
We’re dealing with something which has no relationship whatsoever to psychology, psychoanalysis or any other mental healing school which ever existed. Anybody who tries to say that “Well, this was part of, and that was something else” is doing a sloppy job of evaluating. Because while some of these things with which we experiment were a portion of some healing school, as that portion and as they existed, they were of relatively little use.
It was not until another factor was entered into the problem that a proper estimate could be taken of the situation in the mind. The factor of a yardstick to measure the accuracy or importance of a fact. Until one could evaluate facts in relationship to facts, the task of evaluation was too great, since it had to be done by statistical experimentation, not by derivation from basic principles. Statistical evaluation can assume the most horribly clumsy and staggering heights. And when somebody says in Dianetics, “Well now, where are your statistics on such and so?” they are asking you out of a pattern of training which has told them that the only possible method of evaluation is by statistics. The evaluation by statistics is a lame one at best, since as any statistician knows, statistics can be most horribly unreliable. One has to know precisely what he is observing and he may not be observing what he should observe at all.
By the scientific method, one has certain postulates, certain tenets, certain axioms to which he can submit a new fact. Now, when he submits this new fact to his axioms and tenets, which he has already demonstrated to have actual existence in reality, he can then get a proper evaluation of this new fact.
Now, I don’t care whether the Muckalupian Indians in the year 1821 were very fond of making people confess about their relatives or something of the sort. It is of no value. We would have to go in on a statistical basis from this angle: How many patients had the medicine man treated? How many changed manifestations were there in the patients he treated? How good was the medicine man? How closely did he hew to this particular scheme? Then we would compile those statistics and we would have some percentage, but that percentage is not going to tell you anything. It’s going to tell you simply that here was a method of somebody who, having found out data about his relatives, changed his manifestation. In other words, it’s a circular problem. And now we know that if a person is influenced in such and such a way by his relatives, let us say, and his relatives were in the habit of saying such and so to him, and we know the action of those words in the psyche of the person we are treating, we can then free him from the habits and so forth of his relatives. And we can look at this dispassionately and we can say, “Well now, that’s pretty good” and we just incorporate it. We say, “Well now, you find out all the data about your relatives and the person gets a little bit better.” But we have to do more with it.
That is scientific methodology, evaluation on the basis of axioms and tenets. The field of the mind is incapable at this time of properly taking an estimate of Dianetics. They’re confronted with a single physical law and several observed axioms.
As a result, the physical scientist is at work here. His type of methodology is at work. How many volts and how many amperes are coming through that light cord? We go over with a voltmeter and an ammeter and we measure them. Oh, it’s not necessary for us to measure five hundred times. We’ll get five hundred answers and they’ll more or less be the same answer. We don’t go around, then, measuring something five hundred times. That’s the statistical method.
We say, “Well now, there’s electricity flowing through that thing, and it should be, unless the city power system has gone crazy, 110 volts.” We don’t have to measure it. Or if we do measure it, we only measure it once. We make our instruments certain. If we want to really be certain of it, we take three sets of instruments and we measure it. We only measure it three times, though. We compare the results with these instruments, figure out the instrument error on the thing, and we have an accurate estimate of the situation. So we don’t need five hundred measurements. The statistical method and the derivation method are the two points of difference.
I’m telling you this for a very specific reason. I want you to understand that your task as you enter research—and all of you, whether you want to or not, are going to enter research—is not to collect statistics. Your task is to derive new data from your observations and find out how it correlates with what you already know, and know works. In other words, to do an evaluation against known behavior. So if you go off on a line of research, you have to do this: you have to say, “Well, I think so-and-so and such-and-such might possibly be the case, but let’s see if it works, see if the mind works this way.” So we take five, ten patients, something like that, and we observe it in the five or ten patients.
We’re not trying to gather statistics that say five or ten people work this way. We’re trying to find if the human mind works this way. And having observed it we say, “Well, in a proportion of these cases, cases which don’t have dub-in for instance, this thing is observably useful.” So we have a new method and we’ve evaluated it to that degree.
Now, if one of you or myself or Don or somebody suddenly discovers some way of breaking a dub-in case, we will not know that by putting a person’s hand in a fire for three seconds every day at ten o’clock, a dub-in breaks. That is not the kind of information we’ll have. We’ll have information there which will suddenly illuminate some further dark corner of the mind.
In other words, there is something else at work here. Now we can use it and we can lick the case with our processes. But obviously we can improve it. So if we’ve illuminated this little further dark corner, first thing you know the whole principle will fall back over into our field of therapy and the cases where the methods which you are using missed will now resolve. But more importantly, you will probably get a better technique on all these cases.
What we are getting, then, is something that’s getting closer and closer to a simplicity. Something which is closer and closer to working every time on everybody in every case. No matter what the case does, our basic techniques work all the time on all minds. But some of them are too lengthy. Some of them are too complex. The auditor has to be too skilled. It sometimes takes too many hours.
As a result, the gains will be in terms of evaluation of new data, not the discovery of new statistics. It’s a process of thinking. It’s a process of shaking up and evaluating.
This is in no way a criticism of the older methods of attack. It is no criticism of such work to say that it was not properly evaluated, since to have been properly evaluated it would have been necessary for that work to have been aligned with the natural laws.
All right, the fact that one discovers the natural laws does not immediately give him the right to come down with all four feet on the head of somebody who hadn’t discovered them. I don’t think, for instance, that Maxwell was furious with the boys who had the phlogiston theory of combustion. That’s a backwards way of looking at it. But I want to point up to you that there is an entirely different mechanism at work here: it’s going to be derived. So when you do research, such as Educational Dianetics Dick’s talking about, he wants to observe something, he wants to find out if you can rehabilitate reality.
Well, we’re working on something there, we want to rehabilitate reality. We’re not trying to make a person face it or anything nebulous. We know that there is a validating mechanism in the mind which, when it is put into operation, suddenly tells the person this is reality. Now, what is the exact character of that mechanism, how do you spring it into full view? If that, all by itself, could be sprung into full view, your cases would get well quickly, much more rapidly.
Male voice: Most of them would be well.
Yeah, that’s right. In fact, that little discovery and that little gimmick, if it could be put into full play, would be more useful than anything else we have, except of course our basic tenets which already have shown up the existence of this. [gap] You’ll find amongst the schools of the human mind a lot of data. You’ll find all kinds of data. It’s not evaluated as it should be. Because to be evaluated it had to have a scale on which to be weighed. But you will find lots of data. And it would be quite profitable to conduct a full-out salvage operation throughout all the schools of mental healing, quite profitable. It would turn up things which we could evaluate, fit them in and we would probably have a few more white pieces on our jigsaw puzzle.3 There are certain practices, like the one I told you about, Homer Lane— here’s a little isolated datum—Homer Lane goes in, the worst psychotic in the institution, he wants to talk to him, they say, “Well, he’ll tear you to pieces because he’s homicidal.” Homer Lane goes in, steps quietly into the cell, says to this great big naked maniac, “I’ve heard that you could help me.” And the maniac looked at him and said, “How did you know?” All right, Homer Lane had a large number of successes with this method. He became very famous over this through England.
What makes that work? Why does it only work occasionally? What makes it work? Now, that’s a nice little research project. Now, we should be able to find out what makes it work with about a week’s research. Yes, we should be able to, because we know something about the third dynamic. It’s a postulate, but it has proven an extremely workable postulate. It was predicted to exist in actuality and when a search was made for it, it was found to exist. Confirmatory evidence can be turned up on this left and right. It’s to a point there’s no reason to go on confirming it; one could just go on confirming it forever. But this evidently has something to do with the third dynamic. Why is it? Or what dynamic is it that could be touched in this patient or that patient?
Now, if he had his Dianetics at hand, he probably would have said, “Let’s see now. A lot of these people work by an appeal, they react to an appeal on the third dynamic. Maybe some of them would react on an appeal on the fourth dynamic. There’d be another one that would only act on an appeal to the second dynamic. And maybe a lot of them would only react to an appeal on the first dynamic. Now, what’s the difference? How can we recognize the difference in these people? Which dynamic is it to which we must appeal?” For instance, I was talking to a psychotic here a few weeks ago, and I threw out an appeal to the second dynamic, her children. Oh, that was really dead blank! That was blank! But an appeal made to the first dynamic had some slight effect. An appeal made to the third dynamic was dead, no effect whatsoever. And if I’d been thinking at the time on this subject—because I’m just reviewing what I did, not what I was evaluating, because I’m evaluating it right this minute! If I’d made an appeal on the fourth dynamic, I might have achieved results. In other words, it’s a worthwhile piece of experimentation. Why did Homer Lane’s method work? Because sometimes it did work.
Yes?
Male voice: I think I know how you can find out from normal people which dynamic to appeal to.
Yeah.
Male voice: Give them a check—list the various drives, the four dynamics. “All right, by studying Dianetics you can clear yourself and make yourself an immensely more valuable person.” Mm-hm.
Male voice: “You can establish much better relationships with your wife and children and so on. You can really be a big advantage to your community. And this is essential to the world in its present condition.” And this sort of stuff comes out, in a sheet or two. Make it fairly complicated and then give him a little test on it, see which one he remembers.
Mm-hm. Yes?
Second male voice: I think a simpler and more direct way to test on these various dynamics is to find out which kind of a situation each dynamic—they can reach in them by direct memory and they can build up on, and dramatize. Use it similarly as were using reaching the sperm dream, the sperm sequence. In fact I’m expanding my paper to cover this very subject.
Yes, he’s using the principle here of dramatization. This was covered to some slight degree in the original thesis, but had not been developed into its full use in therapy techniques.
Second male voice: As a method for pinpointing the target.
All of a sudden here’s one principle working, let’s see if it’ll work across the boards. It should work across the boards if our tenets are really workable here. So it does work across the boards. It’s been found, for instance, that if you put a person into the second dynamic, yes, you can take him back and in a lot of cases find the sperm sequence.
All right, let’s take him into a rage dramatization in the family. Let’s take him into his own emotional moods in each one of his dramatizations. And then let’s carry him back to its inception and we might be able to crack all the chains by just establishing his mood in a late-life incident and then riding the mood back earlier. Now this is a piece of research and it’s very worthwhile.
Second male voice: And I think that in the research you should keep in mind that the—you must build up the dynamic to sufficient proportion to give this person the propulsion to get him back to the basic factor there such as we do in the second dynamic for the sperm sequence. If we don’t build up the second dynamic level, and if we cant get him to relive that second dynamic level sufficiently and dramatize it to a point where he’s really in it we cant get him back. But if you fall somewhere along the coitus chain higher up . . .
All right. That may be of interest, and you will probably find this. And here again we can predict what we might find. You will discover that a person who can’t be put back into the sperm sequence may possibly be reached by striking one of the other dynamics and striking one of the other tones. For instance, it is a fact that a patient is not recovering whose place on the Tone Scale does not rise. If something keeps him suppressed on the Tone Scale into an apathy, let’s say, he is not going to spring up into a better state of being. It is absolutely necessary that he pass through tone one—as a whole case, not in just an incident. You’ll find on the Tone Scale that a person who starts in through an incident with the emotional tone of apathy will then go into it on anger and then go into boredom and then you’ll get some false fours and finally it’ll settle down on the upper three. And that incident, then, is deintensified. In such a way the whole case will function in this fashion. The person is in apathy, let us say, and he must actually pass through a period of being angry. First resentful, then he is angry and then finally he starts to get bored with the situation a bit and he’ll finally come on up the line. That Tone Scale is fantastic in the fact that it does follow those steps, just like that. That is observed phenomena.
Now, I am talking to you about, this morning, about research, because out of you gentlemen will come, as you go along, many improvements for Dianetics. I’m just trying to demonstrate to you what you should look for, show you how you can coordinate it.
Do not despise, under any circumstances, anything which has been done in the field of the mind prior to Dianetics. Don’t despise it. Because you will shut your mind to data which, isolated and unevaluated though it may be, can be of value. Men have been thinking about the mind for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. Dianetics came into existence only because these people had been thinking about the mind. Suddenly, by hitting at the center of the problem, the problem crystallized and we could do something about it which was certain and positive. But Dianetics could not have come into existence had it not been for the ages behind us wherein men were thinking. So there have been a lot of thoughts thought in the past and to despise them is to close one’s mind. Naturally one has a feeling of grave distaste for a prefrontal lobotomist who without any experimental evidence, without any proportion of good results, actually without reason, began to carve up brains. Such a person is not worthy to belong even to the schools of the past on the subject of the mind. And the better people in those schools despise him. The neurosurgeon today is under more fire from his own profession than we could put him under. I’ll amend that: that we are going to put him under, actively. We could put him under fire.
Somebody recently down in Georgia referred to Dianetics. He was describing the transorbital leukotomy. And he said in this Sunday feature that despite what some science fiction writer said about the mind, that transorbital leukotomy was the latest thing.
You can just see the dramatization involved in a transorbital leukotomy or a prefrontal lobotomy. It’s a dramatization, nothing else. “You got to get a needle and stick it in.” Or “You’ve got to get a knife and cut it out. Now, that’s the only way—the only way I can get rid of these worries is just to stick a knife in there and get it out, get it out, I got to get it out, oh God, oh God, it’s killing me so I got to get it out!” Only it’s probably Papa. “I’ll cut it out of you, dear.” I’ll bet I could take fifteen psychiatrists, neurosurgeons now practicing these obscene and horrible acts and find in every one of them mutual attempted abortion. There is the scientific method at work. We see the dramatization, we know what lies behind it because we know the principle of dramatization. Because there’s no rationality connected with it. They don’t get any results. They just go on cutting up brains.
They kill their patients quite often. The mortality rate’s high. They report them in the most diffident tone. You speak about concrete evidence. You should read some reports on these neurosurgical operations. “The mortality rate is surprisingly low. The number of remissions is very high.” Now, that’s real data. They don’t even follow out the statistical method on this. I was unable to get data till somebody told me one time 43 percent of brain operations resulted in remission. I said, “What do you mean by remission?” “Sent home, discharged.” “Discharged what? How?” “Just discharged to their families.” “Where are these people now?” “They’re at home.” “What are they doing?” Well, by running it down we find out they’re performing routine tasks—some of them are performing routine tasks; a large percentage of them are under constant care at home with a nurse in attendance daily, day and night. The failures, maybe some fellow only was a mild manic-depressive. After brain surgery, we find him in a cell, wet, dirty, naked, unable to control any of his bodily functions.
The transorbital leukotomy, prefrontal lobotomy, topectomy, the rest of them were imported from Europe on a statistical authoritarian basis. They have never succeeded in America. And yet they are in use in practically every institution in the land. Now, there is where statistics can lead you if those statistics are not derived and evaluated.
Even so, we can still learn something from the transorbital leukotomy, the prefrontal lobotomy. We can still learn something from them. They have made a mess out of a lot of human beings. They have discovered that when they cut up the prefrontal lobes of the mind they are unable to stir up any ambition in the person. They have found out what they consider to be the seat of the ambition, hope, kindness, friendliness, the dynamics of the individual When they cut up the prefrontal lobes these things diminish or vanish. A useful datum. It took I don’t know how many thousands, I think over ten thousand human beings before somebody made this bright observation with regard to them. But it’s a datum.
Now, the topectomy is a little apple corer goes in and removes sections of the brain. And they have stuck this little apple corer into various parts of the brain and removed them and they found out, for instance, that if you take this part out, the person goes blind. And if you take that part out, why, he has no sense of taste. And if you take some other part out, why, he can’t smell anything anymore. And you take another part out, then every image he sees is inverted. In other words, there’s a lot of data there, a lot of structural data. The method of obtaining it is highly reprehensible and having been obtained, the practice should certainly stop. Most of these things are just because somebody is dramatizing, not because they wanted data.
Male voice: I wonder if it wouldn’t be possible to sic the antivivisectionists onto . . .
You’re not kidding. I have thought of this two or three times and as a matter of fact was in correspondence with Marion Davies about two years ago. And I got a letter back that she was still worried about dogs.
Male voice: Well, what are the arguments of prefrontal lobotomists for doing this?
They have no arguments and no justification.
Male voice: They must have some justifiers.
Well, they’ll tell you some things.
Male voice: Well, what will they tell you then?
Second male voice: A choice of the lesser of two evils—either a man in the insane asylum or wholly a vegetable.
Yeah, well, they say, “Well, let’s get him out of the road.” Male voice: Easier to take care of them.
The whole field of psychology has been working on an erroneous premise which they themselves must have recognized as erroneous in that a person “has to be adjusted.” That above all things must happen. They’ve been working with a herd psychology. In other words, “What we need is more sheep.” And therefore they’ve been putting it forth that a man should be adjusted to his environment.
With relationship to this, there are evidently three classes, three general classes of mind. One, the lowest class, seems to be a mind which is incapable of adjusting to the environment and is incapable of adjusting the environment, neither one. The second type, which you find in routine levels, supervised tasks, is a mind which is capable of adjusting to the environment. The third class is the mind which is capable of doing some adjusting to the environment, but adjusting the environment. And as you rise on the scale and get a higher and higher intelligence level, greater and greater worth to the society, you find that the person is more and more capable of adjusting his environment. We’re here today because we adjust the environment. We are living in a man-made environment. If we clung to this outrageously dull tenet that the thing we must do for a person is adjust him to his environment, we would have at last on our hands a complete cave-in of our culture. Because it calls for no change. It calls for no advance.
A man who is adjusting his environment is immediately labeled by the psychiatrist as neurotic or insane in this day and age. And I have a textbook that I pulled off the presses just ten days before the first copy of Dianetics rolled off the press, which validates the fact that this was the thought and tenet of modern psychology, what would be the standard text on psychopathology for the University of Illinois. I pulled it off the American Book Company press. And it has all their definitions. It’s a standard text. And that is in our library now; I’ve got it very carefully put aside. Because after the appearance of Dianetics you’re going to get a lot of people saying, “Well, we knew this all the time.” And that talks about nothing but adjusting the person to his environment. “This person was maladjusted.” God give me men who are maladjusted! You’ll build a world that way and reach the stars!
Psychology sort of fell off into the same trough as Christianity did when Christianity was being used against people rather than following its own philosophic tenets. The old slave traders went to Africa and they said, “Give ’em rum and Christianity. That’ll fix ’em.” And it did, too! It crushed the opposing tribes on the coast. It permitted the slave traders to pick up shiploads of black ivory and it provided the United States with a rather terrible population problem in the South. “Rum and Christianity.” That was the way it was used. But the people who were using Christianity in this way never thought that they themselves would be caught with it. And it’s a sheep religion when preached that way, which it was never intended to be. And now psychology has fallen into the same slot. We have a sheep psychology: the thing to do is to make sheep.
In the political field, we say, “Aha, what we want is everybody adjusted to his environment. It’s a well-known psychological fact that a person should be adjusted to his environment. Therefore we’re going to adjust everybody to his environment in the whole society. We’re going to make them utterly dependent upon the government.” They somehow or other fit these facts together. They say, “What we must take care of is the mass.” The mass has never been able to take care of itself without having amongst it people who could adjust the environment for that mass. Because a person who couldn’t adjust his environment was a person who was as good as dead as far as future generations were concerned, unless he was being helped along by people who could adjust the environment for him.
The present political equation which is running is—five morons don’t make a genius, but they’re running on the basis that five morons do make a genius. So, it’s a perverted look at life.
I’m bringing all this up and just running through it rapidly here to demonstrate several things. One, there’s an enormous amount of data which has not yet been correlated. There are practices and skills and treatments known today—psychodrama is one of them, which is improperly correlated at this moment in Dianetics. Psychodrama has some validity. I’ve watched it, I’ve used it, studied it and took a few chunks of it but there’s a lot more can be gained. It’s a tool somebody was using. All right, let’s make a better tool. The next thing is to keep an open mind toward these things. And the next thing is don’t let yourself get stampeded at any time on the statistical method. Because engineers who try to build bridges on the basis of a statistical method are going to get bridges that fall down. If you say, “A hundred and eighty bars of iron have been tested. We’ve found out they didn’t break.” But we know nothing about the compression or tension or stress, strain, the principles relating to iron. And so we take a thousand bars of that iron and we build ourselves a bridge. We have no guarantee that those thousand bars don’t contain amongst them some that are going to fail. This is the statistical method. We didn’t have, right there at the inception, the metallurgical laws to hand wherein we could guarantee that out of one thousand bars of iron you had one thousand bars which would stay and do. Stay put and do what they were supposed to do.
Our whole civilization, by the way, depends on the laws of metallurgy, first on fire and then on metallurgy. We’ve known all about a lot of this for a long time. Today we consider it very common. We pick up a piece of iron that big and that big and we say, “Well, it’ll do so-and-so and such-and-such and we can trust it to do so-and-so and such-and-such” and we don’t think any more about it. But boy, there’s scientific methodology behind that piece of iron. It was not picked up on a statistical method.
Any auditor who is worth his salt is a researcher. He has to be a researcher. He is doing continual research in the human mind. Every day that he works on a patient he is confronting the subject of research. It’s research even if we have a fairly standard case, because we want to know how this case is put together which made it what it was. But we want to be able to take the things out of that case to bring about what we know will be a heightened level of activity. It’s search, research; we’re performing that search and research with the basic, fundamental laws in application. But if you could audit, any of you could audit, for two thousand hours without materially adding to the knowledge and skill of Dianetics, you ought to quit right here. Because the field is awful big. One of you one of these days is probably going to stumble into telepathy. You may stumble into the mechanism of telepathy or a validation of its existence or how it functions, or prognostication. Or you may find out, as some have been stumbling into, the extension beyond present time of the time track. Or you may stumble into the extension behind conception of the time track. And you may uncover suddenly with one spadeful enough new data to completely alter our techniques of application.
You’ve always got to look for that. Don’t do it by rote! And as long as you are doing it interestedly, from the standpoint of trying to make it better, you don’t fall into the sins of a practitioner. The second that you are merely a practitioner and no longer anything but a practitioner, you’re going to have cases that fail. Because you can’t do Dianetics by rote.
The laws of affinity are—we just know of their existence. How do they function? On what do they depend? We don’t know, for instance, but what the laws of affinity depend upon a very simple mechanism. We know about what they are. They are lined up and more or less evaluated with Dianetics. But we don’t have their cause. It is not good enough to say the day we find the cause, the true cause of affinity, which makes it possible for one person to sit down and audit another person . . . But we have to go and look on the bright face of God and go that far just to discover the source.
That source may lie just five minutes’ research away from us and it might lie two thousand years away from us. We probably wouldn’t have to solve the whole universe just to recover that datum. What holds man together? What makes him a species? Why does he stay together? What is the cohesive force? A lot of research, a lot of speculation.
You’re in a live subject. It’s really live. When you look back at 1894 and you recognize that in 1894 the laws of electricity had at that time been formulated, and we now have the atom bomb and we see that only fifty-six years have intervened, we may be able to get some insight into Dianetics, which actually came into existence in 1938, was not promulgated. 1950. Certainly by 2006—on the basis of the laws of electricity, having a science which is advancing, which is very young, which can be improved, improved and improved, again and again and again, over and over and over, what will we have in 2006? I would hope maybe in five years for a one-shot Clear. But if you got a one-shot Clear you would not have solved 1/1000th of the problems relating to man, because these problems have a source. You just open up your mind sometime, some night, and go out and look at the stars. It’s a goddamned big universe. And all the answers to that universe, as far as I’m concerned, are accessible. Every single one of them we can know.
Now, not to get lyrical, I do want to impress upon you the fact that as you work on a patient, you are looking at one small laboratory, one grain of sand on the beach. That grain of sand has things in common with every other grain of sand, but there may be something different in this patient, may be something new. You’re working continually as a practitioner, as a laboratory technician, to researcher and as a philosopher. You can find things out.
From this class we have already received two very marked and extremely valuable advances in Dianetics. And that’s in two weeks. Now, we should have several more before this class is finished. If we don’t have, then Dianetics has slowed down. Getting old.
Okay. I would like to get you people now to do some auditing and I think that we shall do a little bit more of this auditing, of all hands looking on and finding out how we can help the fellow be a better auditor. Okay?