The Anatomy of Circuitry (501125)
Date: 25 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I want to tell you a definition of all circuitry. Circuitry consists of “you” phrases. They are phrases addressed from an exterior “I” to the person as “you”: “I have to tell you,” “I have to control you,” and so forth, “You’ve got to control yourself” is still a “you” addressing the “I,” you see? That is the form of the phrase. And the phrase is invariably received from persons who seek to nullify the independence of the judgment of others. These “you” phrases, which are circuits and become circuits, are from those persons who seek to nullify the independence of the judgment of others.
My, my, how well that fits some parents. They wonder why the kid has such a tough time in life. The kid says, “I think I’ll go out and play.” “No, you can’t go out and play,” There isn’t any reason why he can’t go out and play, but, “No, you can’t go out and play.” “I think I’ll have something to eat.” “No, you don’t want anything to eat.” Next time he says, “I’m—I’m hungry, I’m hungry.” And he’s told, “Why, you’re not hungry, you just ate.” Persons who seek to nullify the independence of the judgment of others are people from whom control circuitry is gained. All circuitry is actually to some degree control circuitry, but there is that specific species called “control circuitry” that I’ll cover in a moment. But circuitry is always from persons who are seeking to nullify the judgment of others.
This doesn’t mean just that they’re trying to control others. That is a secondary method of controlling. There’s one method of controlling. Let’s say here is Matilda and Oscar, and Matilda has found out long since that she is not able to control Oscar physically. In other words, she’s not able to throw him on his back and kick his teeth down his throat when he does things that she doesn’t like. So she found out she couldn’t control him that way. So she tries to order him around to some degree and she’s found out that doesn’t work and she gets a bad reaction. So she takes the next possible step: she nullifies him. She cuts him down enough so that she can control him or anybody can. And she does this very simply: “You’re wrong, you don’t know anything, nobody likes you.” So in other words, she cuts off his affinity, communication and reality and just violates it, invalidates him completely; and if she works on him hard enough, eventually, sure enough, he doesn’t amount to anything anymore and she is then able to triumph in her dire danger.
The only trouble with Matilda is, is normally she wasn’t in danger. She doesn’t get into danger until she has sought by this means to cut somebody else down to sort of overcome them. And if she cuts them down enough, all of a sudden one day he’ll have a resurgence, and there she’ll be lying out in the woodpile with an axe in her skull.
In other words, these efforts to control cause a recontrol. These efforts to cut down and nullify somebody else are all repercussive. They interact. In fact, any government which harms the head of any individual within its borders is doomed. It has started at that moment its dwindling spiral and is done for. And it may be around for a couple of hundred years but it’s done, because the interplay has already been started. Government, harm, control, so forth; it has been unjust and has actually injured an individual irresponsibly. Let me put it that strongly. The first time a government does that, it has started its dwindling spiral. And that dwindling spiral will wind up in the rubble and dust which became Rome, which became Babylon, Chaldea—all the rest of these civilizations—and which will be this one too. Gets repercussion. For instance, the government kills a man. It says, “Well, we’ll get no trouble from this fellow, we’ll bump him off.” That’s very simple. Boom! He’s dead. Only that fellow isn’t dead; he had friends. Furthermore, the people who killed him, as part of the government, are themselves suddenly convinced “This government’s dangerous, it can kill people.” Although they seemed to have enjoyed killing this guy, they’ve still got that. So they become a little more protective themselves. The individuality, then, starts to pick up beyond where it ought to be. And instead of being individual they become aberratively separate, which is a bit different than individualism. Individualism would be really doing what “I” wants to do, and an aberrated individualism would be doing what one did because of the reactions caused by others caused by this— interactions, in other words—reactive thought.
So, this chain is very easily started and it’s rather hard to interrupt. I point out the fact that it can be, and has been in the past, interrupted. For instance, the British sailors mutinied along about eighteen— oh, they had two or three mutinies, but was oh, in Nelson’s days or right afterwards. And they decided that they weren’t going to put up with it any longer and they just decided that this was the way things were going to be; they were going to be a lot better- And they didn’t kill anybody to do it. There was a very smart man in charge of the last mutiny. It was a very much of a white mutiny. They just quit. No ships sailed, they were very polite and courteous to their officers, they were courteous to all the shore officials, they conducted themselves with decorum and so on. And the British government took a look at all this, tried to make trouble, was unable to make trouble and collapsed and surrendered in the face of this, and the British navy became more habitable. Flogging through the fleet and the types of rations and all these things got changed. And it started a cycle which went the other way, because there was a group which wasn’t using violence all of a sudden. It was refusing to use violence.
Now, we see this has gone into the philosophies of many civilizations and many cults: you don’t use violence. But you see that it’s got a limitation on it. If one says, “Well, the thing to do, you know, if they want to hurt you, why, you just lie down and let them walk on you.” Oh, I’m afraid somebody missed the point. What one does is face force with reason and refuse to partake of the force but continue to give out reason. If one does this he is using far more horsepower than the force has got. And actually, it is a tremendous kickback against the force.
You see, force is borrowed from life’s contact with material universe. And life gets confused in these turbulences and says, “What must be done here? Well, you know the laws of interaction and inertia and so forth, the thing to do is to apply a force to reason or force to life. And if you apply a force to life, then naturally these people, these things, they’ll all go off someplace and lie down and behave.” And of course the second that thought sees something kicking back against it to this degree, which is not reasonable, which is force, it says, “Aha! That’s material universe stuff. Yeah, that’s material universe and we’re supposed to conquer that. So whom!” And you get this tremendous boil-up of turbulence, whereas if somebody will say, “We’re not supposed to conquer that particularly, except in this way.” Because you see, force has this Achilles’ heel, that it can be conquered; but it has to be conquered by reason. One uses the fundamental, then, that life has always used to conquer the material universe.
From the tiniest step forward, on to the most complex step (such as the building of New York City), life has been doing this to the material universe: it learns a law of the material universe and then it turns that law around so that another part of the material universe is brought in under its aegis, and now it takes this section of laws, and so on, and it turns those around. It’s learning what makes the material universe tick. What are its laws? What are its basic rules and axioms? How does it function? And the more life learns about how this basic thing functions, it just keeps turning itself around on itself.
Engineer goes down to build a big dam across a river and he builds up something there and conduits the river one way or the other, and the first thing you know he’s using the river to build a dam to block the river. And unless he does that he doesn’t get a dam built. And that’s the way life works.
From the moment thought first contacted the first chemical and virus and started to make the first cell, it was conquering that little law. And you didn’t have to know much, but you just knew just that much and then you turned it back against the material universe; and then a little more, and then bigger, more, we know more, know more. We’re going at such a geometric progression on the way, that people talk now about the ease with which we could blow up a planet. They haven’t gotten up to the point now of realizing that they need that planet. But as they did this, pain kept coming in on them occasionally and there’d be these turbulence areas, and so occasionally thought would get all mixed up with the material universe.
The laws of force, then, would get mistaken for the laws of thought, and the two of them would go into a turbulence. And the second that turbulence got big enough—in other words, engrams, aberrations—as soon as that thing gets big enough, life just has to back out, because it is no longer reasonable enough to take the material universe and start turning it back on itself. Then is the moment the material universe starts winning. So there is what happens between two people, two nations, children, parents and so forth, is they have borrowed, because of these aberrations and their turbulences, physical pain. Physical pain is caused by contact with the material universe with too much strength, force. This pain has gotten turbulent, and so the laws of the material universe—which are those of force, interaction, reaction, and so on—get turned against thought. And every time they do, thought reacts against them because that is the natural, basic line of reaction.
Thought sees force. Thought says, “Pick it up and conquer it.” Natural reaction. If you get a human being convinced that he no longer has any right to attack force with reason, where does he go? He goes into apathy. He quits. He’s dead. And the fact of the matter is, thought might be said to have just retreated from him, left him. “We don’t want this guy, he can’t conquer any more MEST. We’re through with him.” He’s practically dead. And that’s the aspect of apathy: no life. So you see, making a child obey by applying force and nothing but force would inevitably wind up into the fact the child either goes into a complete state of apathy or he turns around and conquers. And obedience, blind obedience in the face of force is something of which man had better be awfully afraid, because it’s the stuff that wipes him out.
Now, when we talk about circuits, then, we’re talking about the material universe forces which have channeled themselves through another human being or society and have gone in, through aberration, into another human being. You understand that conduit? We’re talking about the laws of force which have gone in, so that one human being has made the mistake of taking another human being as a thing of force, MEST, and he’s trying to control it or he’s trying to force his own conclusions on it. He isn’t permitting this other person to be an individual with individual judgment. He is not permitting this person to be a responsible, judging, bit of little theta, of thought. He isn’t permitting this person to go on the lines of being himself, of being thought and so on. He is trying to interrupt that process. And that’s why circuits are so thoroughly sour and so completely bad. “You have to do what I tell you” says “You do not have the right to use your own thoughts and judgment about this.” Now, when that phrase is given just like that in the analytical world, without any basic reactive thought about it at all—when it’s handed out like that, people that are told that thing say, “This guy’s crazy.” So he is. But when we have here all of these things lying in areas of turbulence—”You’ve got to do what I tell you”—and it’s all surrounded by pain and out of this pain reaches this force and hits this individual and it’s the reactive mind now, is activated to a point where it, being much closer and much more a part of the material universe, can say to the analytical mind from an unseen and hidden place, “Whumph! You’ve got to do what I tell you”; there’s something there that is MEST controlling the individual That’s why these things are bad. They get in there and all of a sudden the person starts to split up into other identities and so on.
Here’s circuitry, [drawing on blackboard] Here’s “I.” But here are two circuits. This is a section of the analyzer, see, that’s chopped off here. This is all analyzer, let’s say, but here’s the residence of “I,” and these two circles, the one on the left side and the one on the right side, are circuits; control circuits or just plain circuits. They are pieces of the analyzer roped off and they say (each one of them says), “I am going to tell you what to do. I am going to tell you what to do.” A piece of the analyzer has been borrowed and this circuit says, “I’m going to tell you what to do,” and this one over here on the left says, “I’m going to tell you what to do.” And “I,” here in the center, has a tough time kicking back against all of this. And as a matter of fact, as these grow and get charged, they take in more and more analyzer. They take in more and more of the individual as they become charged up, until finally “I” gets less and less and less, and whoomph! And your psychotic is one whose “I” has moved over into the center of one of these circuits. And actually “I” is a false “I” which has taken up residence within a circuit of some sort- There is your computational, you might call him, psychotic. “I” is no longer here in the center; “I” has moved over into the middle of a circuit which says, “You have got to do what I tell you.” Now, just in the normal course of human affairs a person, by shifting valence, becomes the “I” over here on the right (center of the circuit) and the one over here on the left from time to time. So that this person is very subdued, let us say, most of the time. He’s got circuits inside his reactive mind that are saying, “You’ve got to do what I tell you,” and then these circuits go ahead and tell him what to do. These are residues from old engrams left by Mama and Papa and so forth. They’re laid in, they’re actual engrams. “You’ve got to do what I tell you.” This fellow is very mild. All of a sudden, one moment, he says to somebody, “Now, I want you to go get me a glass of water.” And this person says, “Oh, I’m busy.” The first thing you know, his analyzer shuts down in the area of his own “I.” He’s got a restimulation, shuts down his analyzer and boom! “I” will move over into one of these circuits and the fellow is temporarily not himself. He is temporarily insane. And he says to this person that he asked to get a glass of water, “You’ve got to do what I tell you!” There is the circuitry passing along. Now you see, in other words, he can shift—over, in. [gap] Your schiz gets supercharged by secondary engrams up to a point where he is either this big circuit over here on the left or he’s this big circuit here on the right and there is precious little left of that center circuit, so that “I” is never in control but these other things go into control and he starts changing his personality. Of course, he changes his personality because these “I’s” are laid in by other personalities than his own. He has been usurped by other people. Thought is trying to conquer MEST. In the process of aberration, thought, in attempting that conquest, gets human beings confused with MEST, tries to control them, and sure enough, winds up by doing so. But this control is resident in a live mind, and being resident there of course plays havoc because the thought lines, harmonics, everything is disrupted and this person is trying to apply force and it really gets very, very badly fouled up. But this is your normal picture of a schizophrenic, you might say.
Now, a person who is just caught someplace on the track is still going around into these other personalities, moving from valence to valence, so on. These are circuits, [taps blackboard] It’s what we’ve been talking about. They are false “I’s” laid down into the mind. As sleepers, they’re laid there, they are part of an engram, just a standard engram, but they’ve slept along just fine till all of a sudden one day they became terrifically restimulated. They got a secondary engram laid on top of them. They charged way up and then they took over and submerged “I.” You want to get this “I” back, you release that secondary engram. The secondary engram takes the charge out of these circuits and “I” can come back up again.
You would be amazed, but a lot of psychotics cease to be psychotics at the first grief charge you blow out of them. And many psychotics are, to be colloquial, all ready to bleed. You take them down the track, they’re so explosive that they just start exploding in all directions, they’re so supercharged with all of this stuff. And where the points they were psychotic, their aberrative pattern, let us say, does not alter, but it deintensifies so they’re no longer psychotic along this aberrative pattern. They’re not crazy. Because “I” is in there to take over some control of its own. And “I” is supposed to be in control of this organism and whatever upsets the control of “I” has upset the control of the whole being. So the person who was responsible for the circuitry in the preclear was a person who denied others independence of decision as to himself, groups, the future generation and mankind. Every time an effort was made to upset that judgment was a lock on an engram. Every time an effort is made to upset one’s right to be oneself, to communicate with oneself (along any of the four dynamics), may become a lock on engrams which knock this out. You see? That should tell you where to look for these things very quickly. Now, control circuitry is—it’s all control circuitry to some degree but some of these circuits are very specific. They are where you get a terrifically dominating person. You can have circuitry laid in by a very sympathetic person. “Well, you just had better take it easy. You had better not work too hard. Now, you know how you are, dear, you’re not very strong.” And we get that inside of an engram and it is so persuasive. That is actually a tertiary effort to control somebody but, you see, it’s not very intimate. So we have in degrees of bombast with which this is done. But the degree of bombast only affects the false emotion on this engram. It doesn’t affect the effectiveness of it, because this engram can charge way up to where this circuit is absolutely terrific. So we get this nice, demure, pleasant little lady and she is sitting there and she says, “Control yourself, dear. Don’t cry. After all, we know for the best, you know, and all’s well; and just control yourself, dear.” And boy, you get one of those circuits charged up and God, an auditor has a hard time locating the thing unless he knows this. That here we have a supercontrolled individual who’s very quiet, who never cries, who never emotes, who never bombasts, who walks through life a very model of propriety. “Oh, Father was a nice man. He never raised his voice—of course, nobody liked him very much either—but he never raised his voice and he was such a nice fellow. And of course, Mama went all to pieces. She went to the insane asylum. Mama was crazy.” And we finally find out what this fellows chatter was: suppress yourself, suppress yourself, suppress yourself, “Don’t cry, don’t move, don’t have bad manners, don’t do this,” but all so pleasantly. You see? There is really supercontrol. That’s supercontrol, because that seems to say, I’m your friend and that’s why I’m telling you this. Now, just control yourself. I’ll kill you after a while but that’s fine.” So don’t look for the person who is terrifically bombastic.
Very often, incidentally, you will find somebody who is dramatizing and he is being highly irrational and he’s saying, “Be reasonable, you’ve got to be reasonable,” and so forth and he’s being anything but reasonable, but that’s just part of the engram content. In such a way, “You’ve got to be controlled like I am,” and the fellow will be screaming and practically knocking off the roof.
These circuits are pretty bad, but these are very easy to spot.
Who was the tumultuous person in your family? “Oh,” they say, “that’s Pop.” “Well, what did Pop used to say?” “Oh, hell, he used to really ruin me. He used to come home at night and he’d . . .” so on.
You’ve got a person who is a supercontrol case, supercircuitry case, and you just can’t quite figure out how to get to this case, because you’ve found already five people who probably laid in the circuits and every time you got to those circuits and ran out some engrams that had the circuits in them, nothing happened, the case didn’t improve. And these persons—obviously bombastic, mean, cussed people that obviously would just ruin this person; and then we find out that it was Aunt Tizzy. And Aunt Tizzy was always so nice. Every time he got sick, why, Aunt Tizzy would come over and say, “Well, it all comes down to this, honey: I love you, and you must take care of yourself You know you’re not very strong and you’ve just got to control yourself now. And don’t cry.” And so on and so on and so on, and this poor guy has been walking through life.
Because the more sympathetic—get that, sympathetic—you know what sympathetic vibration is: you get one tuning fork moving over here that you strike, and because this other one is in pitch, the other one will start to vibrate; sympathetic vibration. You ever hold a hat while a symphony orchestra was playing and feel the thing vibrate? You get the vibrations inside the hat? It’s vibrating sympathetically because the tones hitting it, the harmonics hitting it, are in the same pitch, you see, as this thing will resonate to. So a person comes along and says, “I am very sympathetic to you.” Oh, boy, this sympathy is really deadly. [gap] . . . UI am very, very sympathetic to you,” more or less. This person’s mood is saying this. “I,” and the individual, has a tendency to vibrate to this. “I am taking care of you. I will always take care of you. Stay right here.” Now, there is why a sympathy engram is deadly. Because the thing gets in there. The circuit is there, it is a circuit and it’s pretending all this time, “I am your friend. I’m going to take care of you. All you do is have to stay here. Everything is going to be all right. You just mind your father and your mother and you just mind me and everything will be all right. I’ll come back and see you anytime, now that you need me.” Yak, yah, yak. Anyway, it’s in here. It’s in here solid, given in a moment of delirium or something like that. And you’ll work with this case and you’ll sweat over this case, trying to find out who in the name of common sense came in and pretended that this person was this person. In other words, who got an identification? “I am your friend,” that is to say, “We’re identical.” “I will take care of you,” therefore we have some identicalness. “I love you,” therefore we have affinity. “I talk to you, I pet you on the head”—get that perceptic communication, pleasant perceptic communication. “Everything I tell you is the truth.” This is reality. “I am your reality now; nothing else is your reality. Nothing in the whole world is real except me.” Oh, this is gorgeous stuff!
Now, you see how all this boils down to the sympathy ally, and why the ally is so awfully important. So when you’re looking for circuitry, don’t just look for bombast. What you are looking for is someone who interrupts, knowingly or unknowingly, the identity or judgment of another person. There’s the person you’re looking for.
Grandma was very fine. You ever hear of a child being spoiled? Well, children don’t get spoiled with affection or by being given things- You can give the kid Ford cars to hammer and break the windshields on or do anything you want to with this kid. You can give him anything, but don’t interrupt him. [gap] . . . hasn’t any big vengeance against the world and you haven’t built him up with a lot of force; you can give him practically anything and he’ll handle it all right. He won’t break it up, except by accident and his own clumsiness, but it’ll be actual clumsiness, inability to handle himself. You could just smother him with affection, gifts, everything else and you wouldn’t . . . [gap] Give him the car now, and let’s say, “Now, of course, you can go every place but down to your clubhouse and to school in this car. And I think you better have it oiled and greased every Monday. And I’m giving you this car only on the conditions that . . .” A person’s independence is wrecked about this car. So, taking the supercontrol over the child, the child will come back this way: that car will wind up against a lamppost. That’s right, that’s where your destruction angles come in on these things. And this child has been spoiled there because somebody else was trying to control “I,” and “I” is the one who is supposed to control it, and “I” left in his own control will cooperate 100 percent and thoroughly and fully with other people, groups—all in accordance with how much he understands of the needs of the rest of thought and life. “I” will cooperate. Try to control “I,” and “I” says “Hmm, MEST. Whoomph!” And there’s where your turbulences come in, there’s what happens, and your control circuitry is where this effort has been made to enter the mind and the personality of another person. [gap] . . . identities, and so forth, which will tell him what to do. This is commonly known in armies and in families as “training” a person to have a “social disposition.” And if you give them enough of a “social disposition,” I can guarantee that you can find them over in Napa or someplace. The people in Napa have been given too much social disposition.
Thank you.