Taking Inventory SOP Step One (500821)

Date: 21 August 1950

Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard

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This morning we start on Standard Procedure. All this week, every morning, I am going to advance your knowledge, I hope, of Standard Procedure. It doesn’t matter whether you are running a preclear on Guk or on the back end of an observation car, Standard Procedure is what you use.

The amount of latitude which is allowed is such that the various sensitivities, as one has called them, the various nuances of auditing are very well cared for. Standard Procedure contains all those techniques which are accepted techniques in Dianetics. There is no little bin, no bullpen of techniques lying outside of Standard Procedure which somebody suddenly lets you in on. Standard Procedure is an all-embracing process. If and when there are new additions to be made to Standard Procedure you will know about them.

You have heard, for instance, of the basis of “controlled accessibility.” All right. That’s a part of Standard Procedure. You have heard of picking up all these things by straight memory. That’s Standard Procedure. You have heard of running somebody on Guk. That is standard Guk procedure, but it’s still Standard Procedure. And you use the same things in Standard Procedure whether you are running a man on Guk or you are running him just straight; it doesn’t matter. They use both ways.

Now therefore, I am calling your attention to this very solidly. Somebody that knows that you’re taking a professional auditor’s course is liable to ask you about this or ask you about that and say, “Well, I have heard of divebombing. That is a new technique in Dianetics.” Of course, that isn’t covered by Standard Procedure. You find out what divebombing is and you will normally find out it is one of the small techniques of Standard Procedure. Because there are quite a few techniques mixed up in this. But they are not mixed up. They are delineated in it in such a way that you will rapidly see which one is required. You can put in steps or omit steps in Standard Procedure. It is very elastic. It is not something that’s done by rote. It is something which you should not do step by step.

Now, many of you people have the bulletin. There are also quite a few of you who do not have the bulletin. It was regrettable that the bulletins were left unguarded in the office in there, because the Foundation airmailed enough bulletins out here to give each one of you one bulletin. Therefore, if anybody has two in any fashion or other, having found one on the floor or something, please pass them over to those who don’t have the bulletin. This is going to make this morning’s lecture not quite as smooth as it might have been because I wanted you all to have the Standard Procedure Charts.

Now, there’s the Standard Procedure Chart. This technique is delineated in this bulletin.

You will find in this bulletin a great deal of data, but it is written somewhat on the order of a synopsis to a five-foot shelf. This covers the thing adequately and if you read the thing very closely and don’t overlook a single word or a single comma in it, you will come out with data. I had to sit down and get this out in its most condensed form in order to publish it in this form, but there is a nice thick book coming out on Standard Procedure. It blows up probably on the ratio of about five pages per sentence or something like that.

Now, you will find, as I gave you very early in this course, some of the changes in the book are taken care of here in Standard Procedure. Now, for instance, reverie is the same thing as being wide-awake with ones eyes closed. There’s a lot more that you can say about reverie than that. It’s true that reverie is being like that but the condition which you intended to create—now, what gets created is often something quite different.

You will find out with some people that you will tell them to close their eyes and they immediately go into hypnotic trance. You should know when this happens. One of the main reasons we have a canceller is that the hypnotic trance is a possibility and also because the canceller works anyway. The preclear’s eyes will roll a little bit under the lid and when he returns, particularly, the eyelashes will flutter. Now, you will get the fluttering eyelash first. You will find that ordinarily when you return anyone, if he is really returning, moving well on the track and if he is just a little bit suggestible he gets this little flutter of the eyelash, a very little, small tremble. That’s quite noticeable. This tells you immediately that he has become more suggestible than he ordinarily would be. As a result, you should not use on him any more English than you possibly can.

Now you have got to minimize what you say to him and you have got to put most of what you say to him in questions and ask him whether or not we shouldn’t do this. In other words, reduce the positive command level. Also, reduce the sharpness of your voice because at that moment you are putting another “I” slightly behind the front edge of the analyzer. That is in essence what hypnosis does. It sets up an analytical demon. And the hypnotist becomes in interposition there between “I” and the banks.

Now, there is something very interesting with regard to this. There have been two cases back East of newspaper reporters coming in, saying, “What is this about Dianetics? What kind of a racket have you got working here?” And somebody saying, “Well, it’s really not a racket. It works this way.” And somebody talking them into a demonstration. This happened the first time to an auditor who spent about an hour and a half with this newspaper reporter, giving him a very beautiful demonstration of how one returned and so on.

He took him back to a time when he was swimming and he had him swimming and had him going through the air in slow motion—this should have warned him—he had him going through the air in slow motion and into the water slowly and feeling all the moisture and getting all the sounds. In other words, he was there; he had revivified him completely there. I don’t say he was reliving, because it was revivification— because this man came up to present time, was told to open his eyes and said, “Well, go on. What about Dianetics?” The man had been in an amnesia trance the entire time, and he had merely gone into an amnesia trance by closing his eyes. And all memory of everything which had happened was utterly and entirely occluded.

The next one that happened—wasn’t it you, Dick, that ran this boy? He tells him to lie down, tells him to lie down, close his eyes, “Lets go back . . .” and he runs him through lots of incidents. The fellow’s strictly pianola. Brings him up to present time and gets the same reply. “Well, what about Dianetics?” Two of them in a row, both newspaper reporters. I am not saying, by the way, that all newspaper reporters go around in a light trance. The unfortunate part of both of these was that all one needed to have said at that moment was, “Dianetics is wonderful. You are fascinated with Dianetics,” and awakened them and we would have gotten beautiful stories in each case. So this I am telling you so that you will recognize the depth these trances achieve, just on no provocation. Tell a man to close his eyes, bong he goes into an amnesia trance. Or sometimes use the old counting technique—it becomes much more frequent—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven—bong! Therefore, you must learn to—in case anybody went to sleep when I counted from one to seven: five, four, three, two, one— wake up! (snap) The wandering eye. You can see the eye pupil moving underneath the eyelid when a person is slightly tranced or deeply tranced. That is a second stage. The fluttering eyelid is the first stage and the wandering eye often denotes the second stage.

Furthermore there is another test: if the person begins to answer you literally just like you were talking to an engram. You say, “Go on,” and he says, “Where?” See? You want him to continue and he thinks you want him to go someplace. That means that your preclear is now a hypnotic subject and you are running him in hypnosis. There are a couple of ways to overcome this. One is you just want to go on and run him, just go on and run him. But you are going to have a very long strange time with this case. The other one is just to make him keep his eyes open and shove some smelling salts at him. He can work with his eyes open. As a matter of fact, almost anybody can, and after a person has been a preclear for quite a while, he ceases to be as well regimented and well drilled as he was once, and the auditor, “Well, close your eyes,” and he starts to go back on the track and he thinks of something and he opens up his eyes and he lies there traveling along the track with his eyes open. And the other part of this is the man who is very alert, very aware. Don’t confuse the fact that one can travel with a person who is obeying a “Look out” command. You’ll suddenly see some fellow come up and look at you like this or something. He has got a command “Look out” or “Watch out” at work.

The matter of inducing reverie, therefore, requires a little judgment on your part. There are cases in which you might want to induce a little deeper state of suggestibility than you have achieved. Some cases will do this. Just have him look you in the eye for a few minutes and talk to him quietly, and then tell him to close his eyes. And you will find out that he’s quieted down considerably. As a matter of fact, you put him in a little light trance. I am giving you that as an example.

Here we have a sentence in the bulletin that says, “It is not a special state of being” and so forth. There’s a great deal that can be said about reverie and as you work in Dianetics more and more, you will learn more and more by experience what you are achieving. You will also learn, as you adventure it, not to work somebody in amnesia trance if you can possibly help it. Because “I” is out of contact there and you are going to have a bad condition on your hands.

Now, everything that you run in amnesia trance becomes a lock and so on and so on. I give you this as an example. But now I want to start in right at the beginning, the very beginning of Standard Procedure and go straight on through with it. The first thing we find is Step One. We are inventorying the case. That is the word being used in lieu of diagnosis. Diagnosis is a medical term and we are not interested in the medical approach here because we are trying to get thoughts and memories and so forth. So we call it inventorying the case. Now, there are inventory sheets made out which will be passed out to you. I don’t know whether any action has been taken on that or not. I know we have well-worked-out inventory sheets back at the Foundation that were improved a short time ago and we will try to get some of those out. And if somebody will drop a line to the Foundation or send them a wire or something, we can have a few hundred of them. Actually, it’s quite exhaustive—the sheet. Now, here we have name, age, height, weight, foreign language, whether or not he has been hypnotized, received shock therapy, pre-frontal lobotomy, psychoanalysis or any other disasters. That’s not saying there’s anything wrong being psychoanalyzed. You can generally blow out a complete psychoanalysis in a matter of a half an hour unless it’s been done under sodium Amytal. I am not talking flippantly now; I am giving that to you straight. It’s rather an unfortunate thing and unsteadies a person who has spent six or eight months, let’s say, with an analyst and has achieved some release from grief’s and so on, has been partially— maybe even reeducated and has reassessed his life. But you start down the time track to find out why he had this chronic somatic in the first place and it kicks back in and you can knock it out, of course, at the source; but when you come back up to the psychoanalysis . . .

One case in particular was very interesting to me. We brought him up—he had a bad set of stomach ulcers and Diane tics broke down psychoanalysis just on the basis that the fellow read the book and the ulcers precipitated again. And he was worked on for a short time and he achieved—bringing him back up the time track to the moment when the analyst was discharging him as alleviated. We got the playback of everything that was said by the analyst, and one way or the other these words were all locks on the manic in which this man was. Now, I don’t know, there may have been an engram in the analyst that caused him to use these words and we went through this again and the fellow felt just fine for about an hour and the fellow collapsed and we never could use that again.

I am warning you about this, because people are going to tell you, “Now, I have spent three years in psychoanalysis. I don’t want all this destroyed. I am in a happy frame of mind now I don’t want to tamper with it.” I have seen this very often. I am not decrying psychoanalysis. Please don’t take it that way at all. I am telling you what you are going to find as auditors, what you are going to run into. I don’t want you to be suddenly amazed at it. While going back down the track and finding out that you have broken to pieces long and arduous work, don’t be dismayed because you can put it back in that state fairly rapidly again. But it may be that for a week or ten days your preclear will be in a state just as bad as he was the day he reported to the psychoanalyst, if you don’t start clipping charge right off the case.

The next thing you are going to find is people coming to you to be treated and they’re going to be in that state of mind that says, “My husband tells me to come but after all I spent a year with this analyst. I am very fond of this analyst and I have spent a whole year, and I am doing just fine. Now, will Dianetics undo all that?” Well, what do you tell them? You can say with great honesty, “Well, Dianetics can certainly bring it up to the same level rather rapidly,” and sort of avoid the issue a little bit. Because that person is going through this curve; if you tell them, “Yes, it will undo your psychoanalysis,” they are liable to say, “Oh, I couldn’t stand that. I couldn’t tolerate that.” And you wouldn’t have a preclear there. The fellow will go on being very careful.

We mentioned psychoanalysis—you will sometimes find that analysis has been done under sodium Amytal. Now, that is a very peculiar thing to run into where some—it isn’t hypnosis. We have no difficulty recognizing it as hypnosis, but it isn’t performed under that name. It’s deep analysis or narcosynthesis or something along that line. And something happens when people are worked. We think of the person awake and the person asleep. That is to say, in a trance state. And we look at this person when he’s awake and then we put him to sleep and he looks the same way. I mean, he hasn’t changed his hat or something because he is now in a drugged state. He will still answer, even more rationally.

This is peculiarly true of the psychotic. A psychotic is given a sedation and he appears now to be rational. It appears now as though you can converse with him and the impulse to do so is almost irresistible, to be casual with this person who a moment before has been screaming. The result is that any work that you do on this person, any work that restimulates this person is going to lie, when he is awake, encysted, just like—and it is a hypnotic command. You are going to restimulate things which when the sedation wears off will be in themselves engrams.

Careless conversation around this person, like, “Lie back; be quiet.” It doesn’t sound like much. The fellow starts to get a little excited when you are working on him and you say, “Lie back; be quiet.” Nice engram. Think of it in terms of an engram. When you are dealing with this person, when you are dealing then with sedation hypnotics, one has to be fully aware of the fact that he is in the role of, at that moment, a hypnotist.

You will find that where the person has a large number of treatments by narcosynthesis or deep analysis or has been analyzed under sedation, sodium Amytal, something of the sort, it poses exactly the same problem that is posed by the patient who has been many, many times hypnotized.

One of the interesting cases which came forward in the East was a young boy who had been under treatment for about a year by psychoanalysis. And two things had taken place there, not necessarily related. But the analyst, an old lady, it seemed that she liked young boys. This made a rather nasty situation, by the way; put a complete block on the second dynamic. He was told to forget it all. These statements that one has been raped while drugged are usually false; the bulk of them are false. But there are some that have happened. Just because the majority of them are false is no reason to throw them all out the window. That would be irrational selection. So in this particular case we had the boy drugged with sodium Amytal and raped, several times. He was in pretty bad shape. In addition to this, all of his engrams in the postspeech area had been clipped but nothing had been done to them. He was in about the saddest state of anyone you ever want to meet. The auditor who went into this case did something, however, that was quite brilliant. Instead of worrying about various parts of the case, she—the auditor was a lady—went into the first sodium Amytal treatment and ran it out and found its material and she then traced back, found the engram and reduced it. And then picked up the next sodium Amytal treatment, ran it out, picked up its material that had already been found by the analyst and went back and reduced the engrams. And followed this on up the line with each one of these sodium Amytal treatments. And in such a way used the sodium Amytal. And there was a question of professional ethics involved here, as to whether or not this Dianetic auditor owed the analyst for the Amytal.

This does not mean that you find every time a person has been psychoanalyzed that you have a bad mess on your hands. That is very far from the case. You will find many people have been enormously assisted—nothing compared to what you can do, but enormously assisted—by psychoanalysis. You will discover many analysts—and believe me, in Dianetics we get to know the characteristics of anyone who works on the mind—we get to know it rapidly. The activities of this and that are certainly an open book when you are an auditor. You find all about the home life of America. You will find out all about what doctors say to nurses and so on and so on. These are the coverup strata and they have not been published in the past and some ignorance as to their nature has existed, such as Mamas penchant with a knitting needle. Funny thing, in the past, that Mama has never advertised that she was handy with a knitting needle—has always said that she wanted the child.

By the way, it s interesting to digress for a moment, to notice in the Johns Hopkins nurses handbook there is a comment that says something to the effect of: “A nurse must always reassure the mother as to the physical condition of the child so that the mother will not be upset at the thought that the child will be a monstrosity, since nearly all women have to some degree tampered with the unborn child,” Interesting comment there.

Well anyway, psychoanalysis very often has a psychoanalyst who practices more or less silent analysis. He just lets the person talk and talk and talk. And this is not bad. Sometimes some of the material—surface material has actually been tapped and sometimes an emotional charge has been touched and the case is to some degree softened up. But there has been an education laid into this case that one does in the present time—free association.

Those auditors who have been analysts sometimes have to bring themselves up with a hard charge on this free association. They’re liable to let a preclear run on and on and on and get very little work done. And then after a while they get a comparison with what other auditors are doing with cases and then suddenly they start getting down to brass tacks.

Another thing is, you will occasionally find that the analyst has been working a person who is automatically returning on the track, whose track is wide open, who has sonic, visio and everything else and the analyst has been sitting there running this person. This is not always too fortunate because quite often the analyst has left him regressed on the track in a painful incident. And of course he gets deterioration of the case. Sometimes he has left the person in a manic and the person is saying, “I feel wonderful. Psychoanalysis is wonderful.” Just like you have people say, “Dianetics is wonderful; Dianetics is gorgeous.” And three days later saying, “Well, I thought it was all right.” These manics are very funny. You will find these conditions obtaining.

Now, we list psychoanalysis as one of the things which you should know about the preclear on your inventory if he has been analyzed over a long period of time. You will find that this education has set in, that he can stay in present time and remember. Nothing wrong with that.

The education that he must free associate is there, and that little habit must be broken.

You run any preclear who has been a patient in psychoanalysis and he starts analyzing himself every incident he gets. He runs through this incident and then he lies there and analyzes and analyzes. Then he wonders why this and that and so and so and so and so on, instead of just going through it and just going through it again and again. The analyzer does an automatic job of refiling and computation on this stuff anyway and there’s no reason to burn up time on it.

Occasionally in running grief engrams, however, it does a little good to let the preclear wander a trifle, particularly if we let him wander—let’s say you are dealing with the death of his father. When you let him wander into the early youth period when his father was still nice to him, that assists blowing that emotional charge. Sometimes when someone has wronged him considerably and you have a break of affinity there, if you will just let him tell you how mean everyone has been to him before you run him back through it again he will tell you once or twice about how he has been chopped up by life and you can run it through again. Whereas he won’t easily go through it again, you see, unless something like that’s happened.

All right. So there is the problem of psychoanalysis. Now, perhaps we can induce Mr. Cooke to deliver a full lecture on the subject of hypnotism, so that you will know all about hypnotism or at least know enough about it so that you can take a hypnotic engram and pull it all apart—they are just a little bit tricky to pull them out—that is, you know precisely how, you can make a good heading on it. Hit for these hypnotic engrams quite early in the case, by the way.

The matter of shock there gives us a new type of engram. Sometimes shock therapy creates cerebral hemorrhages, sometimes it creates a broken spine and other interesting side issues and it always seems to have amidst and amongst it an awful lot of conversation. “Where did you go last night ?” “Oh, I went to the movies. Saw Clark Gable. Do you like Clark Gable ?” “No, I don’t like him very much, but Lana Turner is my meat. Well, take her down now. It probably won’t do her any good, anyway.

Come on, let’s strap her to the table here. Well, she’ll just be here next Tuesday.” “Well, let’s shoot her the juice now. Boy, look at her convulse,” All of this stuff you will find in these electric shock things. And sometimes you will find this person has been put in narcosynthesis, strapped down, electrodes fastened on and then given a shock, big convulsions and so on. And at that moment, just as soon as the shock finishes, somebody leaning over, a psychiatrist probably, and saying, “We are taking care of you here. You are going to be all right. Now, don’t worry about anything,” And some such reassurance. And then they wheel them out of the room.

One psychiatrist, Dr, Rossette, told me rather proudly that he made a practice of doing this to every single person that came by and went through electric shock with him. Of course, he is putting a very strange line of stuff right on the end of those engrams there. That has a tendency to make a sympathy engram out of them which toughens them up. So it’s important to know about electric shock. But it’s terrifically important to know about transorbital leukotomy, prefrontal lobotomy or anything of that nature. This is of the essence. As a matter of sober fact, the information usually presents itself not by your being told but just by looking. The analyzer is pretty hacked up in a prefrontal lobotomy. In some prefrontal lobotomies, where they just slice through the lobes once, the neurons have gotten together and hooked it all up again.

The transorbital leukotomy is another thing. That’s an inspirational thing. It took place—I think it was done in Europe, had to do with an ice pick, I was amazed to see that an ice pick was used. Not an ice-pick-like instrument, but in this particular one, it was a sterilized ice pick, Woolworth’s, and it was the best instrument for the job, I should tell you about this in case you ever want to try to lift one of these things, if there’s anything left to lift out of. The ice pick is nicely sterilized and an electric shock machine is set up and the patient is given sedation. You bring the patient in, put the patient on the electric shock table, put the electrodes to him and shoot the juice. Standard convulsive shock. Then they take the ice pick and then lift this eye up and they pass the ice pick up underneath the eyebrow, right in through there and sweep it this way once very nicely, and they take it out again and resterilize it and give the person another electric shock. You should know this sequence, because I tried to lift one of these things and I went and found out what the sequence was. It was important data to me. Another electric shock, take the ice pick again, lift this eyelid and up through this eyelid and then sweep this way and put it down and then, wheel the patient away. A couple of days later the patient is still bleeding from the eyes and in rather foul shape. Usually sitting there.

You say, “Well, how’s your psychosis today? Hm?” He is tractable; he is a “well-adjusted” person now. He is thoroughly adjusted to the vegetable kingdom. Sometimes these things work. I am being very cruel on it. Sometimes they kill the person; sometimes they fix him so that he will obey his orders and not carouse around. And sometimes they do nothing for him but just slow him down.

Actually, what one is doing—it’s an operation akin to throwing a hand grenade into a telephone switchboard because somebody in Chicago is swearing at somebody in Los Angeles.

Now, the topectomy is another one of these. They take a thing that looks like an apple corer and they put the patient under sedation and they take something that looks like a brace and bit. Did you ever see one of those brace and bits? It cuts a ring out of wood. And they have got one of those just about like that and that goes through the skull and they just work it into the skull this way. And they open up and they take out that piece of skull. Then they take this thing that looks like an apple coring thing, a very nice apple corer and it goes into the brain, swishes around in a circle and takes out a section of brain.

Now they can take out a person’s ability to see, a person’s ability to hear—some very interesting experimental work has been done about this. The structural switchboards situated in the brain. You will find a few of these and you will find a few of these people are not too far gone to save. I am sure that’s all very doubtful. If somebody comes up to you and says, “I have had a prefrontal lobotomy.” You say, “Very pleased to meet you. Next.” That’s the rational thing to do, unless he appears to be pretty rational. And then maybe he had a single slice and the neurons grew back together.

These neurons growing back together though, that has been defeated by a more recent operation, a double prefrontal lobotomy, where they take a block of them out. They cut a section of them out. And then of course they can’t stretch back together again. And any one of those cases is pretty hard to handle.

Now, I am sorry if I am making your blood run cold, but this is what’s being done in practically any institution in America and it’s the fate of a large, large number of psychotics. And these psychotics, we hope, will continue to be treated by psychiatrists. But sometimes some of them may escape from that particular fold and fall into your laps as auditors. The situation may be such that the family demands that you do something with such a person. Don’t under any circumstances promise to do anything for this person. In the first place, you can try. If you get results, wonderful. But don’t say, “Dianetics can take care of that.” It might interest you to know how this operation came into being. I read a paper on the subject. There’s some character in this country known as Meduna; he claims personally to have originated electric shock in America. I think it’s highly questionable, but on some of his papers and recountings this character gives a story and I found this story someplace else; there may be some truth in it.

On the brain operations—the analytical mind, conscious mind—a prefrontal lobotomy operation and so on, got started in Europe. It was a very simple thing. There was a blacksmith in a shop—blacksmith’s shop and something happened. The crowbar flew through the air and struck him in the temple here and went through. So people pulled on it and the man lived and they found out you could cut up a man’s prefrontal lobes and he would still live. Isn’t someone going to ask what happened to the blacksmith’s ability to think? Isn’t someone going to ask whether or not this blacksmith was an idiot to begin with and now became a rational being? Because I don’t know. It won’t do any good to ask these questions. Because wherever I have read that story, those points are omitted. It says merely that they learned that the prefrontal lobes could be knocked out of a man’s skull practically and he could go on living—in some cases.

Now, what the genesis is, what this effort amounts to is none of our business. The operation is not malpractice but it is being rapidly abandoned by the very best in psychiatry. They have been fighting—doctors have a hard time in their own field, because there is a thing called “ethics.” They can’t talk about other doctors. And there’s been a very active fight going on in the field of psychiatry by, for instance, the Washington school of psychiatry, a very powerful group, to eradicate brain operation as a “cure” for living—pardon me, for sanity. There has been this tough fight going on and you don’t have to enter into this crusade at all, because it’s all going to be carried forth. We have given them ammunition. “In spite of a certain science fiction writer’s theories, the prefrontal lobotomy is still the greatest advance that was ever made by psychiatry into ever curing a man’s mental ills.” That was written by a psychiatrist down in Savannah, but don’t pick up that gauntlet. Because it was on its way out, down into obscurity and there is no reason why any one of us should lambaste psychiatry as a profession. Just because there are some theories in psychiatry which are inhumane, horrible—besides, we want psychiatry to be happy, if only so that psychiatry will keep their psychotics.

Dianetics, some people believe it assumes a very punitive attitude toward these brain operations and electric shock and all the rest of it. And Dianetics doesn’t. Dianetics has no attitude. Dianetics is a science. I personally might get pretty riled about it. Don Rogers might sit around and blow froth for a while, but the science of physics never had an opinion about Einstein. It never had an opinion about an atom bomb. When somebody starts getting you cornered and says, “Now, what does Dianetics believe about. . . ?” Well, you have got him. Because Dianetics does not believe. It merely performs. Or it fails to perform or performs. Now, we know it doesn’t fail to perform, so it performs.

The engineer who goes out and starts to build a bridge, of course, uses physics. Now, this bridge might not believe in Boss Tweed who authorized this bridge to be built, but the bridge gets built. That’s very important. People will ask you about the Catholic church. How does it stand on—how does Dianetics stand on the subject of the Catholic church? Well, the oddity is, I haven’t found any Catholics who weren’t quite well in favor of Dianetics. But Dianetics has no belief about Catholicism. It doesn’t have a belief. That is, it doesn’t believe any more than a physics does about something. A physics doesn’t believe in or not believe in religion. A Dianetics doesn’t believe in or not believe in religion. It’s a delineation.

It happens, by the way, that you can just knock the stuffings out of atheism with Dianetics. That is one of the most amusing things that happens. To have this fellow ranting and roaring on the subject of the church and the dogmas and so on and you get down there and get that prenatal engram when Mother is saying, “God is punishing me. That’s why I am pregnant. God is punishing me.” You knock this thing out and the fellow says, “Church? Interesting social group.” The monsignor in the Catholic church, by the way, is very happy in his practice to employ Dianetics. Here’s where we got a little bit off the subject.

Your data, then, on the inventory, has to contain all these things. I have tried to give you a few tips on what to do about them when you run into them. So you have to know these things. You have a body of data here that is valuable to you. And if you omit to get it, you are being quite remiss. You are sailing into an ocean with no charts showing where the rocks are because you take electric shock, a person that’s had a lot of electric shocks and you start going back down his case and you wonder why this person starts to boil off every time he closes his eyes. He starts to boil off. You say, “Let’s go back to the time when—go back to the first time.” He gives you the first couple of words. This often happens in a case where he’s had an electric shock. He’s trying to get the unconsciousness off the electric shock. There’s a lot of attention units tied up in these shock treatments.

Now, I omitted one: foreign language—terribly important. Met a fellow one day who had fourteen languages in his prenatal bank and he couldn’t speak any of them. That was an interesting situation, because there was high emotional tone on some of these engrams and when he would come about, trying to dramatize them, he was quite beaten down. He could never dramatize the engrams. Sound and so forth would stimulate the engram. They would come up all ready to be dramatized and so on. Now, what do you do?

You will find very often that in a foreign language case a great deal of repression results in its inability to dramatize in its own language, its inability to run. That was quite puzzling to me because it would seem, you know, that a foreign language case would be in pretty good shape because there’s no words to restimulate this foreign language case. That’s not true because in the first few years the basic language which underlies the English is probably that foreign language. So English is still being translated in and out of the basic language. When the person starts to dramatize one of these engrams he gets twice as frustrated, and quite often practically breaks him.

Male voice: Is it possible for a preclear to translate from her language into English?

Oh, yes. Practically everyone with a foreign language background will translate for you if he possibly can. Some foreign background languages are learned in early childhood and then forgotten, so to speak.

One of the leading psychoanalysts there in Washington, DC, came in to find out, “What is this about Dianetics?” And an auditor took him upstairs and in about half an hour, he had him speaking Yiddish again. He hadn’t spoken Yiddish since he was about five. And he was chattering away merrily, quite set up about the whole thing. His whole prenatal bank was in Yiddish. Then you don’t have to know the language, you know, to treat a foreign language case. You just go back and try to pick it up. If the person didn’t know that language at the time, you can clear up the bank very nicely from birth onward or someplace like that, pick it up about the time the child begins to talk and he didn’t have to speak this language and bring it up to there and adjust and so on, from there on up.

It’s too bad, incidentally, if a person like this has been given electric shock or some other type of stuff because this person’s usually wide open. And he can then go back, dress up the case so that he has sonic and then go back into the prenatal bank and he will recite this stuff off with full sonic. And that’s easy. “Gee, I have rubbed out Chinese and everything else.” What was the favorite phrase there? “Kum Yung Goong.” That’s “I am so sad.” That was our boy out in Hawaii. His whole prenatal bank was in Chinese. So if you don’t know about foreign languages, this sort of thing happens; you have to be very insistent sometimes, in trying to find out about a foreign language, because the preclear does not immediately volunteer the information, doesn’t think it’s important. So you find yourself running back down the bank and you get into the basic area sometimes and you say, “Well now, let’s repeat this.” Then he says, “Well, that’s saying, ‘I can’t believe you.’” “Go over it again.” “I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you.” “Have you got a somatic?” “Yes. ‘I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you.’” Whee! And you say, “Well, for heaven’s sake, why isn’t this coming up? Let’s find an engram someplace.” So we find an engram that says, “I believe you utterly. I believe you utterly. I believe you utterly.” It isn’t there. It’s right down in the basic area. So you send him right down to conception. “I love you so much. I love you so much.” Nothing lifting. By this time you have got three engrams restimulated and nothing lifted. And it may be that all these things were in German and he is translating for you and it won’t lift unless it’s spoken in the language in which it was laid down. Because an engram’s a phonograph record and you are trying to get the ripples and grooves off the soundtrack of this record. And so it’s useless to say, “I believe you utterly,” when the underlying tongue, although it says, “I believe you utterly,” may be “Bang yung bong” That’s very important then to know the foreign language background.

Male voice: Should a preclear who knows he has a foreign language and brings it up—the file clerk, it gives a phrase for instance—just go ahead and try to translate it so the auditor can understand, go right into it and . . . ?

Sure. Here’s something interesting. You have somebody repeating “I love you” in the foreign language and it’s “Ich liebe dich” or whatever it is and he doesn’t move anyplace on the track.

One of the roughest cases I ever walked into was a young lady who made a tradition in Dianetics. We called her “jaz ne vem.” And eventually, a “jaz ne vem case became one who just didn’t know Because “jaz ne vem means “I don’t know” in Slovenian. And this young lady, through some shame or something of the sort, neglected to tell me anything about her Slovenian background. And her whole prenatal bank was in Slovenian. She was in very bad shape, an apathy condition. She would run through AA with full pain and so forth, going through it in English and never bothering to give one the Slovenian. And it wouldn’t lift. And this case was driving me slightly on the side of frantic when I turned it over to an auditor who, with an inquiring sort of an eye, started talking about this young lady’s love affairs and when her father beat her and he all of a sudden realized that she must be hiding something about the family. So he wanted to know something about the incest. And he got down that close, you know, to diagnosing the case and all of a sudden it turns out that although she’s right there telling him something that her father said, she can’t tell him the meaning of it. And he went whirr, click, “What language is it in?” She says “Slovenian.” I’d beaten my brains out for dozens of hours on that case and so he—only don’t think he wasn’t proud. He came down to the house and . . .

All right. These things then are important. Inventory of that character is very important. It’s also important to know if you’re handling a junior case. And remember that girls can be junior cases and also that children can be named after grandparents or great-uncles or something. Those are also junior cases.

Male voice: If the preclear can’t interpret the language anymore, then what happens?

If the preclear knows the meaning of these words, he will very rapidly fall into a nice free translation of them; and he doesn’t know the meaning of the words, he will run them off as sound. They’re just plain sound. He will go yakkity-yak, dubbidy-dub. He will say, “What does that mean? I don’t know. Yakkity-yak, dubbidy-dub.” Male voice: Will they reduce?

Oh sure. They will blow right up. They never meant anything to the analyzer.

Now, if you don’t know Russian, for instance, you have to say, “Give me ‘Get out’ in Russian. Give me a bouncer in Russian. Give me a swear word in Russian.” Male voice: If a preclear does not know the word content of an engram, how is it restimulated?

It restimulates by tone, emotion, noise, the pain, tactile, kinesthesia, any one of the other perceptics. There is the subscience of perceptics. It is a subscience in Dianetics which is developed with language as only one of its facets of communication, one of very many. General semantics is that one. But a general semantic organization is possible for every other perceptic. And this all together was organized into the subscience of perceptics in Dianetics. And many bows were given to general semantics for having so assisted but there is just that one perceptic that is being covered, when you can cover each perceptic in that fashion, in the organization of general semantics. It might be interesting to some of you semanticists.

Male voice: Will a foreign language bouncer bounce if the preclear has no knowledge of the meaning of the words?

No, I didn’t go into that. No, I didn’t give you that dissertation. I will give it to you later. The analytical mind, the attention units—the analytical mind has learned by mimicry what these syllables mean and so it walks up, the attention unit walks up to it and the thing says, “Get out.” So it gets out. It forms its own liaison with it because it’s obviously dangerous. In other words, it is the analyzer which is acted upon, the analyzer which does all analysis of the whole subject, and it does it just on a phono record basis.

There is no more certain proof of this than in watching somebody with Chinese in his bank; for instance, supposing he was raised in India and had Indian in his veins and he doesn’t know what it means. Maybe Mama left there before he was born. He doesn’t know what it means. He goes straight through the thing. It doesn’t matter.

Sometimes the reactive mind—but very, very seldom—will combine some of these syllables into an apparent word. It’s very seldom. The reactive mind is fantastically accurate on the interpretation of language. It will make puns, homonyms and so forth. It will embrace those but it won’t make an error. For instance, let’s say we have a push button on a person, the word “painted.” Every time you say “painted” to him, he coughs. “Painted,” he coughs. “Painted,” he coughs. Now, we say “Painter.” No cough. Now, we say “Painting.” No cough. We say “Painted” and you get a cough. Those push buttons will wear out after a while. And you can certainly have a circus, by the way Sometimes you will find out this engram is here with the word “painted” in it and you have another engram up here which has to do with a push on the nose, and this upper engram has the word in it “dice.” So you say “Painted,” cough, cough, cough. And you say “Dice.” (putting hand to nose) “Painted, painted.” Cough, cough, cough. “Dice, dice.” (putting hand to nose) Just going through this routine, “Well, I know that routine, now. You can’t pull it on me anymore.” But he hasn’t removed the engram. So you keep on saying “Painted, dice, painted, dice . . .” So the chances of the reactive mind making an error on the foreign language are quite small.

Now we get down to psychosis, neurosis, dramatization, chronic psy-chosomatics. You want the history of these here. You don’t want to know everything there is to know about this. You want the history of psychosis, you want the history of neurosis that the person may have had and you want the history of his chronic somatics, because the chronic somatic will normally show up to be some sort of sympathy engram. And so you have then clues to what to look for. Because this thing, as you work on him—may cease to be the chronic somatic. The thing may destimulate as you go past it down the track, and you turn on some other chronic somatic. He no longer has what his chronic somatic used to be. But you want to know what it used to be.

Now, as to his dramatization—one thing about dramatization is this is an engram running off in a way to carry over the whole content of at least one valence into the environment. Dramatizations are extremely important to you in working engrams, because they contain the content of the engram. There is the engram leaking, you might say, displaying itself, laying itself wide open out in the daylight where you can get at it, take a look at it, turn it around and see what makes this aberree tick.

Now, of course, that dramatization is not the engram. But it is a restimulation of the engram. You can go so far as to take a real solid restimulation of the engram and put the preclear through it several times, and of course wind him up at the source. Just say, “Let’s go now to the first time this engram occurs in the bank,” and you will find that these dramatizations are very closely hooked up. You have restimulated the emotional tone and everything else in the engram. This, by the way—that’s controlled accessibility, if you want to give it a name, a compartmented name, outside of this.

Male voice: When you find somebody who naturally dramatizes everything does that mean they will probably be a pretty good case to run?

No. I would say that they were pretty close to psychotic; but let’s not get the word dramatization wrong.

The person who is dramatic about everything and a person who is dramatizing . . . Now, a person who is dramatizing an engram that says, “I don’t like students who come late to class,” so it is “I don’t like students who come late to class” will be the dramatization, you see. One thing by the other. Now, if we go down the time track and find some time when he said, “I don’t like students who come late to class” we can run that a couple of times and then we go into the lower part of the bank and we find an engram with that content. Ordinarily it has to be something aberrated, you see. It’s a dramatization.

Now, the mainstay of dramatization is if it is accompanied by emotional stress. Those are the rough engrams anyway; those which contain apathy, anger and so on. The key to this is whether the analyzer is more shut off than ordinarily. The dramatization becomes very, very, very pronounced, the analyzer’s almost completely off. This is temporary insanity.

You take someone who has a rage dramatization. That rage dramatization goes along a certain line and he normally dramatizes his rages in more or less this fashion. You can get him back to a time when he was dramatizing this rage and we can run it and we can run it until some of his emotional tone turns on. And then we can send him immediately earlier on the track, you see, to a moment when he received the engram. That’s the trick.

Now, we mentioned before, the rule that when an aberree does something once, he will do it again. When he says something once, he will say it again. This holds very well when we are looking for dramatizations. We find Mama saying, “Oh, I just can’t be myself around you.” And then we go back down the chain and we will find a moment when Mama was saying that when the child was on the way. We can find that in the early prenatal bank. First we find it in conscious recall and so on. There’s where we have the greatest use for straight line inventory. Straightwire recovers these dramatizations.

Now, the best way of which I know to resolve the “control yourself” type of command is to find what this person says, what your preclear says, to other people. Because the other’s liable to be occluded, but what he himself says, that might not be occluded; so you find out, for instance, what he says to children or what he says to his wife or husband, what the dramatization of “control yourself” was. “How would you go about so-and-so, telling somebody to control himself?” This, by the way, is practically the essence of the psychodrama, which is a therapy which is very close to center. You get the person saying what he would say in a given situation or doing what he would do in a given situation or get him whipped up artificially into anger or so on and you pull the engram into a dramatization right on top. It’s very dangerous to go too far on this, by the way, and right in “orgasm” therapy, (not a single smile)—they inadvertently sometimes train a person into convulsing. And sometimes a person can’t get into convulsing and it just keys this thing in solidly and they will dramatize it.

One young psychiatrist had this so strongly that he had to sit down on the curb—he had it so strongly. It was trained into him. We never could quite get it through his head that it was an engram performing. He thought it was something he’d developed himself. And we could go back and turn this thing off and on by running engrams, and it was very well developed. It was all the way down the bank. He was what you would call a convulsive case, very tough.

You can actually make a person start dramatizing an engram and wind up by keying it in. So don’t start dramatizing it without doing something about it. This is not very dangerous. It is only one of these mild little risks of no great importance, but certainly at all times you should safeguard against making this person go through the same emotions time after time after time because you will start to key in one of his engrams after a while. The only reason you want this dramatization at all is so that you can go right down the track and find the engram.

Now, the engram is usually in more or less the same words. You go down the track, then, to the moment of pain or unconsciousness which contains the record. First we listen to the jukebox playing one of the current horrors and we are standing in front of the thing and we are gathering up handfuls of sounds that—I mean the stuff is—just as far as therapy is concerned—seldom more valuable than trying to grab handfuls of sound off the front of the speaker. But we at least listen to it there and then when we have listened to it then we open up the machine and we look into it very carefully. We find this record and we take it out like this and we bust it carefully and throw it in the wastebasket. And then that one doesn’t play anymore. You could go so far as to say that this is the chief mission of Dianetics, busting these records.

Male voice: Isn’t this method a violation of the theory to let the file clerk pick the engrams?

Well now, when I said it was most useful in control circuitry—you will just have to wait until I get down here a little further. When you’re trying to run a case with lots of control circuitry, the file clerk is something like a pitcher who is five miles from the grandstand and you are right there watching the show and you ask for a flash answer and you get this large array of fans and one says yes and one says no and one hands up playing cards and another forwards the information through to you by a note, and the peanut vendor sells you a bag of peanuts. And the pitcher—the pitcher is clear over there about twelve miles away. So you will find this condition obtaining sometimes. And this is what you do about it. You get dramatizations. You get the dramatization, you have it worked. Or we have an emotional charge on a case that’s badly closed off emotionally. We get the person back to a time when he was crying about something. We find nothing happens. As Andy Anderson brought up one day, it might even be possible to make a person pretend to cry and force some tears out and then get him into the situation gradually that way. I mean, that would be perfectly valid.

We go back down the track on all of these things and find them—we find that because of the existence of the engram, because of its nature, we are unable to get information out of it. It has denyers and it’s all sealed in and we can’t find out much about this case. We always have this little side manifestation over here, the dramatization, we can get. Mamas dramatization, Papa’s dramatization, Grandmas, Grandpas and the preclear’s own dramatizations. We try to run them on the track to get a little more content out of them, returning to the time when this was said, we get the whole playoff.

If necessary, we can then start next by making him “imagine’ what he would say in a given situation or what he would do in a given situation. And we may get data that way which, when we retrace it, will be found in his own dramatizations and the dramatizations of his parents. Or we can make him synthesize an emotion, something like that and we can get more data. And failing all these things, we always have his wife or his child.

One little boy who was not yet ten was the source of a great deal of information about Papa for me. And I just ran the boy for a while and he was very, very glad to tell me what Papa said and when Papa did this and that. And the little boy was quite amused to find out, by the way, to find out about Papa’s engram. The little kid knew all, by the way, about Dianetics.

When people start to get prenatal visio, that’s a control circuit. Anybody here got prenatal visio? All right. So you see why we can get the dramatization. Now, if you can get dramatizations in inventory and so on, you can find out then what so-and-so—what he would say under certain situations. You could write down certain words. That would do you some good.

The next thing is you want to get moments of pain or unconsciousness. You ask this person—or by hearsay, and knew that he had pneumonia or was faulted and was variously rendered non compos mentis in his youth—so we get a list of these things. He knows, for instance, he was operated on for appendicitis and that he had an exodontistry. So we get these things. One of the reasons we want these things is to know what to avoid late in the bank because we don’t want to run into any moments of pain or unconsciousness late in the bank unless we can’t help it. Naturally, when we have exodontia in the question, sometimes nitrous oxide will so snarl the whole bank that we have no choice but to isolate exodontia. We have to hit it. It’s right there. We can’t go anyplace; it’s locked up in it. And that goes for any other engram in which the preclear is stopped on the track. We have to do something to open that engram in order to get him moving on the track. And so we can often find in our inventory that his moving on the track is impeded by one of these and that he has a recall of what is happening to him.

Male voice: Would you advise knocking out of the engram the words that are holding him in it and then go earlier? 1 would try to, certainly. I would rather get him out rather than trying to run the engram because you can sit there for hours. Usually something which is holding—this is not a rule, but it is just a comment— usually something holding the preclear will deintensify. That may be of interest to you. For instance, somebody is held more or less “permanently” in birth. Birth isn’t, quite often, ready to reduce. You should shy away from birth widely. Birth sometimes is sitting right there as the—anytime the file clerk gives you birth to run you had better run it. Run the first section of it, certainly run the first section. Run the first few contractions of it, see whether or not it’s going to reduce. Run these a few times and then if it appears that those are reducing, run the whole thing. You will find that in a case like that the case will advance much more rapidly if you get rid of it.

Now, in a late-life period of unconsciousness, it’s very difficult all by itself to shut off the perceptics. Much more important, they will go on again in the basic area and there’s where one gets perceptics. Tampering with late-life moments of pain and unconsciousness is very unsatisfactory, very dangerous. You are liable to precipitate the preclear into them, get him held solidly on the track, cause yourself a great deal of trouble generally.

Fortunately, when using the reverie, when we go into a late-life period of unconsciousness, what we restimulate will ordinarily settle out in from three to ten days. That’s an important thing for you to know But if it’s gone into with narcosynthesis, it is permanently keyed in until you do something about it Dianetically, If you go into the thing by hypnosis, amnesia trance, you may key it in permanently until at last you can strip it down to release it. So that is why narcosynthesis and amnesia trance are dangerous. That is the whole reason they are dangerous. Because one goes into something, restimulates a moment of pain and unconsciousness, it won’t lift because it’s too late in the bank. And then we have the thing in a permanent restimulation, Male voice: What about a preclear who has practiced self-hypnosis?

They can be resolved fairly easily. As a matter of fact, in self-hypnosis he almost—I would say he could never get into a late period of unconsciousness that would be very destructive to him. He would just pass out when he hit the thing. It takes an auditor to push the thing through, Male voice: Would the auditor run into a hard spot when he runs into those?

Would the auto-ability hold the auditor back?

Male voice: Yes, if the auditor is working a preclear who has practiced self-hypnosis.

Oh, this is just another case of “control yourself,” You just knock out this control circuitry as it was installed, usually, in auto-hypnosis. It has been installed by a hypnotist and that will lie on one’s prenatal engrams about controlling oneself. That just reinforces the circuitry. Anyone who can do auto has this sort of thing in the bank. Anyone who comes up to you and says, “I can hypnotize myself,” you know that Mama or Papa had a habit of saying, “Control yourself” or the doctor was very insistent about telling the mother to control herself, Male voice: How about early lives?

They’re almost a certain type of control circuits. This is a beautiful type of dub-in, Male voice: Well, for one example, the individual died at twenty-two years of age and a student at Harvard University. He gave his name at that time. And merely for his own satisfaction he sent a letter to Harvard and asked them to look up the record to see if there was such a name and if the individual was at a certain age when he died, what he died of And the return letter was received about three days ago and I saw the letter which confirmed it Yes, that’s very interesting. Was this person supposed to have died at twenty-two years of age?

Male voice: Yes. But how long—what was the date of the death, 1850?

Male voice: Well, it was fifteen years supposedly between lives, reincarnations. He died after twenty-two years of age. I really cannot remember the date.

When one understands the tremendous amount of data which the analytical banks hold, this is not even peculiar. Such data can get fished up in the most remarkable fashion. Anyone who has practiced automatic writing10 is aware of the enormous amounts of data which can come around by the back door.

Male voice: What is the back door in this case?

The back door in this case is dub-in. I am calling it dub-in and will continue to do so until such time as somebody starts producing past lives, ostensibly spoken in Gaelic which lift very easily when in English. And that’s the Achilles’ heel of a past life. A lot of interesting data is on this. There is a lot of telepathy, clairvoyance—that is all in the same group of research. One is not stating that these things are flatly so-and-so and we mustn’t research them anymore. But it is in that body of research, and cases resolve without any attention to telepathy, clairvoyance, past lives, past deaths and so on. The case is resolved. As a net result, it is a bullpen over here and it is a bullpen with a big question mark over the door.

Male voice: You are carrying on a program of research?

Oh, definitely. We have some of the craziest people in the world carrying on this program.

Male voice: That point of reincarnation. I went back to a reincarnation and I said that I waited thirty years for birth. Well, I have gotten my answer on that. My flash answer when anybody asks me how old I am is five. I am thirty-five now. That’s the file clerk’s way of telling me that I have been waiting thirty years to come up to present time.

All right. Honestly, nothing has greater interest to me than psychic phenomena. I started playing with psychic phenomena at a very early age and one of these days I will even do you an Indian rope trick up here. The audience pays a hundred dollars admission fee though. It costs that much to rig the thing up.

All right, after that digression, let’s get on with Step One. Step One isn’t too terribly important. I don’t know why I’m spending that much time on it. It is terribly important for you to know the loss of allies, and this, incidentally, will be very occluded material usually. The most occluded you will find will be the great-grandparents because the parents were probably occluded on it and the parents may give quite remarkable misinformation to the child concerning his grandparents. Because this was Grandma, after all, to the parents and he has an occlusion on it and a grief charge in his own right, and so when information is relayed it’s relayed incorrectly.

The number of these incorrect relays is astonishing. One day a preclear turned up—the first one that happened on this—a statement had been made that the great-grandparents had been dead, all of them, long before the child was even conceived and so they were ruled out as grief discharges. And it came along a short distance in the case, it became apparent that there was heavy grief on the case but there was nobody dead nowhere. We couldn’t find anybody dead. And so I asked this preclear to find if he could find a family Bible. He did, and the great-grandparents, both of them, died within a week of each other when the preclear was one-and-a-half years of age. And they had been the source of sympathy for Mama all during her pregnancy. And they had been the ones who bossed everybody around with great regard to the care of that child up till the age of a year and a half. And when they died there was a great deal of to-do about the whole thing and everybody was quite upset because they were very fine old people. It laid in a grief charge in this preclear that took about an hour and a half—oh, one box of Kleenex—when the case started to move. So I don’t trust anybody on the subject of great-grandparents anymore. And it has been borne out consistently with me that this data is the most unreliable present time data that you get, is the death of great-grandparents. The death of grandparents is sometimes off, but usually the child has been told by his parents when the grandparents died because after all, the grandparents of the child were Mama and Papa to the parents. And if there is a bad chain of aberration going along the line there, why, the parent told about his parents very easily. Usually they were antagonists.

Now, on other allies, many other allies, very often some of the strongest allies are not members of the family. And they’re somebody who came in there—this washerwoman or there was a nurse someplace or—one I ran into was a social worker. And this preclear had grown up in a tenement and the only breath of life that this preclear got up to the age of about eight was this social worker who came in and was very kind to him, reassured him, tried to help him out in life and then at the age of eight was run over and killed in his sight by a truck. Boy, was that case occluded! That case had curtains, opaque, everything else, anything, when you started toward any kind of an emotional charge in that case. The auditor would go right straight down, you know, and the preclear would run down the track and then—it just wasn’t there. That person had not been alive up to the age of eight. There was really a shut-off, terrific shut-off Now therefore, when you are going for allies, the data which you get on inventory is usually erroneous data. But it does do this for you—it lets you rule out all the people that he told you were allies as being the hidden one, if there’s a hidden ally in the case. So you take all these people and you say, “Well, none of these were it, probably.” And this, by mathematical subtraction then—the number of people who might have been around and the number of people that he says were around, when the number of people that he didn’t say were around—one of those is an ally. So you see, this—sometimes I have actually had people tell me flatly that the person was an ally and the person turned out to be an ally and there was a grief charge on the loss of the ally.

Male voice: Would the loss of an ally of the mother during pregnancy create a bad sympathy situation?

Oh, yes. But not really—here’s something interesting about that. A little girl—the mother, when the little girl was on the way, lost her mother. And Mama died at about the sixth month of pregnancy—what would be the child’s grandparent died. And, “Oh, Mother, Mother, I miss you so. How could you possibly leave me? Well, I will see you in heaven,” and all this sort of stuff is in there with terrific whoops and caterwauls. And this child, at the age of ten, had her mother separated from the father. They separated and Mama went away and left the child in the custody of the father. And it was most mysterious, because Mother had never done anything to this child but beat and nag, and all of a sudden Mama disappears over the horizon and the child was told about it, thinking the child would probably say, “Well, thank God.” And instead of that, the child does a complete dive. That grief engram keyed in at the beginning—right there early in the track, and made the case ball up right there. The child became morose, endocrine balance went out of gear, studies fell off in school, all sorts of things happened like this.

On working on the child for a short time, one suspected that there must be something of a strange nature in this case. So after a great deal of cross-questioning, prosecution attorney questioning on the papa, it was divulged, “Yes, the child’s grandma died while the child was on the way.” He sure wasted our time on that. It didn’t seem important to him. We resolved the case.

Male voice: In the case you just cited, when the great-grandparents died within a week of each other, at what point on the time track would you hit the grief charge?

Where else but the moment they died?

Male voice: One and a half years?

Yes, where else? Now, under what misapprehension are you laboring? This is serious.

Male voice: I was wondering if you would get a grief charge at a later time when the child learned what death was.

Oh, no. The organism knows what death is. Somebody, by the way, some of these misapprehensions, somebody’s talking here about personality. And “I” exists from the moment of conception or earlier. It is without valence. Well now, you are talking about when you ask a person to get into his own valence, the supposition is here that he has twenty or thirty thousand mimicries which when composited together compose him. No. A person has a personality at conception, has an “I” at conception. That “I” goes forward as a complete personality, straight on through. It is genetic. And there’s a valence “I.” I can see how you would get off the track on these things, but that one is pretty wild. There is a valence “I.” I mean, that there can’t be, but there is, and when a person strikes it he knows it. It isn’t even a hit-or-miss proposition. Although on that line, by the way, telling the person to get into his own valence is often fruitless since he is in so many valences that to tell him to get into his own just shifts him around.

A junior case gets confused about what his own valence is. Therefore, if one merely coaxes the person to feel moisture, to perceive, to hear and so forth as he is running him in the engram, the next thing you get is the person in his own valence. Then he is in his own valence and he can continue on in his own valence. After one has been in his own valence a few times, after that when you say, “Shift into your own valence” he will know where his own valence is—but not until you have shown him where it is. Sometimes it’s lost, very badly lost.

Now, valence is very pertinent here on the loss of the ally because the person has the ally’s valence anyway. He is using it sort of on a mimicry basis; and then life seems to get it tricked up in some fashion so the ally goes on living after he is dead. That is to say, the preclear has lived up to this period more or less free of that valence and then-bang!—suddenly springs full into that valence. By the cause of grief associates himself, seems to get locked up in that valence by the grief discharge as though life had sort of planned a continuum of that person who is dead. Look at it that way It isn’t explained that way; it has a tighter explanation than that, but there it is.

It was postulated at one time that the reason a person went into that time was because everyone was so sad about this person’s dying and said, “He was such a good person” and “Poor old Joe. How we abused him,” and the little kid swings over to the valence because that is the winning valence because the person is dead. That’s right. Death in this society is very often accompanied by many compliments. Actually, there is one of the dullest things a person could do because who can be wronger than a dead man? He is really wrong. So you see . . .

Male voice: In returning a person to their early childhood, in every case that she returns, she’s able to see her mother and her small brother and never her father, although it’s quite apparent that he must have been there at that time. Does that definitely indicate that she’s in her father’s valence?

It definitely indicates a couple of things. Probably there is a command about not seeing her father and probably there is a valence problem in this. And it’s quite interesting when this takes place. Sometimes the case will run this way: You will run him back down the track and there he is: he can see himself, he looks around the room and so on and he sees Mama but he doesn’t see Papa. He is Papa; how can he see Papa? You see?

Male voice: That may not be unusual, but I have run into two women who at early ages were in a doll’s valence and they had engrams about it, and that’s no joke.

Well, sure. You can imagine the valence shifter there. I have found preclears who were in a dog’s valence or a cat’s valence.

Male voice: One of them describes the doll and she broke her doll on the floor and she’s all broken up; and the other one had an ugly face and smashed her doll’s face. But what do you do about it?

Well, you break the valence shifter. Somebody shifted that child into that valence.

Male voice: Mr. Hubbard, when someone kisses a dog on the mouth, isn’t that an indication that he might be in a dog’s valence, or isn’t it?

Now, that’s an interesting idea. It’s very true. And, talking about dolls and dogs, don’t omit these from your list of potential grief charges, because the dog is often—not often, but rarely the only ally a little boy might have. And all of a sudden somebody poisons the dog or the dog is run over, something of the sort, and that’s a rough one. That is probably the roughest of them.

Male voice: I ran one of those Saturday. This dog had been poisoned and the preclear has been in it ever since.

Yes, all right. Now, another interesting thing is trying to get visio on these people—as we were just mentioning—by getting visio on a person means that that person is pretty clear, as far as valence and so on is concerned; but let’s make sure when we get this visio that we are getting the visio of the person at that time. Let’s not get Mama at the age of twenty-one with long gray hair, in a 1950 business suit. Mama at the age of twenty-one, if we take it back to 1914 or 15, was probably something that Irene Castle was busily advertising through Sears and Roebuck or some such place. Outlandish costumery, and also scenery is different. The size of the scenery is different. If you have a child, for instance, returned back to his early childhood and there’s a parquet floor, why, these blocks are enormous. They’re little blocks about that big; and these great big blocks on the floor and these great big table legs, and these great big chairs and these enormous people who are mostly legs—that’s real returning.

Now, a dub-in will happily go back and look around the scenery and take a little bit out of 1950 and a little bit out of some picture book and put a scene together there. And I have never seen a dub-in yet dub in size. They don’t dub in these size relationships. It’s just too much of a strain, evidently. Demons are kind of dumb.

Now, you occasionally can check up on these people, other occlusions, very easily by having—let’s say the person’s wife is occluded. He can see everybody in the family but he can’t see his wife. And you go back down the track and he can see everybody in his childhood but can’t see his great-grandmother. So we have got a pseudo-ally combination there. It is usually not that precise but it gives you an example of what’s happening. The pseudo is occluded when the original is occluded.

Now, we have another test of allies and valences as well by the chronic somatic of the individual The chronic somatic of the individual may well be that thing from which the ally died, if an ally is dead—a counterfeit of it. The preclear s reactive mind has taken one of his own pains and injuries and has dubbed it in and tried to counterfeit this death proposition. You will very often find this.

This, on Straightwire, becomes a very important fact because you can sometimes, by discovering what an ally died from and discovering its similarity with the chronic somatic of the preclear, spot immediately that this was an ally. And sometimes you can just separate it, their identities, in such, at which moment the chronic somatic will whoosh out on you there. They’re very, very tough on the individual and they’re usually difficult to knock out when that proposition, that setup, holds.

Now, on this ally proposition, don’t be surprised to find somebody with a little boy who is his ally; that is to say, some man who has as his ally a son or a daughter or some woman who has a son or a daughter as an ally. And something happened to that son or daughter, let’s say. It isn’t just the loss of a child; it is sometimes the loss of an ally.

I know one man, a grown man, who works consistently on the basis of a little twelve-year-old girl. She is his ally. He looks up to her. He expects to be told what to do by her. He expects to do by her. He respects her judgment. Fortunately, her judgment’s excellent. I found this out. I was having a little bit of difficulty with this fellow in keeping appointments with me and so on. He was hitting one of these incidents that said, “Oh, I don’t want to lose it. Don’t make me get rid of it. Don’t, don’t. I would lose my mind if I got rid of it”—the kind of engram that created the idea that neurosis composed the personality. Then I finally learned this about him and I got a hold of this little kid and I said, “Do you know what’s best for your pop?” And I said, “Well, the best thing for your pop is to go on through this and sweep up some of this stuff. And then he won’t be quite so erratic.” And she said, “Oh, I will be so glad.” And I said, “Well, tell him to get over to my place on time.” And she said, “Sure.” So he was.

On further delving, it turned out of all things that this little twelve year old kid was his grandmother. There was enough basic coloration in his early age, basic appearance and so on, it was such a shadow of appearance but it was just enough to trigger the ally computation on it. So don’t look for it to be rare. It’s not terribly rare.

Okay. Just to finish off the Step One here, it’s very important to know about the early environment of an individual; the poor-man orientation, the failure orientation and so on. What sort of a life did he live? What sort of a life is he living? You will find a great deal of data, very valuable data in relationship to this. You can discover—well, such a broad field. I can’t just stand here and delineate it in the next two minutes. It’s very important about this.

Furthermore, you should understand his relationship to his teachers in school. Did he like school? Did he get along well in school? Did he get good grades in school? That is all telling you something very important. Allies, teachers. Teachers, allies. Now, you will find a time when he was scolded by one of these teachers and it stands in there as a royal command. The teacher may say to him, “Well, that’s all right, Johnny. Don’t be sad; we can’t all be musicians” and here’s this fellow trying to learn to play the piano when he is eighteen and he just can’t make it. That’s how commanding an ally can be. Just the thought transmitted has very high value, because of the engram bank. Because of antagonists in the vicinity, the child will associate himself very closely with an ally; and what the ally says is very important. So that we have got a “I have got to believe you” as an automatic proceeding; and because of the automatic existence of the engrams and a slight attenuation, we have as well a slight suggestibility. So in other words, he’s in a light trance. So we have this mechanism across the line. If we get rid of all the engrams, we don’t have to worry about these things.

Anybody who sits there and just wants to write down, “Are you alive?” “Yes.” “You have a name?” “Yes.” “Were you born?” “Yes”-a person who does that sort of an inventory is going to miss the vital data in the case, because he is demonstrating to the preclear that he is not very interested in him. It is during this inventory, and the reason, the chief reason, this inventory exists is that you attain an affinity with your preclear if you are auditing. And this is the mechanism with which you do it. Here’s where you get him to talking about himself; here’s where you start him becoming a little bit introverted about his own life so that he can contact it. Here’s where your whole relationship begins, so be interested in this person. Don’t ask these questions mechanically. Be very interested. Follow up these things. Get him to talking about things. You’re doing Straightwire there, you are broadening out his life. You will suddenly find that you are actually opening up occluded areas as he talks to you. That’s very important. It’s therapeutic. But above all, it is your establishment of affinity with this person. Here’s where you start.

Now you, as an auditor, become the ally of every preclear you treat if you are going to do any successful treatment at all. This is not transference so much as an operating line of affinity. You are not asking this person to be dependent upon you. You want this person to be confident in you. You must do, then, everything you can to keep that confidence in you reinforced. Breaking appointments with that person is a demonstration that you are not interested in him. Invalidating his information is demonstrating that you are not interested in him; furthermore, that you doubt him and don’t believe him. You are doing the thing that all the antagonists did to him. So you move yourself over into the bracket of an antagonist right here in the beginning of a case. Running inventory you are setting yourself up as an ally. You are committing yourself, by asking these first few questions, to continue to follow the Auditor’s Code with this person. An auditor who will consistently break appointments without warning, be late to appointments and generally make himself a bit of a worry to the preclear is, by breaking those appointments or being late to those appointments, being very, very bad as a therapist, since he is cutting down the preclear s ability to work with him—the very thing which he ostensibly is trying to build up. In other words, it starts here on the Step One, not where you put the person in reverie.

Now, I know you will appreciate that. I know, too, that occasionally a poor example is being set to you on some of these appointments and so on. But you make that example—make it a little better. And make, by all means, your own conduct towards your own preclear good. When you are late you are telling him, “You are not important.” When you say, “Well, I don’t know if I want to work on you today or not,” you are telling him that you are not interested in him. When you don’t force work on him, you are telling him also, “I am not interested in you.” It is your relationship to the preclear’s basic personality, not his engrams, which completes the alliance you are making. Now, quite in addition to that, your alliance may not be visible to you but it is nevertheless being created.

You will find in a preclear that you handle well, you can break an alliance with a preclear this way too, by the way, by losing your nerve when you are running something on him. He may be begging to come out of it. He may be pleading and finally, out of misguided soft-heartedness or just lack of nerve, you may walk off from it and say, “Well, come on up to present time.” BP has been violated. His confidence has been violated and the affinity will break. It will be hard for the next guy to get this person in processing and it will be very hard for you to get him in processing. All those points in the Auditor’s Code right down the line from one on take care of these points, and you must start to establish these points immediately when you go into Step One of Standard Procedure.

Male voice: Is it suggestible when an auditor breaks an appointment or destroys affinity—any way to reduce that at the earliest . . .

Yes, but don’t count on your being able to reduce it. Sometimes they are so thoroughly latched up to engrams that they won’t reduce. There’s absolutely no excuse for making an appointment and breaking it. The best way to get around it is to make appointments tentatively—“If I come,” “Unless something breaks down,” along this line, and so on, to make it very positive.