Straightwire (500817)

Date: 17 August 1950

Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard

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This technique is what we have been calling Straightwire. Just to make it different from other things we have been calling this thing Straightwire, and if you are unhappy with that word, call it something else. Its original name was straight line memory, which means to say that one is busy remembering, rather than returning.

Now, the reason we call it Straightwire is because it is the “I” going straight through to the standard banks; and we are not, however, doing anything even remotely resembling free association. I want to say at this time that if anything annoys the professional auditors, it’s finding people doing free association when they are supposed to be doing a Straight-wire. That isn’t because they have any antagonism to free association but because they have seen in the past dozens and dozens of people wasting hours, hours, hours of time.

So, what I am telling you this morning is a precision technique. It has no relationship to any past system of remembering, although you are using a straight memory to perform it. The difference is, in this technique, that the auditor specifically directs it. The auditor is doing the thinking across the gaps where the preclear cannot think. And this is a lot different than sitting in a chair and looking at somebody on a couch and letting them wander. You let your preclear wander in Straightwire and you have lost the whole subject, the whole plan—as you have lost all of its effectiveness. It’s very important to understand this distinction. Once you understand this distinction, you can do this particular point of process very easily. And I think you are going to find this enormously useful.

This particular skill is the auditor’s show technique. It’s his double shuffle off to Buffalo, you might say—the thing he really puts in the act that makes everybody sit up and blink. And now, you can’t make anybody sit up and blink with this unless you know very well what you are doing. So you are not asking a person to use his memory, although you say you are asking him to use his memory. You are thinking across the gaps for him. You are actually doing a telephone lineman’s job. You are stringing wire from “I” to the standard memory banks and hooking it up in this technique; the auditor looks very, very clever both to the preclear and to the audience, I have a body of students who didn’t particularly understand—you know, very early—the precise nature of this thing, sit there and say, “I don’t think I could ever do that,” “Why not?” “Because you have to think too fast. We watch you and the pro auditors around here do this and I don’t know how you learned to think that fast, but it’s just remarkable,” And they get terrible inferiority complexes about this. That’s why at this moment I am making it as clear as I can to you. No amount of fast thinking goes into this. What we are putting into process here is something that’s on a very precise equation and we never permit ourselves to go off that equation. We never permit ourselves to stray. We appear to our observers and to the preclear to be very, very clever, because it’s just so miraculous the sudden results that you sometimes get from this. And it’s so astonishing that you knew right there, you knew this person’s grandmother must have been dead and so on. You have been psychic.

It’s a good show but you don’t have to be very clever to do it. But you do have to pay attention to its basic fundamentals and never let it deteriorate into casual conversation. Never let it deteriorate into reminiscing on the part of the preclear, because somebody can sit there and talk to you about fishing trips for hours. He can talk to you about what he thought somebody might have thought because they said, and he guessed, and he is not sure but that’s fine, and he had a Buick car once. And you can sit there for hours listening to him, and when you get through with the thing you will have—maybe he feels fine. He’s talked to you. He’s talked to somebody. Well, people feel that fine every time they go to a party. When they finish with the party, if they don’t have too bad a hangover or something of the sort, they feel fine because they talked to people.

Well, communication all by itself then is a sort of therapy. The Catholic confession is a more positive type of therapy. Free association and psychoanalysis in general is an effective type of therapy. It has as an ingredient, there, the establishment of communication with another human being. The next thing is that it sought to go through and ransack a persons hidden memories, and it unfortunately specified the wrong things to remember in some cases, so they slowed down their technique so it takes two or three years sometimes to completely psychoanalyze a person. Well, we haven’t got two or three years to spend, so we speeded this thing up.

The original derivation of this thing was actually psychoanalysis. Here one was confronted with an astonishing fact. That a young man could go in and sit down and talk to somebody for sometimes two hours, sometimes two weeks, sometimes two months or two years and at the end of this time evidently be better, but there wasn’t any adequate explanation as far as I was concerned as to why he felt better. I kept asking psychoanalysts why they suddenly achieved these results. And they returned to me many various answers, quite varied; and it was quite obvious that they were not hitting a dead center.

They were doing a sort of a blind shot in that direction without much spotter technique and they were getting it, but after they had gotten it they weren’t too sure what they had gotten. And I picked up people from time to time who had been put into a manic stage by psychoanalysts. Well, that’s very dangerous. A person’s supposed to remember things and then somebody triggers a manic—that is, “You are so powerful; you feel so strong; you are so good today,” and all of a sudden the fellow goes around—oh, he is feeling fine and he will tell you frankly, “Psychoanalysis is a wonderful thing.” He may even go into a euphoric state and that’s very frightening even to an analyst. He feels too good. He is too upstanding.

One gentleman that I was working contacted a manic down in the basic area. His mother had tried to abort him because he was illegal—it said in the Ohio State laws—and so here he was, well on his way, and his mama decided to get rid of him and save her face at the church. And she used a very strong solution which almost killed her. And Grandma picked her up off the floor after she had fallen downstairs—this is really a complicated engram.

We couldn’t get this fellow to return. One of the reasons why was that people kept saying in this particular engram, “She fell downstairs.” Now here she is downstairs. “We will have to take her upstairs again and keep her here for a while.” And here he was at the top of his time track and then at the bottom of his time track. But he had been in the rear portion, that is, the beginning portion of the engram, which was a very sad thing. “Oh, I don’t know what I am going to do; life is horrible” and so forth. But right at the end of this, Grandma gives a lecture on the subject: “This baby might grow up to be a fine upstanding young man or woman and a credit to the world.” Oh, it’s really flag-waving.

We triggered this manic. We got him out of the front end of the engram into the rear of the engram by accidentally kicking the thing; we moved his position on it.

He had been wearing glasses—well, I wouldn’t exaggerate; they weren’t that thick. But, they were pretty thick. And he was considerably hunched—fine, upstanding young man, you see—and he almost broke his spine walking around like this. “Oh, I feel good. Dianetics is wonderful,” he was saying. “Absolutely wonderful. You see, I can’t wear my glasses.” And he couldn’t. His eyes had gone completely back to normal. He was a fine, upstanding young man, and a fine, upstanding young man does not wear glasses. And the muscles alongside his spine were just snapped taut. They were aching. Well, of course, if we had let this fellow cruise—in view of the fact that he had Dianetic processing—if we had just let him be gone for a few days, he would have probably gone back to the rear end of that engram where he started. But, possibly, he could have hung up on this point too.

In psychoanalysis they weren’t using a therapy discharge line which you see in your books. They use a different type of line. They get a straight memory and sometimes by restimulation, which is an entirely different process than returning a person.

Well, a manic is quite often not as interesting as this fine upstanding young man, because it might be a nymphomaniac. So we don’t turn on manics, and if we turn them on, we turn them off in a hurry by finding them and triggering them out.

The point here is that inspecting the field of psychoanalysis it came to view that if this could be done occasionally there must exist some sort of push-button arrangement in the mind, and if you could push the proper buttons, you could get a precise result. And I tried and tried to find from analysis what were these push buttons; I came to the conclusion that they weren’t sure because it took such a varied length to do something about it. However, the work—by the way, the past art, prior art in psychoanalysis was very useful—started adding this thing up; already knew about engrams, knew about locks and so on. I found out that straight memory has a new quality which I had never suspected. I decried it unnecessarily. It was a validating thing.

If something is gotten by Straightwire from the standard banks, the process of picking it up from standard banks to present time “I” is a validating process. Somewhere along this line there’s a monitor unit and it says, “This is real” When it goes back on real straight memory there isn’t a falsity to it. Now, here’s “I” and the front part of the mind; here’s the reactive banks. Here’s the standard; I say “reactive,” reactive circuits—if we can get—this is data which happened at the age of four years; we can get a Straight wire from here down to here and back again. That says, “That really happened at four years of age; that’s real.” Normally these things sort of seep up to the surface by various networks—not too straight. Somebody said, “Yes, I lived . . .” It goes like this. Somebody on the street, you ask them, “Where were you born?” And he says, “Well, I was born in Columbia, South Carolina.” And you say, “Well, do you remember being born in Columbia, SC?” “Well, that’s silly; of course I don’t remember.” “Well, how do you know?” “Well, it’s on my birth certificate.” Triumphant. This circuit is going somewhat like this. That’s not Straightwire, but if we could make “I” remember his being born—he doesn’t return back down the track as “I,” or some portion return down the track and reexperience being born. He will return—if you want to invalidate the fact that he was really born . . . and you see none of us, before we have really been back through it and granted the actuality of it, really knew if we had been born or not. We had been told so; it was a fact which we took on faith—which was, by the way, rather invalidating to our affinity and communication and so forth. Everybody knew nobody could know he was born.

Actually, by working hard on somebody you could probably kick him back to the time he was born. We have kicked people back to four or five months. Once a memory comes back like that, it s not to be invalidated. That’s there.

You will often find people returned down the track, running off an engram, getting visio and everything else—not very strong though— getting maybe impressions of sound, who aren’t sure that what they’re running happened. They’re not sure this is real. Well, they’re lying there on the couch, their eyes closed and they aren’t very well oriented as to now, so they have slight wonder about it, whether or not it really is happening, because they have nothing to compare it to; it doesn’t quite compare. Well, they will run the thing for the auditor’s sake. Well, sometimes when you run an experience like that, you bring the person back up to present time, make him open his eyes and sit up and say, “You can remember this experience now. See if you can’t. You can remember this experience.” And he will grind on it and know that couldn’t have been in that house, “It must have been in some other house; and I don’t think it was Dr, Dinwittie, because my mother told me distinctly that it was Dr, Jones.” And he puzzles over this thing and puzzles over this thing and sometimes you will get a straight—all of a sudden, “Yes, yes, sure, sure, I remember that,” All of a sudden he feels better. He feels better because he has validated the fact that he used to be alive and that there were people around and he has maybe been told a lot of things about this incident. Now he knows whether they’re true or false and he can separate them out.

In other words, in his computer units you might say that he has a lot of data related to this experience which was taken conditionally and it’s still standing there. It’s not in good solid slots with nice labels on it—”That’s true, false, true, false, yes, no, yes, no,” That isn’t the condition his mind is in around this area. His mind is in this condition: “Well, I think—at that time —I did go—they said—and it’s my opinion that, history books to the contrary . . .” He has all of this data sort of jumbled up and as Don Rogers calls it, he has a full bullpen.

Now, Don is speaking of electronics where the memory, as it comes fully forward to the computer, comes up and waits (has a waiting area). That’s a bullpen.

Well of course, only so much data will wait for recomputation. The human mind’s pretty good. It will hold a couple of million facts waiting fairly easily. But don’t start getting it up, oh, a couple of billion, because a man isn’t comfortable with a bullpen.

One chap I knew had every quip, every joke he had ever read or heard parked in his bullpen. You would tell him a joke and he would look at you seriously and you could see him thinking about it and then it would occur to him as a learned pattern that he had better laugh. So he would say, “Ha, ha, ha,” looking at you carefully, “Yes, I am supposed to laugh here.” And then he would go off and think it over carefully.

Some people, by the way, carry a joke around—here’s something that will bring it close to you—carry a joke around for a few days or maybe a few years, thinking about this thing, wondering what the point was. It may be a story which runs something like a newsboy on the streets of Boston and a fellow walks along and he says—the fellow says, “Have you got the New York Times?” And the little boy looks at him, you know, and he kinda smiles and he says, “No, but I have got the Boston Globe.” And you tell this joke, and you drop it there and you say, “By the way, did I tell you about my wife going down to the country?” And the fellow—there are a whole series of these stories. One of them in these lines, “Will peach pie do?” and if you say it very alertly, there might possibly be some sort of datum in the man’s bullpen, and it can’t be resolved. He hasn’t enough data to resolve this thing and the mind operates more or less on algebra: no greater than yes, yes greater than no. And he can’t get a no greater than yes, yes greater than no in this thing. There’s no data to relate to this. He doesn’t know whether it was funny or not or whether he was just going crazy and so there the data waits for a period. Well, of course, it might not wait in full sight, but that bull-pen’s very deep; very, very deep. And you start going down in the barrel with Straightwire and you will find jokes back to the age of five or six years of age or something the teacher said about some misconception.

Oh, this was an historic misconception. A little girl was two years of age and her father took her down to the seashore right down here and—very foggy night here, and there was a spit of land out into the water, and here was a tower and it had a light swinging around. It was foggy and so she wanted to know what that was and the father said, “Yes, that’s Mr. Johnson’s place out there.” What she was asking about first was the spit of land running out into the water. She couldn’t quite make it out. That was Mr. Johnson’s place. Well, she took in this datum and he took in this datum. So she looked at the land and here was a giant about one hundred twenty-five feet tall. And he was looking this way and he would say, “Moa” Look this way and he would say, “Moa” And a very angry eye—and the fog shadows behind the beam were evidently flash-shining through the dark. She could see these things as sort of hair streaming out and she looked this thing over carefully and her father left her not too long afterwards, but she was sick for quite some time. At nights she would hear strange moaning sounds. She decided that there are lots of Mr. Johnsons in the world, because they might be walking around, but that was all right. They were probably friends of her father—she hoped. And she had this datum awaiting there in the bullpen. And of course it was an unresolved problem. She wasn’t quite sure that it was Mr. Johnson, because actually Mr. Johnson didn’t . . .

Now, later on in life other data comes up that doesn’t compare with this data. This data doesn’t compare with anything. It doesn’t fit. It’s in the bullpen. By straight memory this incident was contacted and a considerable fear of the dark was broken out. Because it was the dark in which one occasionally heard a moan; it was the darkness setup. She had a lot of engrams down below this, so that not enough attention units could actually pour through this area and it was parked data which had worried her and she was now about twenty-two years of age, and she was still occasionally worried about seashores and so forth because there must be giants in the world. But there weren’t any giants in the world, and “Would peach pie do?” “Boston Globe?” Well, on Straightwire you are doing this thing. You are just recomparing data against the real present and you not only recompare it against the real present but you also compare it with all the incidents subsequent to the moment when the datum was acquired. So you have all of this data now and this data compares out. “I”—a person is more in present time, because what is the bullpen doing? Every time one of these datums went to the bullpen, an attention unit had to be following it around in there all the time. A man is forty years of age, he received the data at five years. That’s thirty-five years one attention unit has been following that around. So you see that’s an important thing to get the attention unit back. You can get them back in a terrific rush by Straight-wire. I hope you have some idea about what you are doing now.

You will find almost anybody who has done a lot of living has got a lot of engrams, has got an awful lot of black spots. Now, when you get to his data in the bullpen you start to get occluded areas, caught attention units in that area, or more or less absorbed in tracking around Mr. Johnsons place and so forth, this and that. This is on an educational level, this will be. It is of a vast importance in education, by the way, to have each data learned by the individual compared to the real world. That’s very important. Its importance is such that the fact it has been mainly overlooked is not just strange, it’s . . .

A lot of people have commented on the fact that some persons get overeducated. They just don’t seem to be able to use their information. I had a young fellow aboard one time in the navy. He had been through his ninety-day course and the poor guy had had the ninety-day course pulled up on top of a technical education which had lasted for four years and before that he had been in a military school and his—the time he had had to look at the real world was practically zero. So here he was and his attention units all the way back along the track were busy tagging around the fact “they say the stress and strain of concrete is so-and-so.” This has nothing to do with concrete sidewalks. This is out of a textbook and it’s unrelated. Data has no value unless it’s related and the most reliable thing you can relate data to is the real world. So this boy had a very bad case of, well, bad mental jam-up.

His whole attitude then toward the ship was quite remarkable. He had nothing to do with anything he had ever studied. He was suddenly placed aboard; he had a stripe on his sleeve; he was supposed to be here, function as an Officer of the Deck and as Gunnery Officer. Here all of a sudden—here we get the other part of this—he had to execute his knowledge. Unless knowledge and computations become executed when ready, they start damming up. So this fellow thinks, “Let’s see. The best thing to do today is to go down to the secondhand dealers and get that radiator cap for my hot rod. Uh-huh.” So he says, “Now, I have got to do that today.” And something is saying, “Nope.” It stops the inertia of his execution.

Now, tomorrow he says, “The best thing for me to do is get down in the basement and clean out all this stuff and get rid of all these old newspapers.” And he is all set to do the thing and something goes and he can’t do that. You might say he is traveling at a certain velocity in life as pertains to executing those things which he has solved. He solves them computationally but then he has to put the computation into execution, so he can think it up all right but he starts to put it into execution, he gets stuck.

Well, the mind is rigged up to a normal amount of stopping; but don’t stop a little child, for instance, if he has something he wants to do. The first thing you know you have got all of his attention units in the bullpen, because every one of those conclusions which wants to be executed is still in the bullpen. So the engineer is told how to build bridges, fly kites and so on and so forth. And he is getting attention units, attention units; no execution, no release. The inertia of his application is stalled down slower and slower and slower. And it can actually get to the point where it can just start idling like the rest of the attention units in the bullpen. And that’s on an educational level, a conscious level, an analytical level. Has nothing to do with engrams; that’s the way his mind operates.

A fellow, however, who will do this would have had to have had quite a few engrams, because the impetus to put things into execution is such, and so strong; the analytical mind’s necessity to overcome obstacles toward any one goal is such that you can’t stop an individual aside from chaining him down completely and pounding the pins in the floor. He is going to execute what he thinks up or he is going to resolve what’s keeping him from executing what he thinks up. If he’s got engrams he can be slowed down to a point where he won’t. Everything goes into the bullpen. A Straightwire—we start knocking things out of the bullpen.

You could take this person now who has been educated, you might say, on this system “train the standard memory banks to remember.” That’s his system of education that’s being used. You train the standard memory banks to remember, only it’s perfect and it needs no training in memory. And you neglect the execution side of the brain and you minimize the amount of exercise which the brain itself must have and you get this sort of condition. You can take this man now and you can sit him down and put him through the whole curriculum and he has maybe had a couple of years out in the world away from studies and so on. You can sit him down right at that point and start him remembering. He starts comparing the fact that the tension factor, testing concrete, is so-and-so. You can use that. That’s the real world all of a sudden. The unreality of this related data becomes the reality of having actually existed in the real world. You don’t even have to make him compare very much until all of a sudden the inertia picks up, the force starts going through and it’s like opening a small hole in a dam. The rest of it—the hole’s a little bigger, a little bigger, logarithmically, until whoom, the whole dam goes. You can do this with Straightwire. You can straighten out a person’s education, you can make people happy, very good, without touching engrams. That’s on an educational level. That’s just his brain working.

Male voice: Can you get rid of engrams that way?

No, it has nothing to do with engrams. I am just giving you an analytical mind lineup. It has to do with engrams to this degree, as I said before. The mind so powerfully does this that it takes such a powerful thing as an engram to slow it down where it won’t do this.

Now, you are going to see somebody who has been cleared— technical definition of “Clear” is somebody who has no engrams left—and you are going to see this person have to walk around for months before he’s got all of his data rerelated because the amount of data he has in the brain is just fantastic, the number of data—and he will play this sort of a trick. He will go around all of a sudden, he will see an ad about a railroad train and there was a whole string of data there sort of bullpenned about railroad trains, and he will all of a sudden think of this. Ha! Very interesting! Blows a little lock here, blows a little lock here, someplace else. He goes around doing this continually. It’s an astonishing thing. And the world really settles. All right. That is a primary step of Straightwire.

Now, here’s the time track and here’s conception. Let’s draw this time track the way it looks to the reactive mind, not to the analytical mind.

The way it looks to the analytical mind, here’s conception, here’s birth, here’s present time to a person about twenty years of age. Here’s the way it looks to the reactive mind: here’s conception, here’s birth, here’s present time. This area’s really full The child is quite vulnerable apparently, and there are lots of engrams appear up in here. Oh, dozens, dozens. But nothing like that down here. This is really a bundle and so we have a few minor engrams neatly filed down here in the basic area. They’re all straightened out and these engrams down there get reactivated from time to time. And a person gets a chronic somatic and he gets all sorts of things and quite often comes up to present time and these things start getting material up here from this life and he starts forming locks.

Now, if we look at this time track the way I first drew it—conception, birth, present time—that’s about the way the life span will go chronologically. You start to get in here, locks on these engrams, you get another lock here, another lock here, another lock here and there was another lock here. And then the fellow gets married or does something desperate, and you get a few locks. And then he goes along for a little while and these—his life, by the way, followed about this curve. And then he would hit this place along here someplace, and then he gets some more locks here. Has some trouble with his job or business and he pitched off down to here. Maybe he will carry forward; maybe he will get a divorce and marry somebody that he really likes, he thinks. Then it goes up here for a while and then all of a sudden he finds out that she wasn’t so good, and it goes off like this. In other words, a normal life span. All these are experiences of your—they’re not engrams. They’re locks.

The definition of an engram is a moment which contains pain and unconsciousness. That’s an engram; pain, unconsciousness of perceptics is the total concept. Therefore—and then we have a lock. It is just a restimulation of that moment of pain and unconsciousness; even if the unconsciousness is a microsecond long, it’s still a moment of unconsciousness.

A person bangs his finger. He says, “I couldn’t have possibly been unconscious at any moment during the time the finger was banged.” He couldn’t have been unconscious and all of a sudden he picks up the fact that there were two words missing out of the sentence he was listening to when he banged his finger. There is that little instant of unconsciousness sitting there on the thing. Actually, it’s a very tiny engram. Its power to do very much to a person is slight. An engram is pretty tough. A real honest-to-goodness engram contains all sorts of stress and strains. And it’s something like being run over by a railroad train and then have your wife come up and say, “I have just run away with another man.” That would be a fair one. Nevertheless, they’re akin by definition, that one is a slight degree of another.

Now, these engrams down in the basic area here—of course, this is a pretty clear basic area. These, as a person lives his life, are reactivated at first and then afterwards can be restimulated. Now, in this show, reactivation of an engram is of course the key-in. This can happen very easily, actually. But an initial reactivation of an engram has to contain with it a bit of weariness and similar perceptics to the engram. But it’s a moment that’s a conscious moment in life. That is, relatively conscious. That is, if any person has engrams, he has a little—a bit of anaten already, chronic, and the next step up is . . . 1 hate to have people ask me, “Does a person have to be slightly unconscious or very tired to have an engram keyed in?” And they assume, when they ask such a thing, that a person when he is not very tired has no anaten present. That is not true. We are talking about the number of attention units available to a normal. He has a lot of anaten present if he has any engrams in the bank. So he comes up here to this time when he fell off his bicycle and he hurt himself. Pretty bad. And we have a different type. He hurt himself this time, but what was said to him immediately afterwards was a very similar conversation to an engram, let’s say, like here, when he was hurt. Now we have something. We have an engramic lock. An engramic lock contains pain and unconsciousness in its own right, but is so similar to an earlier engram that it merely compounds the charge. So that we would have a chain here on the top time track. This could be almost any kind of a chain. The blow chain, a minor blow, if he is hit here, the perceptics are so-and-so. It’s not because it’s a blow; it’s because the perceptics are similar and the personnel are usually somewhat similar. And he gets another blow up here, and another blow up here, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And these are all really engrams because they contain pain and unconsciousness, but they form a chain.

Now, I am quoting that to show you that we are not talking now about an engramic lock of any magnitude. To show you that an engramic lock—an engram sort of edges out to less and less pain and anaten to no pain and a little bit of anaten and becomes a lock, you see. In Dianetics we deal more in spectrums than in anything else. It’s a graduated scale. There’s a whole lot of unconsciousness—would be dead. I mean, that’s death. And up at the other end of the scale, we have a person with no unconsciousness, which would be full life. And as we go up the scale on the thing there is less and less death and more and more life. It works the same way with pain and unconsciousness, but up above the actual incident of physical pain we do get locks.

Now, I am emphasizing this because in Straightwire we pick up a light engramic lock as well as a lock, and in Straightwire all we are looking for is locks and light engramic locks. That’s all we are looking for. We are not looking for real engrams with big teeth in them. But a key-in is a very precise thing.

The engram has been floating somewhere off the bank. This one, lets say, had to do with somebody—it had to do with a person being hit in the head and screaming, “Get out, get out, get out,” and then a door slamming. And one night our aberree comes home and he hears his wife quarreling with her mother or something, and somebody says, “Get out, get out, get out,” and a door slams. And he doesn’t feel good about it; pretty bad. They had been quarreling all along and he’s never really had any reaction from their quarreling, but at this particular moment he felt bad. Well, he felt bad, all right.

Originally that “Get out, get out” and the door slam was himself being hit in the head. So it is dangerous to have people say, “Get out, get out,” and slamming a door. That forms, let’s say in this case, a key-in. That’s the first time this engram’s been activated. This is the jukebox machine, and the reactive mind reaching down into what it has considered nonpriority files with the comment “Look, it happened. And now it’s happened again. We’d better put this thing up, ready,” And it moves it up and puts it in a ready position. Now that thing can be restimulated. It can’t be restimulated until it’s keyed in.

The similarity to the incident must be very strong to have a key-in take place. There must be a similar personnel, something for a key-in, and such an incident has a tendency to sink out of sight, evidently. It is apparently lying here on the time track, but actually it isn’t. There’s a hole in the time track right there. And it’s really filing right down with that, right down to the lower area. So here we have incidents being keyed in.

They’re drifting down on top. You will find very often in running engrams that a person will start to run an engram and then say, “Oh, yes. Well, this—when I was twelve years old, I hurt my foot, too,” Don’t mistake it for a bouncer. It’s quite different. Don’t get excited about it. Because he is right there on the track where he belongs. He is not at twelve. He has just looked at this piece of information. He is recounting the thing and he just happened to lift his eyes off that much off the top of the engram and found that he, right over that, had hurt his foot at twelve years of age.

You will discover this as student auditors; this will interest you very much. The engram which you ran out of Bill may tomorrow be found in you. Now, this is nothing about which to get excited and you shouldn’t think you are having delusions if this happens. And your auditor would be actually missing a very important point if he didn’t know what I am going to tell you right now: that you have got a lock, you see, on an actual engram. And the engram which you ran out of Bill comes down and sits on your own engram, which is similar. You start down the track—mind you, you ran forty engrams, more or less, out of Bill up to this point and none of them stuck, but this one stuck; and you start to recount this thing and your auditor says, “Yes, yes. Well, go over it again. And you say, “Well, ‘I can’t stand it around here anymore, and . . .’ that’s funny, that’s Bills engram.” And the auditor should at that moment say, “Let’s go to the moment when the words ‘I can’t stand it anymore’ appear.” Or, he may change it a little bit. Your engram may be “I am not going to stand around here anymore,” in a similar circumstance. One lies immediately on top of an engram and that’s a beautiful way to find some of one’s own engrams, is to find out who else’s engram is stuck. It is a method by itself. Don’t upset yourself, however, if you find yourself running someone else’s engrams. But if you, as an auditor now, find an engram in a case and find the person saying, “This isn’t my engram,” as you are going to—if you don’t immediately look for his engram and get it right out since that was what you were trying to run, you are very remiss. Because you are standing right on that engram at that moment. It isn’t a case of moving him on the track. He is right there. He is right there on his own engram. It’s filed. Here’s the engram of his own and here’s the lock. Now, the engram that you are trying to run is clear down here, and the lock was received up here; but this lock just drifted down on the engram.

Here’s an engram with locks on it. It’s a bundle all of its own. Now, on Straightwire we can’t get this engram but we can go right down the line and get some of these restimulations, certainly. If we really want to make it effective, we can get that number one, which is the important one, which is the key-in. And if we can find the key-in point of the engram by Straightwire, the engram keys out, bang! And that engram, so far as its life is concerned, is a zero as an aberrative quantity in a person’s life at that moment. Of course, this engram can be reactivated later by a new key-in. But it doesn’t key in more easily or less easily. It has to have the same amount of stress and strain that keyed it in before, and that stress and strain might not be particularly major. But it might have required specific personnel, such as Mama and Papa, to really have keyed this thing in. Mama and Papa; he hasn’t seen them for years. You key this thing out. The chances of seeing Mama and Papa are slight.

You want to do a fast job of auditing somebody—20 to 30 percent of the time you can go down in that case—the key key-in of his whole case—and if you can find that key key-in, the one that worries him the most in his case, 20 to 30 percent of the time, my! he feels better. And it’s so spectacular that your own repute will go up quite markedly, and it gives one, I will admit, rather a tendency to say, “Oh well, it’s very easy when you know how, when you have practiced, you know.” It looks remarkable and it sounds fantastic. People who are listening to you who don’t know the intimate mechanics of this—and by the way, one also has to be practiced in this. It sounds miraculous that you can suddenly reach into a case and off goes Parkinson’s disease.

Oh, yes. Dr. Jacobson in New York City, who is a very fine man, very fine reputation, sees fifty to ninety patients a day, sort of on an assembly line basis—I think the nurses put the patients on an endless belt, you see. And they start to go by, and he only has a few moments with each.

Someone became acquainted with Dianetics and became acquainted with some of these data and took off on straight line memory. It was actually Doctor Jacobson using straight line memory that recalled it forcefully to my knowledge—or the attention of the Foundation— because he says, “You know, Dianetics is wonderful.” “What have you been doing with Dianetics?” thinking he was going into Standard Procedure—hoping so, anyway. And he says, “Well, the last three cases of Parkinsons disease I cured with it.” I said, “Hoo-hoo, wait a minute. Parkinson’s disease! How many patients are you working?” “Oh,” he said, “fifty to ninety a day.” It didn’t make sense.

Well, on an earlier conversation with me, we had talked about straight line memory. I had merely offered it up as a pseudo-psychoanalysis. So he, of course, picked it up and this was what he could use in his business. So we started teaching this, because we found out that psychoanalysis received it very happily and that doctors loved it. It made quite a show and people got better and better about it. And then some more techniques were developed. The next thing we knew, it was a diagnostic procedure. So it’s not only therapeutic, but it is a diagnostic procedure. It became part, and it leads the line, on diagnosis and Standard Procedure. It is the leader, our technique of Standard Procedure, and it is a technique which you can employ and which you should practice a great deal before you even start to run very much in the way of engrams. You can employ this very safely That’s why I am giving it to you now, since anybody certainly in this class can use this on anybody else, and anybody can feel very safe who’s worked on with this because it isn’t going to upset anybody and it may do a remarkable amount of good.

Now, the proposition—I will just repeat it briefly—is to get a person by straight memory to remember the lock, the key-in, that lock, and blow it, because it will go automatic just by remembering. It will nullify the engram on which it is lying, and a person will feel pretty good. And you can knock out these little locks. Sometimes you really haven’t knocked out the key one, but you have knocked out some of the later ones and its had a remarkable effect upon the health and outlook of your preclear. If you really get the key-in though, that’s hitting the jackpot; and if you are good at this, you can take a chronic somatic, an illness of a great magnitude sometimes, and whoosh! it’s gone. And, of course, this is magic.

Our subject here is not a very complex one. Undoubtedly a lot of people are going to try and make it so, but if you reach rather easily for this it will come very easily We have covered now the idea of a lock and how it files, and how we would like to get the key-in. If we could get a key-in on direct memory, Straightwire, we can get a key-out. In other words, we can clear a bullpen or clear the bullpen of its data, and the key-in acts like an engram itself In the beginning, the engram plus all its locks form a complete aberrative sequence. Almost any one of these locks has an aberrative effect. For instance, the locks append to the engram in this way. The engram says, “He is no good.” Then every time a forceful statement is made, let’s say there’s a bad experience with “He is no good” in it, that’s a key-in. Right here. The next one is merely maybe a conversational, “Well, you know Bill. He is no good.” The person doesn’t like to have “Bill is no good,” and he may say at this moment—he is adverse to people criticizing people—”He is this; he is that.” Actually, what he is talking about is the pain in his stomach. But here are the locks and here’s “Bill is no good.” Nevertheless, when he tries to reject the argument data by arguing about it, by saying it’s not so, he doesn’t have much luck, ordinarily.

The rejector mechanism is an automatic mechanism in the mind. A fact comes in, gets compared, accepted, filed, rejected, filed. And the data comes in on top of an engram, in the form of a lock, a person tries to reject it and can’t do it. Laughter, however, is a great rejector. And evidently if you want to get into laughter and study it, you will find out that it is evidently first and last an ejector mechanism. It rejects, you might say, but it’s trying to eject data out of, and does, if one can laugh.

Now, a whole community can listen to data about its aberrations if placed on a nondangerous category and they will laugh. They are ejecting this data back out again, laughing, and it’s amusing to them to do so. Sort of like the small boy playing with fire. He’s gotten burned even and he still likes to play with fire. And he will show that fire. And a human being works on the proposition “I will show that engram.” There is that mechanism in action here.

Well, here’s the key-in. Now, these locks form a key-in lock chain. This is not mentioned in the book. It’s very obvious, but it becomes very important in straight memory. Here’s your engram. Actually, here’s your engram and here’s an engramic lock, another moment of pain and unconsciousness similar to this one. Another engramic lock, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, various kinds of engramic locks. They’re all engrams though, and that makes a chain. And that chain is really out of sight. The contents of this chain. He can remember the beginning of the incident and the end of the incident but the center of the incident is gone because it’s never been filed in the standard banks.

Now, one can remember if he was run over by a train and remember that he was taken to a hospital, usually remembers it, by the way, on this, not straight line. But, he wouldn’t be able to tell you by straight line memory what the nurses looked like, what the doctors said. This is data filed out of sight.

Now, a lack of differentiation in matters of pain is the main fault of the reactive mind. So here’s this engram. You will understand we have a series of engramic locks based on this engram, which is the basic on this chain. Let’s say that this is the post part of an engram. This one might have been keyed in here and had two or three locks and then perhaps more locks from this one. But these two then got keyed in here. This is very complicated and it got keyed in here and then another lock and a whole flock of locks up here. And these other engrams more or less slept until you get clear up here, and then all of a sudden you get a big key-in of this one, this one, this one. And then you have got a whole chain restimulated. So we can take this one over here as a key-in and a series of locks on top of an engram. These all have similar subject matter. However, they have a great similarity. So by knocking out the first key-in of this material or an early key-in, it will even reach this key-in here, earlier; would reach this key-in here. We would knock out quite a bit of it. And the locks, as they come up the line, of course, are filed down like this on top of an engram. This would be by time sequence. If it were on a coal-bin principle, the locks, everything else, just dumped in there.

Now, these are holes on the time track. For this and other reasons you get lots of holes on the time track and this is occlusion. You want to hit one of these key-ins. If you hit one of these key-ins by straight memory, you fill up these holes on the time track, only you really fill them up now. And every one of these engrams, of course, seizes quite a few attention units. It doesn’t seize the attention units at the moment it’s received. The engram doesn’t. It just bundles up right there and it waits. Now, it can be keyed in ten minutes afterwards or ten years or fifty years; but the moment it keys in, it reaches out its big green paws and it pulls in these attention units. And those attention units are then clenched into the engrams and a person’s inability to think and function stems from a lack of attention units. So here we have an attention unit robber; every one of those locks on an engram chain seizes more attention units. And more and more and more and more attention units. They become frozen up. They get pulled into the original bundle. When you hit the key-in by straight memory, hit it sharp. It validates the fact it is the key-in, compares this to the real world, demonstrates to the person that it was not dangerous, that all of those attention units are walking around there looking for nothing. And all of a sudden the track goes back together again, bang! bang!

On this one subject—of course, a person can have enough engram chains to make several hundred subjects. But we can knock out a subject. An engram chain which, lets say, has led to sinusitis—we can get the key-in on sinusitis, why, we can knock out sinusitis—if we can get the key-in. Sinusitis might have originated at birth, but if we can get the birth key-in— sometimes, let’s say, if you come up here, you try to get this key-in to key out and it just won’t key out. Straight memory, we just can’t force it to do anything. We can even get a Straight wire recall on that lock and that lock and that lock. Nothing happens. That’s because we can’t shake the thing loose because we are not getting down to the key-in.

We have to go down to this key-in perhaps to shake it loose. It’s worth working for, but I wouldn’t try too desperately hard.

If you work on a subject five or six consecutive hours, fifteen-minute sessions, even little short sessions on one subject only, various things can happen, you see. The key-in might have been keyed in—let’s say his mother died when he was two years of age, and there might have been a terrific key-in prior to two years of age but his mother’s death occluded it. The only way you can get that out is to get Mother’s death. Mothers death would lay the key-in open.

That’s why 70 percent of the time you don’t turn off superchronic somatics with Straightwire. But Straightwire, whether it turns off the big ones or not, is a technique you have to know and have to use and is an enormously valuable weapon to use because you can straighten a person’s time track out with it. You can put all sorts of things in view. This is the setup, then, with which you are working.

Now let’s take the case of the aberree who—we are now talking about our preclear’s stepfather. His time track has, down here, a nice big engram. He had liked to dramatize this engram. It’s been keyed in. After it’s keyed in, he will dramatize; before an engram is keyed in it’s not dramatized because there are not any attention units to be utilized by the dramatization. We are talking about another channel now.

If we were tremendously interested in studying the behavior of man, dramatization and all of its facets would be of enormous interest to us. But as you go along you pick that up sort of automatically. You see people dramatizing, you know what they’re doing. There’s no sense of my wasting a lot of time on it because we are not studying man’s activities as phenomena. We are studying man’s activities from the light of doing something about them. You don’t have to know too much about dramatization until we get up to push buttons, and when I give you my talk on push buttons I will show you how to handle dramatizations.

Now, there’s his engram. And every time he dramatizes it—oh, of course, it’s not a key-in; it’s nothing very important. The fact that he dramatized it means that it was restimulated, but that he got to dramatize it meant that it didn’t form a lock. It will only form a lock when it stops. He starts to dramatize it and he can’t. Then it will form a lock. We will go into that later. It’s of no great importance even at this point, but we are interested in Stepfather because Stepfather has been in the environment of our preclear and this is Stepfather. All these locks saying, “You do what I tell you,” over and over and over again. “You do what I tell you. You have to do what I tell you. You have no choice but to do what I tell you.” That’s what we face in this case of a self-control circuitry so great that it dubs in. We are trying to find what it is.

Now, we may find it by Straightwire and key out just like that in a few cases, but by Straightwire we may find it and not reach deep enough in it. We may not get early enough to key it out. But we get early enough to get the data. When we get the data on it by Straightwire, then we put the person in reverie and take him back to the first engram. We have got the dramatization; we run the dramatization until the person has nicely picked up the lock, then we just shoot him to the first time it happened, which was usually—you go to the engram if you can find it that easily That’s how we do it, and that’s the diagnostic use of Straight-wire, We are trying to find out about this. What an aberree does once, he will do many times.

Now, that’s not a very deep sort of a lock but it’s something that is very interesting to you because you know that if he said, “You do what I tell you. You have to mind me,” the chances of his having said that in his lifetime just once are about ten billion to one. He has said it time after time after time after time, up to the time when somebody finally crushed the dramatization utterly and then the fellow sat around with ulcers. Of course, he couldn’t dramatize it. He had to have pain. Of course, we find the dramatization of this engram over and over and over. And who gets it by contagion? Here’s the boy, the child, “You do what I tell you,” over and over and over, making a control circuitry.

Now we are going to try and find out why this person has a self-control mechanism. We know he does have, because he has dub-in. We are going to try to find that out, so we come over here and we try to find out who was the most bombastic person or who was the most self-controlled. We start searching for this. But we are searching for an aberree who had a dramatization that led to this fact which we see in the preclear.

Now, that’s—don’t make that complicated. It’s very easy. What an aberree will do once, he will do many times. What a person believes erroneously or aberratively has been told and has been told so, probably, many times. And the source of this having believed it, having to believe it, is an engram which has been given to him, probably by the same person who afterwards told him many times the same thing. In other words, in the prenatal area Papa says, “You have got to do what I tell you.” But he says it to Mama and then the child’s born and the child then gets, “You have got to do what I tell you. You have got to do what I tell you.” So you see how far back that would go, clear back to prenatal area.

That’s where we have to go chasing down an engram. We merely want to key it out. A person will tell you his worry in approximately the same words as it was told to him, although he believes it to be his own idea. You walk up to the person saying, “What have you been worrying about?” “Well, I don’t think I will be able to get along much in life. You know, I have had a couple of rows lately with the boss. I don’t think I will be able to get along in life.” What would you do in straight memory?

Now, there are ways to jump this individual so that he will become very defensive about the whole thing. There are ways to talk to him so that he will begin to believe everything he says is out of an engram or a lock, and that would be a very, very villainous thing. So we are very adroit about our questioning. We start to ask him about the people who surrounded him when he was young and we just start asking him. Now, he can go on rambling for a long time without doing us any good. We want to find out in this particular case who used to say, “You won’t get along in life.” Or who used to say, “I won’t get along in life.” That’s a serious thing. Why is it? It will keep a person from moving while on the time track. So we don’t care particularly whether he gets along in life or not. We can solve that. We want to know why he is not able to move along the time track. “Now, by the way, were there any ne’er-do-wells in your family? Did anybody used to fail?” “No.” “Was your father successful?” “Except for the times he failed.” “What did your father used to say about that? Can you remember a time when he failed at something?” “No.” “Well now, you can remember this; you can remember a time when he failed. The moment he failed; you can remember the exact experience. He used to run stores, I suppose, something like that?” “Oh, no, he sold Fuller brushes.” “Well, do you remember a time when he complained about it?” “No, except the night when he had the big fight with Mother. Yes, he had a big fight with Mother.” “What did he say?” “Well—oh, I don’t know, probably a lot of things. I can hardly remember that; I don’t remember.” “Well, you can remember,” you say. “You can remember this.” “Well, I don’t know. She kept saying something about—oh, yes, yes. ‘You will never get along in life,’ ha-ha-ha.” Now we have got the villainess of the piece. It was Mama. Only, of course, Mama might have said it to Papa when he was worn out. Now he finally begins to say, “Well you know, I have thought it all out by myself. And you know, I don’t get along in life.” And so this person, the preclear—now we have gotten this thing out—we will find that he will start moving on the time track better. But more important than that, you will find this feeling of failure and so forth will have lifted to some degree.

Now, it’s always when you hit the jackpot on one of these things, you get a lock. Now, the Research Department absolutely failed in the past and probably are failing right now to get an engramoscope so that you can look into a person’s mind, you see, and see this diagram. I would like to be able to put it at your disposal, one of these things. We tried EEG and we found out that it didn’t make a good contact on it. We didn’t try very hard. But the EEG doesn’t pick this stuff up very well. There’s too much muscular reaction. That’s an electroencephalogram measuring brain impulses and so forth. Engrams, unfortunately, are so muscular that the muscular impulse overrides the thought impulse so much of the time that it is not a good, reliable test. So we don’t have an engramoscope. So you are just going to have to use this test. “Did your grandfather ever tell you you were a good boy?” “Oh yes, he did. Yes, sure.” Now, sometimes he will say, “Oh yes, yes. My grandfather told me I was a good boy, yes.” No relief. “Let’s remember . . .” and this is what you follow through on, “. . . let’s remember a specific moment; a specific moment, an incident when he said this.” “Oh, I . . .” “Where was he standing?” “Well, he wasn’t standing, he was sitting down . . .” And all of a sudden you have got the incident you want. Of course, you wouldn’t be going after “You’re a good boy” as being particularly an aberrated phrase unless you were trying to crack a manic. You can sometimes get a manic and key out one in that fashion.

Now, there’s something else that’s of interest to you. That’s when a person has run an engram out, he has been back on the track someplace, hasn’t he? Unless he did get a comparison with real life, which is a little laugh and so on, which is automatic—he really doesn’t see anything funny about it maybe, but he feels the impulse to laugh. It doesn’t even have to be funny. It can’t be something like, “Oh my goodness, I have cut my hand off.” And the fellow goes over this five or six times and he says, “Ha-ha. Oh my goodness, I cut my hand off.” That’s a relief when you get back up to present time and you know this thing has been reduced. You may have keyed one in on him a little bit. Get him to remember the session, knock it back out. Now, he may not suffer any particular relief from it. He may not manifest anything, but make it a practice when you bring a person out of session to ask him about what happened in the session.

You know people have aberrations about remembering, so sometimes you use the words “remember” on somebody and it keeps him from remembering. So you put it some other way Now, “What did we do? What was the first thing you did?” Make him check over it. Not word by word—by Straightwire—when you do it by straight memory, not word by word, you are being very sure that he is staying in present time.

You don’t let a person lie down and do this. You give him “Come up to present time; open your eyes.” And you say, “Now, give me the time when your mother used to put you in the garbage can and put the lid on it.” Now, particularly a preclear’s been in for a while, been in reverie for several sessions, he will go down the track looking for it. Well, you are not interested in putting him into reverie, so you just insist, “Come up to present time. Now open your eyes. Now, you can remember this. Now, tell me about it.” “Oh, I remember that she did, that’s all I can remember.” “Well, let’s remember a specific incident.” “Well, I couldn’t do that.” “Well, tell me a specific moment that she did.” “Well, I couldn’t tell you a specific moment that she did.” “Well, was it awfully smelly?” “Yes, it was.” Now you are leading the person then into these things and you are apparently making almost disrelated remarks as far as he can tell. You say, “Was it awfully smelly?” He isn’t laughing because you’re funny. Because a moment before—what you do is take another wire and remember that the direct wire goes back on all the communication lines. And you maybe have part of one wire hooked up. You know, a person who has only the sense of smell hooked up to his standard bank, he can smell all of his former experiences. And it validates all of his past for him. His sense of smell—if he can smell it, it happened.

Now, what you want to do, of course, is to get as many of those perceptics stretched down there as possible, so by saying “Did it smell bad?” that’s—you are trying to get full olfactory, you see—and “Where were you standing?” you are hooking up his visio. You are a telephone lineman. You see, very easy. Looks very mysterious. You can use an awful lot of inference on this sort of thing, too.

I ran into a fellow one time who had this—well, his trouble was he said, “My memory is so bad, I can’t remember anything.” And I said, “Anything? What do you remember least?” “People, people; I can’t remember people. I can’t remember names, I can’t remember faces. I can’t remember faces. I can’t remember anything.” I said, “What is my name?” He said, “I know you, Ron.” “All right, that’s one person you know. Now, let’s remember a time when you and I were together, some time ago.” “Yes.” “Well, now, there’s a time you have remembered. Where were we at that moment?” “Well, yes.” “What were we doing?” “Oh, so-and-so.” “Who else was there?” “Well, you know who was there; George was there.” “Ah, that’s two people you have remembered.” And you take a person back along the line and make him remember his father—fathers terribly occluded—you try to make him remember his father. You are restimulating Papa. Now you are restimulating the engrams, you are just using—the analytical minds mechanism does this. “Can you say—was your father a very neat man?” He can’t remember his father. Terrible occlusion. “Was he a very neat man?” “I would say yes.” “I thought you couldn’t remember your father.” “Oh well, you ask me things like that, of course . . .” “Well, tell me, did he keep his appointments?” “Oh, I wouldn’t know that.” “Well, did he like to eat?” “Oh, yes. He loved to eat. Say, I tell you, I remember one fourth of July we had watermelon.” And there is Papa, see? Although he can’t remember anything about Papa. But he’s hooked in, and what the auditor has done in this case is string wire. Now, a person who says he has a bad memory will do that sort of thing. So one starts on a small periphery. Now you can get him to remember yesterday. You can get him to remember last week. That’s going back to—that’s staying in present time and remembering. You can get him to remember the last car he had. And this is Straightwire at its best, is spotting a place where a person is stuck on the time track. Don’t feed him repeater technique because you will only stick him further on the track. What you want to do is to find the place. So we get a situation like this. Give him a flash, “How old?” And he says, “Twenty-nine—well, that’s silly. I am forty-three.” Or you say, “How old are you?” And he will say, “Forty-three.” And you say, “What was the first number that flashed into your mind?” “Oh well, I often do that, I got the number twenty-nine.” Or he will say, “Forty-three.” “What was the first number you got?” “Forty-three, forty-three.” Obviously when a person is really stuck on the time track, he doesn’t move or something, so you change your words. “What is your age?” Now, he has got an automatic response. The circuit is, “How old are you?” “Forty-three.” That’s a stimulus-response gimmick. Swap it. “What is your age?” And this will work for a while on him and he will say (long pause) “For ty-three.” “What was the first number you got?” “Twenty-nine.” Well, perhaps the second time—the auditor has really been working on this fellow, “Give me a number.” “Twenty-nine. What did you want a number for?” You follow through with it. “What happened when you were twenty-nine?” “Oh well, at twenty-nine . . .” And, by the way, there’s a chance there he is talking about twenty-nine, there’s also a chance he is talking about twenty-nine days, which you mustn’t overlook. So you say, “What happened when you were twenty-nine?” “I was just back there in Dayton.” “How do you know you were?” “Well, I lived in Dayton from the time I was born up until last year. I never left town.” He’s really got you there. He had to be in Dayton when he was twenty-nine. “What accident did you have when you were twenty-nine?” “Oh, I wouldn’t know; I wouldn’t know anything about that.” Now we start in by taking something which is a little narrow periphery of something. We don’t try to make him remember when he was thirty or twenty-eight or bracket it in any way. What we try to do is find out something else. You are not now diving for the engram. This is indirection. You dive for the engram and it’s got a denyer, holder, misdirector, bouncer, grouper, it’s going to restimulate, reject. So you have got to come over here. Twenty-ninth in July. Let’s hit for December or hit for February, something along the line on an entirely different activity. Don’t ask him for age or anything.

You just say, “Well, who did you work for after you got out of high school?” “Oh, my first job in—well, that was for Bill Peters. I remember that very well” “Why do you remember that especially?” “I got fired.” You say, “Well, how old were you when you got out of high school?” “Seventeen, eighteen—eighteen, yes. I must have been eighteen.” You know all of this is conceptual. He isn’t remembering a specific incident or anything. You are just stirring up the concept or something. And you say, “When did you get your next job?” “Oh, I don’t know. I worked for a long time around there. They had a flatboat out there on the river. I had a pretty good time.” “How long did you work on this flatboat?” “Oh, quite a long time. I guess I went on to something else. I can’t remember what kind of job.” “Well, is it like the work you are doing now?” “Oh yes, accounting.” “Well, did you like your boss or dislike him?” “Oh, I hated him. Yes, that’s right. I hated him.” He got a flash answer out of himself, got a bang response because you hit some stimulant. All right, we were working on his boss. We were trying to find an automobile accident over here that has nothing to do with his boss, but what we are trying to do is open up his twenty-ninth year and find the engram he is stuck in. And we can find out who was his boss, finding out how old the kid was, when he got married, develop it just as though you were developing a photographic negative. Develop it, get it bigger, bigger . . . And he will say, “Well, that’s the time I went to the hospital with a fractured skull.” And he’ll say, “Of course, I knew about that all the time.” Now, that’s the discouraging thing about Straightwire, that the second you blow out a lock on this sort of thing, of course, the data have been sitting there all the time and he has the complete knowledge that it’s been sitting there all the time, and he will say very often that he remembered it all the time. And you can work yourself into a complete lather with Straightwire. And a couple of minutes after everything you have dug up with a shovel and a pick and a pneumatic drill—and he will say, “I remembered that all the time. Why didn’t you ask me?” So the point here is that we are developing the time track, because the time track has gotten full of holes. This would be your time track.

This is a lot of engrams, let’s say, and here’s sort of the way the time track looks on here. That’s about normal Everywhere there’s a hole in this track or a big hole—that’s right, the whole track appears just to drop out of sight.

This is a lock or an engram and the sum of all these locks is the sum of the wipe-out, because it’s stolen moments. Afterward, maybe long afterwards—and it’s stolen this lump of moments and stored them and stolen something else. This is added in to the fact that this person is out of valence and isn’t getting any of his own somatics. That’s added the fact that he has got all the engramic commands, “Hear that. I will die.” They’re dumped down in the reactive mind bank. There you are. All of his life he has been filling this bin up.

Now, by finding out what his past was, what the aberrative phrases of the people were, we can build back the past track, but we do it on this very specific line of: What is he worried about? What did he believe about himself? What did he think about people? We get those things; he will tell you these things. “What did your father think about people?” This is another oblique one. Sometimes you will get a lock standing out on brother’s or sister’s line, which has disappeared on one’s own time track. For instance, “What did your brother used to tell your sister?” “Oh, she used to get into the most terrific rages.” “Oh, what did he used to tell her?” “Oh, yak, yak, yak.” “Well, when did she do this to you?” “She never did that to me.” You show me an aberree that will show you just that one target, because the aberrative mind is not selective. You get one person, why, “My father never caned me in my life.” And you get back to a chain that contains beatings with canes. You will get a delusory recall on this. The mother has said, “I don’t blame you at all, because your father keeps you so disturbed. He keeps me disturbed. He beats you.” You get this often, Mama and Papa complaining to the child about the other. “Your mothers no good. I have got to leave. I am sorry to leave you, but I have got to go.” Of course, he will be the rest of the day and the rest of the year. Why he didn’t go out and drown himself in the first place and save us all this trouble . . . You have got to chop this chain of aberration someplace along the line—why, I don’t know, but you will get these leaving dramatizations. They’re very interesting. Every five days somebody’s going to leave forever.

You get the dramatizations of “That’s all I have got to say,” and then they go on talking for three hours. These things are locks on engrams in the child, engrams in your preclear, and you can start knocking these things out because you find out what—like sister—you can find out actually what he says to his wife. Ask what he says to his wife. Often he will be able to tell you. That’s a dramatization, right on tap, right straight out of an engram. You know that he has got locks worded just like this, because of a specific instant over a specific subject. You take his dramatization, that was Mama or Papa or somebody, know these locks. “Lets remember a specific time this was told to you.” And you pin him down. He can’t remember a time so you work on something else, then come back to this thing again, et cetera, et cetera. Then we work over here and we break a few locks over here. And then we come back to this thing again and then all of a sudden he has got a little light on it. We wait until tomorrow and then we work on it again.

File drawers which are sticky will eventually open by asking for an engram often enough. You can eventually find it in the chain. That is to say, you take the person back and forth up and down the track looking for something, it sort of greases his track.

It’s the same way with Straightwire. Give the person some homework. “You remember a time when somebody by the name of Jolson beat you?” He has an unreasonable antipathy, you find out, to somebody around the place named Jolson. And let’s find out what this person has in common with some person who has harmed our preclear, physically harmed him someplace or disturbed his life enormously. Our Jolson, let’s say, is completely guiltless. This person just doesn’t like him, hates him, knows he is treacherous, knows he can’t trust him—“knows.” Let’s find the pseudo-Jolson.

Now we have the preclear and he says, “You know, I can’t stand my wife. I have just gone downhill ever since I got married.” You want to find out who his wife really is. His wife is a pseudo-enemy. Maybe she is a pseudo-ally at first and also a pseudo-enemy; some other person in the banks, you see. So you want to find out. Straight memory puts it—and let me sum up this whole thing, straight memory puts all data into the differentiative sphere of the mind.

The analytical mind thinks in differences, minute differences. You can cover that by saying “similarity,” which means minute differences. The reactive mind thinks in identities. Therefore, when you get this complete time track here, all this data on this thing will be lying in the reactive bank labeled “identical to everything else on its chain.” In other words, all of this stuff—this would be just one chain—is all latched up sort of on the same bit of the points of pain and they’re all differentiated. The analytical mind in its highest computative spheres, which is present time “I,” can differentiate fast, return back on the track. The person is not computing swiftly His computative ability, his ability to differentiate is less than when in present time.

Straightwire works because we reach into the reactive bank and we pull out material which is identified with other material with which it shouldn’t be identified. We pull that up into full view and we demonstrate there are differences. The mind works it out. We don’t tell the preclear. He says, “Look here, there is a difference between ‘He rode a horse,’ and ‘He rowed a horse.’ So that’s wonderful. That’s silly. I wonder how I ever got into that nonsense.” Well, start reaching down there again and we pull up a datum which says, uHe is no earthly good.” That fellow has to fly an airplane. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to fly an airplane. You bring it up into the analytical sphere and get its meaning, get its definition. In other words, the thoughts, the lock, when it is given definition by the analytical mind, ceases to be an aberrative moment. So we can pull all sorts of stuff out of the reactive bank and put it back here on the track and we can start to patch up our preclear’s track and we will get it looking maybe like this. It wouldn’t look bad, and the fellow will have pretty good recall. We can do that all with straight memory.

There is a difference between straight memory and reverie, which consists of this: Reverie is the mechanical process by which one attains moments of pain and unconsciousness which contain perceptions, and eradicates them. Now, the Straightwire is that process which reaches into moments which should have been conscious moments, but because of their connections were not, and differentiates or defines the meaning of that moment. We are not erasing with Straightwire. We are not trying to knock anything out perforce. What we are doing is a Straightwire differentiation of data which should have been analytical all the time. And by restoring to the analytical mind what properly belongs to the analytical mind, the analytical mind now feels better and the little attention units stop walking around in those bullpens.

It now has what it owns. It now can think about what it owns and it can differentiate these moments which should have been with it all the time. That’s the first thing it learns: This was a conscious moment. It was knocked out; no pain connected with this, remember. File it.

The reason it doesn’t work with an engram—and it’s a very simple one—is because the percepts of the engram do not, have not, and never will belong to the analytical mind. They belong to the reactive mind.

They are merely impressed on whatever they are impressed on and there they are. They came in and they’re not thought about; they’re phonograph records that are force applied against reason. And we come back with standard reverie and so forth, we go back to these things, we pick them up early in the bank and we go whoo! whoo! whoo! start erasing. Or probably, as a lot of you have been doing, erasing very slow, reducing, erasing and so on. But the process there is a mechanical process. It’s just mechanical every bit as erasing something off of that blackboard. That’s reverie. That’s knocking out engrams. That’s first, last and always what we are trying to do. And this other is a bonus. We can make the person feel better by doing this and, more important, we can get the identity of the engram.

Now, somebody asked me, “After keying out an engram, is it not harder to find that engram to erase?” Engrams don’t suddenly dive out of sight and come back into sight. They stay about where they are. It doesn’t matter how much is on top of an engram. You still have the whole engram to erase. You can blow its locks afterwards, blow its locks before; it doesn’t really matter. If anybody here thinks that you are going to have any difficulty locating enough engrams to work with in any case, let me know and we will install some in the preclear.

Male voice: If the person has a habit of laughing when he sees somebody injured, does that mean he doesn’t want that injury to . . . ?

No, he is indicating. That is a lock on an engram which the observer had.

Male voice: Then, could you return them by straight memory to that . . . ?

There would be no wipe-out, no disappearance of that if there wasn’t an engram to upset it. Because it wouldn’t be one of these things that was all ready to compute. A person has seen somebody injured, obviously it wasn’t an unknown thing that happened. The person got injured. One might puzzle a moment wondering how the plank came to fall off the building and came to hit this luckless fellow on the head, but one can say, “Well, plank, building, wind . . .” But if one gets an emotional shock out of it, all of a sudden a couple of days later he remembers this person being injured . . . And that is the weird part of these blocks. He knows he remembers this person but he is not supposed to remember about it and he just can’t get it out of his mind. He can’t get this sight away from in front of his eyes. It’s an engram holding this thing down and he is out at about the 195th lock. Of course he can’t get it out from his mind. It’s probably got a holder in it. Sure, so the thing for the auditor to do, if he wants the person to get it out of his mind, is take him and route him down to the earliest time an accident was witnessed. Whoosh! You will find out that he was worried about twenty-nine incidents, not just one.

Male voice: Can we blow these locks with Straightwire auto-control?

Yes. This is the one legitimate straight therapy, remembering.

Now, let me give you the wrong way first. This is self-therapy at its worst. A fellow thinks to himself, “You know, I have a headache today. Hmmmm, that’s interesting. I have a headache today. I have a headache today. I have a headache today. I have a headache. I have a headache.” And all of a sudden, “I have a headache; I have a headache; I have a headache. Yes, I do have a headache.” And then he suddenly wanders off the subject completely. Why? The attention units with which he was going down the track get mixed up in the unconsciousness, and the next thing you know they’re lost and he has to wander off on something else. And the next thing you know he is controlling on something. “I am deaf. I am deaf. I am deaf. There’s something wrong with my ears. I am deaf. I am deaf. I am deaf. I am deaf. You see, its a pain in the stomach; it hasn’t anything to do with being deaf. It’s down in that engram. Only that’s not going to release it. Now he has got a headache and a pain in the stomach. Now what is he going to do about this? Now, the best thing to do about this obviously is automatic therapy and the quicker the better. “There must be some mechanism that makes me do this. It’s probably a control circuit. ‘I have to do this myself. I have to do this myself. I have to do this myself.’” And he wanders off of that. Now he has got a neck-ache. That’s auto-therapy Anytime a person comes to you, by the way, who has been indulging in this, you know very, very well that this person has supercontrol circuitry. There’s lots of it. If a person can hypnotize himself and run himself auto, that person has supercontrol circuitry. That person is also the most likely candidate for dub-in, which seems to be caused by control circuits. So that is the wrong way to do it.

The right way to do it is if he has a headache he asks himself, “Who used to have headaches? Who used to have headaches? I wonder if my mother ever had headaches? No. Oh, I wonder if my father . . .he. . .he had migraines, yes.” If he says to himself, “Let’s see if I can get a time when he really had that migraine headache . . . Oh hell, yes, rolling on the floor.” And then maybe it’s not gone yet, so he says, “I wonder if I am in my father’s valence?” And he says, “Who used to tell me I was in my father’s valence . . . I was like my father? Oh, yes, my grandmother.” All of a sudden, no headache. That’s the right way. It works often enough. That’s straight memory, that’s not going back down the track.

That is, you can do all the remembering you want to do and you can remember along this system of remembering, of recalling Straightwire, and you can do a lot for yourself. You can clean up your track, do all sorts of things, but nobody is going to do it as well as an auditor. Because a person who is doing the memory, remembering himself, that is by himself, auto, sometimes has the reason why he is upset occluded from him and it wouldn’t be occluded from the auditor. The auditor can audit, add it up, figure it out and say, “You remember this.” And the first time the auditor says that, the guy says, “Oh, no.” And then all of a sudden he does remember that. And he says, “Huh, that’s nothing.” We can get that sort of play along that line.

I wanted to give you a demonstration of it, but I can see by your faces that you weren’t—some of you perhaps a few minutes ago didn’t understand some of these differences. I have used the time instead to try and explain some of the basic mechanisms to you.

We want the fellow in present time. He remembers the key-in. You don’t have him going down the track to find the key-in. Here’s what happens when you go down the track to find the key-in. What you do, you run a key-in because the key-in is sitting on top of the engram. You will have the person running an engram. You only go through a key-in two or three times and you are running an engram, because the words are the same, so you take a person down the track and you say, “Let’s run a key-in.” It’s legitimate to run a key-in. That’s good Standard Procedure because you want to find out the dramatization there that’s caused maybe a control circuit or a valence shift. So you run the key-in, run it once or twice and then a somatic starts to turn on and then he is running in the engram. That is reverie.

Now, straight memory is different than that. We don’t want to do anything in this straight memory but make the person remember specific moments. And we hold him in present time and force him to stay in present time. Actually we don’t force him; persuade him to stay in present time and make him remember the incidents.

Male voice: If you can catch a person’s engrams, they wont try to bury themselves farther, then why can’t you discuss . . . ?

The injunction which is laid down in the book about evaluation includes within it other things besides discussing his case with him. One of the main reasons that injunction is there is because auditors can go all out on the subject of telling the preclear what’s wrong with him and he starts to do that and maybe they have been back and they have run two or three things and maybe a couple of these things didn’t lift. And he comes up to present time and the auditor says, “You know what you were running was such a thing, when your mother said, ‘I have a headache, I have a headache,’”—you are giving him another lock.

Male voice: When a person through necessity pulls herself or himself up by the bootstraps, so that they can accomplish what they set out to do, do they not get rid of a lot of engrams?

Do they key them out?

Male voice: Yes.

Yes. A lot of times they do.

Male voice: Why, when they’re in an atmosphere that is so intimidating, and suddenly through sheer force . . . ?

Oh, yes, they key out. They key out. They recapture a lot of attention units through sheer force. I would like to answer all these questions, but I am not going to have time, if you will forgive me, because I am going to have to give a demonstration on this tomorrow I want to tell you that on this straight memory you have a chance to work on each other, see how it works. Just try and find out how much you can find out, what a person’s circuits are, what the demons are. You can find out valences. You can find out why he is suffering from this particular psychosomatic illness. You can try and find out this and that and get yourself some practice on this, because it takes a lot of practice. And I am going to have to talk to you more about this diagnostic procedure, more than anything I guess, because this runs off very easily But diagnosis along a straight memory line, you have to sort of set up a few demon circuits of your own to respond adequately. That’s the way I want you to get on this stuff, so that you are really sharp—because it’s nice if somebody can walk in, talk to you a few minutes, say, “I am suffering from a very bad headache.” Two ways to make him turn off the headache. And then make him remember other headaches. The other one, of course, is to make him close his eyes and run a pleasure moment. Make him go through it like he is running an engram. Make him run through it a few times and he will park the somatic back on the track someplace. Attention units will run up to him. Of course, sometimes people can’t find any pleasure moments and that’s your problem.