Standard Procedure Chart (500926)
Date: 26 September 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Now all this brings you more or less up to date on the latest developments so far as Standard Procedure is concerned. Standard Procedure is something that can stand a lot of review. You all have these charts.
In the first place, we have Step One: Take an inventory. I ran a case once for eighteen hours (my ears are red; it’s not so much the number of hours, because you are sure to run much more than eighteen hours, but this other) and I was contacting somatics and I couldn’t understand why nothing would lift. I was getting a little bit upset. I said, “Did you ever take any drugs?” Auditing anybody who is under sedation is bad. With phenobarbital or the drugs used in narcohypnosis, the engrams will stay restimulated. So, that is one of the things that can happen to you. This case was dragging along, and I didn’t know what to do. Then an auditor came along. This is the one time he got me, and I tell the story on myself quickly. He ran her a few minutes and then he asked her, “Have you ever spoken any other language but English?” She finally said she had spoken nothing but Slovakian until thirteen. Of course no engram would lift. You have to run the engram in Slovakian or whatever language it was put in with. She did a very nice job of getting released in an additional fifteen hours just because of that one point. When she got the phrase in Slovakian, the engram could reduce. So, ask your preclear if anybody in his life ever spoke a foreign language about him. One preclear had Russian, French, Polish, Spanish, Italian—thirteen languages in his prenatal bank. He spoke none of them himself and in addition to this, he didn’t have sonic.
Taking the inventory is the beginning. You do want to establish affinity with him. Now, it is very, very bad to get transferences going and to keep it going and so on. But in Dianetics after seventy-five hours a guy comes to the point where he doesn’t need you anymore. So transference is not too much of a problem here.
In taking the inventory you seem to him to be interested in him. He starts telling you about himself. You are already starting Straightwire. Ask little basic questions. You want to know whether he has ever been treated by any other therapy. You want to know it because you may have to cope with a little indoctrination. You want to know what you are going to come up against.
Now, you can upset a psychoanalytical release rather rapidly. I will tell you that if you have somebody who managed to have his ulcers cured by psychoanalysis you can expect a recurrence in a case at first. In running the psychoanalysis, back will come the ulcer pains. In the case I have in mind, this took quite a bit out of him because it took five years to cure those ulcers. In spite of this he was able to suffer it through and eventually they left and for good.
Any old therapy can break up rather quickly because you are going down for the cause behind the manifestation. People going into Dianetics should understand some of these steps.
Now, dramatizations: You want to know how this man dramatizes. We take him back to a time he was bawling somebody out. This is the way we pick up control circuits in a case. The favorite dramatizations are those of people around him. You can pick up repeater phrases from these dramatizations. Finding out all the dramatizations, running them and using the content of them. Knowing he is dramatizing an engram, you know he will be using the exact words of the engram, whether mother’s, father s or grandfather s and the chances of finding the exact wording in a basic engram this way—very, very good.
Going on to the next points: You are interested in nitrous oxide, because what this does to a man shouldn’t happen to a man! It locks the reactive engram bank. If you touch this nitrous oxide incident, if he is not stuck in it, and you touch it, you are liable to freeze him. You want to know where these incidents are so you can avoid them.
Another thing which does this is an electric shock. This bunches things up. All sorts of things can be in an electric shock. One auditor had a sister in an insane asylum and this auditor back East went into his sister’s case and he found that everything in the lower engrams had been pulled into the shock. Childhood shock has the same effect as a therapeutic electric shock. Run them out and you will find data there. Next, make a list of the people who have died or gone away in this person’s life. Then ask him, “What do you worry about?” “Oh, I don’t worry.” “Do you like your father?” “No.” “Do you like your mother?” “I like her very much.” Look for some allies; a child is going to get love someplace. And allies get old and die and all kinds of things happen to allies. The most vital allies will be so thoroughly occluded, sometimes you might find them unexpectedly.
Ask the preclear, “Who was your favorite aunt?” “I guess Aunt Grace.” “What about Aunt Grace?” “Well, I haven’t seen her in the last few years.” “No?” “Well, around the time she died, it was three years ago last June, I think. Let’s see.” This isn’t right, so you know you are working with a childhood ally and there will be a charge on this ally.
Sometimes you run a person back to a funeral and it is all blank. It’s a cinch there is an ally.
It is very vital that you get a long list of such people. You get data and you make a list of it. Have a case book for every preclear. You get the data and you make a list of it. If you change cases, another auditor can find what you did if you have the data in a book. Particularly write down allies, and when you get a grief charge off one, mark it on the inventory, i.e., grandmother discharged. Mark them off. Cut down the allies and you have a simple method of keeping tally.
Allies can get lost, can erase. Suppose a case doesn’t seem to be operating right, branches off. You are sitting right on top of a death. This undischarged grief can lie all the way down the bank and cloud up everything.
Step Two. If nothing is happening in the case, go to Step Three. You do that, too, if the case doesn’t open.
The reason the chart is organized this way is so as never to leave you with nothing to do. With anything you run into along the line, you have something you can do about it. Start over again.
Now we come to a very, very serious question: “How do you put the preclear in reverie?” I have received telephone calls from far away Florida, “I am not having any success in putting my wife into reverie.” When we used numbers and counted, somebody could say, “Reverie is like hypnosis.” But you don’t want your subject in trance. Dr. Sloan made an investigation to find out if running under hypnosis was easier and better than running by reverie. Running on the time track in deep trance or light or medium was in each case far more difficult and far less effective than when the person was wide-awake. Hypnosis is less efficacious than reverie. If they won’t run on the time track when wide-awake, the reason is right there ready to be picked up. You do something else and you will find out that they do not work as easily.
You need the attention units to get down the time track. Benzedrine, caffeine, anything to wake him up will help him go down the time track. You are trying to wake a person up every place he has ever been asleep in his whole life.
The more closely you approximate a kind of sleep with a preclear, you may apparently release an engram and yet when he wakes up it will be in full restimulation.
Now, listen: “Close your eyes. Open your eyes.” That is reverie. That’s all.
Sometimes you will notice you get a tremble on the eyelids. This means the preclear has deepened his sense of sleep and has left some of his attention units somewhere. That is a very early stage of hypnosis. Be careful of such a patient.
Next you are going to install a canceller. Don’t read it out of the book. A lady asked me if she couldn’t demonstrate a new technique and she asked me to lie down and she would show it to me. I said no and I looked around for another guinea pig. She picked up my book, turned it to a page and read me the canceller. It sent me down the time track to when I was writing the stuff, typing at my desk.
Give a canceller with the sense of it but not with the exact words in the book. The exact words are not important. People sometimes have very unique cancellers, but the word cancelled is enough. “Anything I say to you while you are lying on the couch will be cancelled when I say ‘cancelled.’” Toward the end of the session, bring the person up to present and then give him the canceller. Give him the word, “Cancelled.” I heard of this canceller being put in: “Anytime that you hear the word ‘abracadabra,’ everything that I have said to you will disappear.” Of course, it all disappeared.
All right. Now the next thing: find out if he is moving on the track. Now, repeater technique has a use, but that is not the use. What you do is, you find out if he is moving. See if he can eat that very good dinner last week. Send him back to when he was singing or riding a bicycle.
Sometimes he won’t be able to pick the incident up. Run it four or five times and he will begin to pick up the data. It becomes more available, more alive, as you run it through. The somatic strip goes there all right, the file clerk has accurately selected the incident. People fail to get good results sometimes because they don’t believe this phenomenon. This person may be hung on the time track for a moment. If an auditor doesn’t count on the file clerk and doubts it, the first thing he knows, his preclear will have engrams restimulated. If they don’t make it easy for the person to go to the instant, it is because they don’t have faith in this thing. And that is where faith enters into Dianetics. You can disbelieve almost anything else, but don’t distrust the file clerk. This is a form of Auditor Code break. You are working very smoothly with the file clerk, say, and all of a sudden you distrust him. The file clerk will give the incident and the somatic strip will perhaps hover there. Then the auditor may say, “I just can’t reach any engrams.” One day a medical doctor said to me, “I never had a somatic.” So with the file clerk in present time I sent the somatic strip to the beginning of his tonsillectomy and I said to run it at standard time speed. The somatic turned on. The doctor held his stop watch and checked each somatic. The tonsillectomy went on for eighteen, nineteen, twenty minutes, twenty-five, thirty minutes, forty minutes. Then “Come to present time.” (The engram had not been restimulated; this was just an experiment.) The doctor running the somatic said, “Nineteen minutes before he got the adenoids; he was slow!” You command the somatic strip; you ask for the cooperation of the file clerk. Give only one order. When it is carried out, go to something else.
Now, I hope you have followed me that far. You tell the file clerk to give the incident. “Give us a pleasure incident at five years of age.” “The somatic strip go to the beginning and run it.” Running these pleasure moments is a necessary step and you can actually tone up the perceptics this way. You want the case to play itself Don’t fool around; get control circuits out. You can say to a person, “The file clerk will give the engram to resolve the case; the somatic strip go to the beginning of the engram. When I count from one to five the first phrase in the engram will flash to your mind. One-two-three-four-five.” (snap) Go over the first phrase three or four times. This helps it settle there. Now he’s at the beginning of the engram and you send him on through, reducing all bouncers and so forth.
The only time the file clerk doesn’t work is when you start dictating to him. So you say, “The file clerk will give us the engram necessary to resolve the case” and so on.
Run it out. It works very smoothly and very easily. The file clerk is a very savvy guy. You work with the file clerk.
Sometimes, very early in the case, he may give birth. If he does, it can be erased. You work with the file clerk; you command the somatic strip. That is the way you work. You know the somatic strip goes where you tell it when you tell it to go.
I know I am going rather rapidly, but all the things which I have talked about and which I have mentioned earlier I am going to demonstrate now, as a matter of procedure.
Straightwire is the process used when the preclear is wide-awake. Inventory is taken in the same way. Straightwire, actual memory. Straight-wire is used at the beginning of a case. After you have entered a case, there is no reason to use it if the preclear is in good running order.
Straightwire is actually an old technique and it lay unused until we had to reach control circuitry. We had to have some method of reaching control circuits. An easy way of finding out was through dramatizations having control statements.
Now, our target is, one, to discharge painful emotion, and two, to reach the basic area engrams. We want to get unconsciousness off the beginning of a case in order to begin erasure. But it is very important that the case be moving and as far as possible with all the attention units in full play. So get painful emotion off first. Sometimes by tacit consent, one can avoid painful emotion. But it is very important that painful emotion be picked up. Just start talking and ordinarily, before they are realizing it, they are moving down the track. (FOR ACCESSIBLE CASES) STEP ONE: STARTING THE CASE (After this, go to Step Two) In: starting the case, the following information should be obtained: 1.
Name, age, height, weight, foreign language, etc. 2.
If hypnotized, psychoanalyzed, shock therapy, etc. 3.
Psychosis, neurosis, dramatizations, psychosomatic illnesses, etc. 4.
Operations, illnesses, accidents, electric shocks, nitrous oxide. 5.
Loss of allies: parents, grandparents, spouse, children, relatives, etc. 6.
Early environment: perceptics, occluded people, etc.
STEP TWO: OPENING THE CASE AND RUNNING ENGRAMS (If the case wont open or bogs down, go on to Step Three) (A) OPENING THE CASE 1.
Put preclear in reverie, check perceptics and see if moving on track. 2.
Run pleasure incidents to tune up perceptics, strengthen sense of reality and get preclear in own valence. 3.
Try for painful emotion discharges. 4.
If file clerk and somatic strip indicate a stuck case, try all prescribed methods to free on track; failing, go to Step Three. 5.
Try for basic area engrams; failing, go to Step Three. (B) RUNNING ENGRAMS 1.
Direct the somatic strip, work with the file clerk, reduce all engrams (or their basics) contacted. Compute at all times, detect and deintensify all denyers, bouncers, call-backs, holders, groupers, etc. 2.
Start in basic area and proceed to present time, erasing all engrams on the way. Keep at it until you have a Release or a Clear. 3.
If case bogs down, check for poor auditing and detrimental environment and remedy their effects. If case is still bogged down, go to Step Three.
STEP THREE: REMOVING DEMON CIRCUIT AND VALENCE COMMANDS (After this, go back to Step Two) 1.
Put preclear on straight line memory and look for demon circuit and valence commands in memories of parents, possible allies, etc. 2.
Put preclear in reverie and run the dramatizations and other locks necessary to establish the exact demon circuit or valence command. 3.
After careful computation use repeater technique to reach and reduce the ear- liest engrams containing this command. 4.
Try for painful emotion discharges on moments of grief, loss, etc. 5.
Return to Step Two.