The Anatomy of the Demon Circuit (500722)
Date: 22 July 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Okay. What does this class feel itself most inadequate or deficient about?
Male voice: Demon circuitry.
Demon circuitry “Once upon a time there was a demon . . .” Is that the way we start this lecture then? His name was “I.” Demon circuitry This is where it takes a little skill in Dianetics, I don’t wonder. You mean some of you have been running some cases and haven’t been able to knock out demon circuits. Is that right?
Male voice: That’s right.
Well, let’s go over the anatomy of a demon circuit. Okay? The demon circuit is installed as a part of an engram. It is a part of an engram which requires, by its statement, computation. It is installed on a “you” basis by some “I.” The “you” does not then enter into a part of the being, actually, but stands off with a separateness from the actual “I.” The demon circuit dictates to the actual “I” in the mind.
In times when that engram is very much restimulated, the whole engram can be redramatized, and at that time the person who is dramatizing the engram will dramatize this part of the engram which creates a demon circuit and he can set one up in somebody else. It’s quite common: contagion. “You’ve got to learn to control yourself. You’ve got to control yourself. You’ve got to get a grip on yourself”—that sort of a demon circuit is “you” addressing “I.” Actually, it postulates the picture that there is an “I” separate from “I” in the mind which is talking to the actual “I.” Now, you see what I mean by that. Actually this is not very difficult, [drawing on blackboard] Standard bank. File clerk with his attention units. Reactive circuits. The amount of analyzer available usually in “I.” And here’s “I.” Attention units—assembled series of attention units up here. All right.
Here is the file clerk. He’s trying to put stuff through to “I.” So your file clerk wouldn’t be down here, he’d be in present time. [tapping on blackboard] This is your past—whenever the hell that is. (laughter) No, he’s trying to get data through here. This is your flash answer.
Well now, an engram is located down here in the bank someplace, in the engram bank. We’ll just draw a good orderly engram bank here. [sounds of rapid marking on blackboard] (laughter) Usual standard bank, engram nicely filed. And this thing has come into restimulation, and maybe it’s in chronic restimulation. “You’ve got to get a hold on yourself,” something like that, is a bit of a holder; there may be other holders in the engram.
Anyway, the engram then is in chronic restimulation. It sets up and takes—cuts down the analyzer a trifle, installs into it a circuit and this is an “I.” So your flash answer comes through, only we’re talking now about this as a generalized picture of a demon circuit. Your flash answer actually reroutes. “You’ve got to control yourself” and so forth, this sometimes hitches up with engrams which say “You can’t let them know, you don’t dare tell, you’ve got to keep it hidden, it is a secret. Now, damn you, you’ve got to forget, you’ve got to forget, you know you’ve got to forget,” that sort of thing. This can all sort of be a compounded “I” — various circuits of that type can build up.
There can be a lot of these circuits in the mind. That’s what’s peculiar about the mind, it’s got so damn much space. Here apparently is just a few centimeters—a few cubic centimeters of cranial content. When you start looking at the amount of equipment that’s in this thing you start to get very suspicious of where thought and the mechanisms of thought are really located. So all of this is just analogy, nothing else. “I” comes through here, and he might go this way, “You’ve got to control yourself, you’ve got to do this.” An engram tries to come through and the person’s regressed on the track. Let’s say it’s a painful emotion engram, file clerk tries to put it through, “I” is now regressed to this point [drawing on blackboard] and there should be a charge on that and it’s saying, “You’ve got to control yourself, you’ve got to get hold of yourself, you mustn’t be so emotional.” And we try to get emotion out of this engram and it’s just flat.
Furthermore, “You can’t see, you can’t hear, you can’t feel, you’d better not listen to that, you’d better not pay attention to what they’re telling you,” something like that; that’s an occlusion circuit. It’ll sit in here, stuff will come in from the file clerk and it’ll go here and you just get blanks. I’m trying not to be too complicated about this demon circuitry proposition.
The reason the control demon circuit is important is it alone makes it possible for the engrams to cause a person to squirm out of the control of the auditor. In other words, the existence of a “control yourself” circuit establishes, you might say, another auditor over “I” It’s not part of “I” — establishes another auditor in there. And you as the auditor saying to the person, “All right. Let’s go back to the earliest moment of pain or discomfort,” and the fellow says, “Well, I’m up here in present time. Ha-ha-ha-ha. Yeah, I just can’t seem to get back.” Well actually, if there weren’t any pseudoauditor in there, you said, “The file clerk will now give us the earliest moment of pain or discomfort available to resolve the case. Somatic strip will go to the beginning of the incident. When I count from one to five, snap my fingers, you will give me the first words in the engram. One-two-three-four-five,” (snap) and you’d get the first words, get them repeated a few times—you’d go on through the incident. There isn’t anything else about it, it just would work that way. Because basic personality is strong enough that even “I” on the thing can’t buck the auditor who wants somebody’s engrams unless there’s a pseudoauditor.
If you called these demon circuits pseudoauditors, you might get a much clearer picture of what’s actually happening. Because the actual fact is that these things have nothing to do with “I.” They have blocked off a part of the analyzer and they actually use it. Stream of conscious— fellow goes around and he says, “My goodness, what am I going to do today? Let me see, what am I going to do today? Ah, let me think about it. Well . . . I don’t think I’d better go swimming because . . .” That’s good fast thought, that’s typical stream of consciousness caused by demon circuitry.
A person without this sort of nonsense going on in his head is . . . And by the way, how many of you here have audio demons? You got some audio demons? Yeah?
Male voice: Every time I read.
Uh-huh? What’s the audio demon do when you read?
Male voice: It reads to me!
It reads to you! Now, isn’t that nice of it. (laughter) A chronic audio demon, that’s all right. Okay, that’s a piece of circuitry. Who else has got—what’s it do?
Female voice: Mine is with me constantly—it thinks all my thoughts.
It thinks your thoughts for you, isn’t that just sweet?
Female voice: Lovely, just lovely.
Do you have a stream of consciousness going by on it or what?
Female voice: Practically constantly. I had occasion to be alone, by myself for a few days last summer and I realized at the end of about three days that I had been talking to myself internally: I mean it does go very constantly. It would go on and go on. “Well, how do you feel today?” Do you—anybody got one that says, “Well, how do you feel today? Well, I guess I feel all right.” That’s awfully common, that piece of circuitry. Yes?
Male voice: I think I’ve got one that gives flash answers to me.
Yeah?
Male voice: To me!
Gives flash answers to you.
Male voice: Yeah.
Oh, you mean you ask yourself for flash answers . . .
Male voice: Yeah. . . . and you get flash answers. Yeah, that’s interesting!
Now, when you get a demon circuit of . . .
Yes, Swanson?
Second male voice: I just hit one today. “Hurry up and get through this. Control yourself’’ Oh, yeah? Did you have anything talking to you in the past?
Second male voice: I’ve gotten one or two as body commands.
Well, people should think about this for a moment because its impossible to me that there are as many people as still exist without having raised their hands, who haven’t had demon circuits.
Male voice: Some are more obscure, Ron.
Second male voice: I had some demon circuits.
You’ve blown a lot of them out.
Male voice: Some are more obscure. I thought you said audio . . .
Well, that’s what I said at first, is audio circuits.
Now—now you get the impression circuits, just the impression of thought, impression of criticism, impression of this and so on.
Yes?
Male voice: I got impressions.
Yeah. You get impressions of thought coming through. Now, there are not only internal-appearing demon circuits, there are actually demon circuits which pretend to be external. People who have these external circuits have somebody walking around with them talking to them. And they’ve maybe never noticed it till you call it to their attention. “Do you ever have anybody talk to you and so forth when actually nobody’s present?” And the person thinks about it, “No. Well, yes. Well yes, as a matter of fact, I get all my advice out from here.” (laughter) There’s an audio circuit existing in thin air. Really audio.
I’m just showing you here that you’ve got “Now I’ve got to do all of your thinking for you, I’ve got to tell you what to do, for heaven’s sakes.” This is so typical from a mother to a child. “I have to do everything around here. Good heavens. You are always making a mess. I’ve got to tell you what to do.” That sort of thing, that’s typical circuitry. So you get a demon circuit then that sits out here as a pseudo “I,” has no connection with this “I” and it says to this “I,” “Now, the thing for you to do is to go down to the corner and you get two loaves of bread and you go so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so.” Sometimes they do very accurate thinking for you, “Go down and get this and then I think you better go over and get some gas in the car.” Now, I’ve seen people do this all of a sudden: stand for a moment, blank, and then say . . . (laughter) You expect them to turn around and salute.
Male voice: Mines been doing a bit of computing Oh, that’s it. They compute. But you mean actually figure out figures for you and give them to you?
Male voice: Yeah.
Well sure, “I’ve got to figure this out.” Male voice: No, I meant the individual himself might have been thinking of what to do and set up what time to go here or what not and another thing or so. He had worked out—not a demon circuit, just a bit of rational, analytical computing. (laughter) It’s okay. You can do rational computing but if you’ve got one like that seriously . . .
Male voice: I was probably doing it, I realized after talking it appears to me that it is a circuit It is the habit of merely lining up a project or program with all the unknowns consciously and sticking it away somewhere for it to be worked out And then when I want it I refer to that and say, “All right Now I have to do this now,” and start right off and there it is.
Well, actually that’s really not circuitry. “I” can do this, sort of suddenly turn around and set up a computing circuit. But he can do this. The time when this becomes serious is when it’s an exterior computation. One thinks offhand that he can interfere with this computation. Try it sometime. Interfere with it. Because it doesn’t work. And “I can’t stop thinking about it”—that sort of a proposition, only that is not the aberrative command. A person gets a stream of consciousness going, now he wants to interrupt this stream of consciousness. Its telling him something is sad and something is dreadful and life is pretty horrible and tired, and he’s so upset about the . . . [gap] . . .so he does, “I will think about the horizon. Okay. Now I’m thinking about the horizon. Good. I’ve thought about the horizon. I’m so tired . . .” (laughter) Another one is a demon circuit with a song. A song starts going through a person’s mind and it just keeps wheeling through his mind, wheeling through his mind, and he says, “Well, I’m going to stop thinking about this song now. I’ll concentrate on something else.” So he does. It’ll stop the song for a moment. And then he relaxes suddenly, and it goes on, “Be kind to your webfooted friends,” or something like that.
I know a person who used to go in fits like this for about a two-day session. And for about two days one song would start to run through his head and it would just keep going for about two days. The circuit on this thing was to the effect “Well, whether you like it or not, you’ve got to listen to it. I’m going to sing it, I’m going to keep on singing anyhow.” It was an audio, vocal circuit, and a popular song would get in there and it’d just start wheeling. Inexhaustible record.
Now, there’s three classifications here. There is the aberration— we’re talking of thought level now, not the somatic level—there is the aberration. It’s just “I have a bad time of it.” That has a tendency to match up with “I,” so that the “I” of the engram is right there with “I.” “I have a bad time of it.” Now, there are the valence shifters, where “I” gets “I” mixed up with the “I” of another valence. And you get another type of “I” in here, a deluded “I,” very close in, a carbon copy. That is “I” comparing with “I.” Demon circuits are “you” but they have an “I” with them.
Only the demon circuit gets set up on this level: “I am the boss around here, you’ve got to do what I tell you to do” is a typical demon circuit. That’s a “control yourself” demon circuit—they’ll vary. You understand this thing gets compartmented up.
We get into the compartment of valence that contains this engram as the “I”—you follow me now—here we have a whole lot of engrams and they’ve got three valences: Papa, Mama and Baby. [drawing on blackboard] Here’s Papa, all the way down the line. This is Papa as “I,” Baby is usually “it” and Mama as “I” All right. He’s in this valence, therefore this is the “you.” If he confuses somebody with Mama, he dramatizes as Papa—he says “you” to this person here in the words that Papa said. He can dramatize that much of the engram, see?
Now, if he’s in the valence of Mama and he meets somebody that reminds him of Papa or restimulates this engram in some way, he’ll dramatize this engram at that person. Now, if the baby is in question; let’s say an AA is being dramatized and the baby’s in question, why, you get “I” to “you” to “it.” [drawing on blackboard] That is, “I” to “it,” “I” to “it,” the person will redramatize the attempted abortion in this way.
Now, these slots don’t compose the valence, so to speak. They are compartments in which the valences sit, that’s true. But the valence is a whole carbon copy of an individual. A person has to have a valence shifter in there to get him over thoroughly into that valence. Otherwise he just fluctuates into that valence as the winning valence. But if it’s got a shifter in it somewhere in the bank, he’ll be in Papa’s valence. Then the part of the track which he dramatizes is this track and “I” in this case is Papa—“I,” almost chronically. Only he can be shifted into Papa’s valence and Mama’s valence too, simultaneously, and have both valences working there. That’s a double shift, you see.
This is not very complicated if you take two people and here’s a person talking to another person, will say, “You’ve got to do it, I’m going to make you do it if it’s the last thing I ever do.” And this other person over here says, “Well, I’m not going to do it, no matter what you tell me. I don’t like you.” And so on.
Well now, in between here, the baby—“it”—may be listening in on this and getting an engram out of it and there are three valences present.
Well now, if he’s the baby and if anybody breaks down his dramatizations and breaks him into this baby valence, it has an age tab on it, spoils his build, it’s got pain in it, gives him psychosomatic illnesses and so on. Not good. So he’ll fluctuate, ordinarily, over from this valence over to this valence, unless he has a strong valence-shifting mechanism.
So, as Mama, I’m not going to do it.” And you get him into Mamas valence and you say, “Well, let’s go back to that engram that we were running last.” “I’m not going to do it.” And you say, “Well, please now, why not go back to this?” I’m not going to do it.” You could suspect immediately that you are listening on this side to a demon circuit. Now, at this time that circuit is over there. And somebody is saying, “You’ve got to do it,” and you as auditor have stepped into Papas boots in some way. So the patient, as Mama—man or woman—as Mama is saying, “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t do it. You can’t make me do it.” Now, if the auditor—you can do a phony shift on this sometimes—if the auditor were suddenly to say, “I won’t, I won’t,” the patient will sometimes catch himself up by the impulse of saying, “But you’ve got to.” Just flick, flick.
You can also, when a patient is doing this sort of thing, say—you want to shift his valence, you say, “What were some of your papa’s mannerisms?” (pause) “I don’t know.” (laughter) “And what were some of your mama’s mannerisms?” “Well, I—I really don’t know.” (spoken in a high-pitched voice) (laughter) You’ll get an automatic shift and the person will shift all the way across through these things, just that way. A person has a bad stomachache sometimes, why, just ask them casually—you figure out, well, maybe that was Mama’s morning sickness. You say, “Well, how did your father used to look at people?” “Oh, kind of mean.” You say, “How’s your stomach?” “Gone.” Unless a person is really locked up in a valence with a lot of commands—”You’re just like your father and I hate you,” that sort of a command (which is incidentally Mama, see) crowds him over, he tries to occupy the winning valence and he’s crowded over here into Papa’s valence and sticks there. Then he’s into it to such a degree that he’s Papa all the way up and down the track. He becomes very, very difficult to shift in valence—very difficult. So when we’re talking about demon circuitry—I like to set it up on a basis of actually looking at circuits but you people want it complicated so I’ll give it to you that way on this. (laughs) Let’s say we’re looking at a certain strata of the brain now. [drawing on blackboard] There is the real “I” of the individual, but as this person shifts into Papa’s valence, into Mama’s valence, you get this sort of a thing happening. He gets into Papa’s valence, Mama is now a demon circuit talking to Papa. He gets into Mama’s valence, Papa is now a demon circuit talking to Mama. Unluckily, if he is aberrated—is in his own valence, he has Papa talking to him and Mama talking to him.
This is, incidentally, the holy trinity of Papa, Mama, Baby. The famous triangle of India. It’s been used in the Eastern world and in the Middle East to represent various things, but you have father, mother, child. Matter of fact, the symbols of arithmetic are father, mother, child.
Now, also it’s very interesting, people get a quite aberrated idea of God sometimes, because naturally God is up there, and there’s maybe a goddess or something up there, and poor shivering “I” is down here. But that would be in the womb, of course. So you get this kind of a strange setup of Papa, Mama, Baby—the holy trinity. Well, here’s your holy trinity working.
When you have Papa and Mama, then, you have these various control circuits. Now, let’s lay this whole thing on edge now, we’ll find out that we’ll get this sort of a situation, you see. [drawing on blackboard] Here are your engrams lying here and as engram after engram is restimulated, why, you get “you” to “you,” “you” to “you” — both “you’s” to “I.” Now, the fellow who is in his own valence may get a double circuit proposition if there are a lot of command sort of things in there. Mama has been fond of redramatizing Papa. Papa has been fond of dramatizing the fact that he is the boss. Papa beat this into Mama very early, now the child comes along, Mama has it by contagion, she uses it on the child.
In other words the poor kid gets it going and coming. When he finally gets up along the line, he’s got to obey, he’s got to mind. By this time you can thoroughly expect him to have a lot of circuitry. But these circuits don’t lie in there as one or two circuits per individual. You see how this is worked out?
The circuits that we’re really interested in are those good, strong, solid circuits which state specifically on a command level. Then those things make up computing circuits. “You’ve got to control yourself.” “Stop and think.” That one is a honey (with a few more words, with a holder). “Stop and think.” You will find people doing it, by the way, they will go along just so far and then all of a sudden . . . (pause) Actually if you looked into their minds they aren’t thinking about a doggone thing. They just have a command that says that they have to stop and think. Or “Think twice before speaking once” — that’s another one. So a guy will obligingly run it through twice, only that wasn’t what he was thinking at all. But people don’t do thinking up here on the front board, anyhow. It’s set up, stowed away, it’s brought back out of the computer. It’s like feeding a cash register. Ptock, ptock, you get your answer. You pays your money and you takes your chance, so to speak.
On a relatively unaberrated mind, it’s the problem of feeding a computing machine. Now a fellow’s got a front board he can work all this stuff out on, but he ordinarily doesn’t go ahead and supervise it. Well, this “Think twice before speaking once,” you can actually see somebody—there are people who make a great to-do of being very thoughtful. There is a whole art, a social aberration on this thing of being very judicious about what is thought. And after they do all of this thinking over this situation then you get something like some legal opinion someplace or something of the sort . . . [gap] . . . you see, naturally, the thing becomes very complex. When we’re really interested in circuitry, the control circuitry, the real stuff that is tough, we have to shoot full of holes that thing which is becoming a pseudoauditor. Now, if Papa in this case has a habit of telling people what they’ve got to do, you’ve got somebody else present, let’s say, doing auditing. So, for instance, he says, “Calm down. Now, calm down.” Or an old line—about 1912 this one was in vogue—“Go way back and sit down.” You’ve got another auditor at work. Or you have Mama who is saying, “Stay there.” You see what we’re trying to do here—maybe this will give you a better concept of therapy itself. You’re just undoing a whole flock of this sort of thing. But those that say specifically that you’ve got to control yourself, you’ve got to think what you’re doing, you’ve got to hold on to yourself, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that . . . “You have to, I am the boss around here, í wear the pants in this family, you’re going to do what I tell you to do,” now, that sort of a circuit is just set up there as a model. A commanding—so-called commanding personality. If Mama was the dominant member of the family in that fashion, of course you have this circuitry on her side.
You try to work him in Papa’s valence and you have a pseudo-auditor to end all pseudoauditors. Mama’s the dominant personality, she’s telling him what to do. She told the boy what to do, she told Papa what to do. Just see if he’s crowded, then, over into Papa’s valence. The handiest way you can break him out of it is simply by knocking off all the valence shifters that made him like Papa. That would be the first step you’d take in undoing the circuitry in this case. You see how that would be?
Because Mama is the auditor, a pseudoauditor, she’s going to tell him what to do. So when he’s over here, as “I” crowded over into Papa’s valence, you are bucking, on a command basis, everything and all the bossing that Mama did. Circuits, in other words.
Male voice: Could you do that on a straight memory basis to knock out valence shifters?
You do it to diagnose it to find out, because, you see, valence shifters also occur in the prenatal bank. Mama may tell Papa, “You’re just like your father, worthless and shiftless.” Male voice: But supposing you have a . . .
Only she means his...
Male voice: . . . circuitry . . . . . . she means the child’s grandfather.
Male voice: Yeah, but supposing you have circuitry of this nature: “I don’t want you to tell anybody anything.” That’s right.
Male voice: And it sits above the valence shifters, so how are you going to get at the valence shifters and at the same time . . . ?
Well, you crack it. “You don’t tell anybody anything.” Naturally the first thing you’re going to buck in the case is the first thing you’re going to resolve. And boy, that is a good rule. We could put down all the rules up here imaginable, but that thing which a person won’t do about Dianetics is that thing you’ve got to crack first if you expect this case to resolve. It goes just exactly parallel.
If this fellow can’t believe it, if he can’t believe Dianetics . . . You could actually go so far as—don’t do this but keep it as a back model for your conversation—you could actually go so far as saying to a patient, “Well, what don’t you like about Dianetics?” and the guy will probably come up with what is bothering him analytically.
You never get quite as thorough a scream out of an individual as you do on the subject that you must get to in order to resolve his case. Somebody who has bad emotional shut-offs told him, “Never have any emotion. You can’t have any emotion. You’re not supposed to be emotional. You got to be cool. You’ve got to keep calmed down about all of this sort of thing. Calm down about all of this sort of thing,” and so on.
You get that individual, you say, “Well, I don’t know. Now let’s see, what are we going to go into here? I don’t know what to get to in your case. Let’s go over the various elements of this thing. We could try for some painful emotion . . .” “Ho-ho, there’s nothing like that wrong with me!” And you say, “Well, we could try for some valences and so forth,” no reaction. “We could try for some attempted abortions,” no reaction. “We could try to find Mama’s lover,” no reaction. “Or we could try some painful emotion . . .” “You’re not going to do that to me! I mean by that, that I don’t believe painful emotion actually exists. That won’t further a case any at all.” And now you get some terrific rationale about why painful emotion isn’t necessary. You watch people reacting along this line, you can do diagnosis just like that.
Find out what facet of living they object to, you’ll find reasons below it. But on a more extreme level, the acute level let’s say, the level that you must tap—your example, the fellow told “not to tell you anything.” And you know how he’ll go into reverie? Like that! “Keep your mouth shut about it” or something of the sort will close him up.
Well, that means the engram must be in chronic restimulation. And if that engram is reducible where it is, you’re in good shape. But if it isn’t, it’s got the same command lower than it. So you go in, find the command for what it is and go on down the line and knock it out and get an engram that will reduce.
It is actually idle, in a case which has lots of this circuitry, it’s very idle to just monkey with the case, let the case tell you what it wants to go to next. Because the case won’t go toward what it’s supposed to go toward. If it could go toward what it is supposed to go toward, the fellow wouldn’t be aberrated. So anytime you start taking advice off somebody, you’re in bad shape. Of course you can look at a fellow—after a guy’s been in Dianetics for a short time he very often has quite an accurate computation of what’s going on. Now, he may say, “There’s a terrific charge bubbling, I know it. I just feel like hell. Let’s see if we can’t do something about it.” Well, you go into his case, you can tell though—he’s not doing an avoid. You can see it leaking out of his eyes! And leaking out of his eyes and so forth, you can get the charge.
By the way, before you get out of here tonight, I want to tell you how to coax somebody back into one of those charges. You can make it so that you don’t get the charge, although you see it right there ready to pour forth. Some of you I’m sure have had that experience already. There’s a way of doing it. Somebody please remind me of that a little later.
All right. Here we’re talking about circuitry, we’re talking about valences. You would have a mechanical arrangement like this: “I” nominally should be in control of this whole brain area but isn’t. Of course, we do have circuitry along this line which is negative circuitry, but still circuitry, where Mama says, “I just can’t go through with it, I just can’t do anything about it,” and this is her continual talk. That rather attaches itself over here in this valence when a person gets in there but won’t affect this valence. You can see why that would be. Now, the fellow could very adventurously be Papa and be strong and beat his chest, but it’s Mama that can’t do it and is so sad and so sorry. Or we’ll take Papa being so sad and so sorry. We get into these valences, a person gets despondent. But there isn’t any dictation going forward. A person goes into the valence and merely becomes unable. You see what I mean?
That’s one of them, but if there’s circuitry with it, the circuitry would go like this: “You can’t do anything about this.” Now we start up this cross-play proposition. If Mama for instance is saying, “You can’t do anything about this, you always fail, you know nobody in your family ever succeeded anyway, you always fail.” Let’s say that is a demon circuit setup of Mama and Papa.
When he gets into Papa’s valence, he fails, he always fails. Everything makes sure that he does; that’s survival. All right. So as Papa, then, he’s going through this type of a computation because it’s being dictated by Mama, and this is a circuit; sometimes that circuit is audio. “You’re going to listen to me, I know you hate the sound of my voice but you’re going to listen, goddamn you.” I ran that out of a guy one time who had a demon circuit in him, and he often wondered why he had a fixation on plugging up his ears and so on. He’d go to bed at night, he’d put plugs in his ears. And he would sit down idly and he’d go like this.
One day I asked him why he was doing this and he says, “Well,” he says, “it’s just a habit I have.” And on further inquiry I discover that he’s got a voice going on inside of his head that’s of the very high sound level variety. And he has had it so long and he’s listened to it so long, and it makes him a little bit nervous when he thinks about it. If you can imagine anybody living in a barn where there’s a loudspeaker going day and night, that was this person. So there’s a failure demon circuit which will sometimes interfere with auditing. And the fellow will be over here in Papas valence and hell be saying, “Well, well yeah. (sigh) Well, I’ll try, I’ll try-it won’t do any good, but I’ll try, I’ll try. I won’t be able to reach any engrams . . .” You ever run one of those guys one time, he’s right in an engram, and that engram is on the wrong side.
Sometimes you shift his valence and you’ll get sometimes the most remarkable reaction. He’ll sit right up on the couch and start telling you what to do. “You’re the lousiest auditor in the world,” he’ll say, “for Christ’s sakes, you’ve never gotten me back into anything. You know damn well that you can’t do anything for me.” Yeah. All right, shift him back again, “I’ve failed.” Now, supposing he’s fixed out of his own valence and he’s dead center, [taps blackboard] He isn’t obeying commands addressed from here to here, usually, but he’s sure caught between them. And the fellow is getting all of this stuff passing on through his head in audio circuit. He’s not believing it, perhaps. He’s not listening to it, he’s trying not to listen to it. He’s exercising his own judgment as best he can. He’s not being terribly influenced by these things when they arrive. They’re sort of passing by.
Something may happen to that person in life to get him over into one of the valences then, like a death or something of the sort. And he gets into the valence and after that he will be subject to one or the other of the command series that’s going on. You follow me? So when a person is young, he is right dead center anyway. There’s Papa but he’s not Papa, and there’s Mama but he’s not Mama. He’s listened to them all the time, they’re going on in his internal world, they’re going on in the external world simultaneously. He’s trying to avoid them in both places. He can get along pretty well as long as he avoids them in both places.
You’ll find people struggling along in life and doing things although their parents were both unable and so on, all this stuff. Then let him get sick sometime, let him get shifted in valence, let him run into an identical situation so that he can suddenly identify himself with his father.
I saw one boy go into the Navy during the war and promptly go into a spin the second he stepped into the uniform. He was in the Navy about three months, they were very short of men so they were pushing him on through. He arrived on board as part of a draft and I picked up his sea bag, threw it over his shoulder for him and ran him down to the psychopathic ward because he was in such terrible shape. They put him under observation down there and he got free meals for a month or two and then sent him home. And I know what was wrong with that boy because I inquired a little bit into his history as I was talking to him. His father was in the Navy. He was perfectly all right as an apprentice seaman. But his father during his gestation period was a seaman second class. The second that he went into seaman second class he was identified. Somebody walked up to him and said an exact line. Here he was in the uniform. He was all squared away, (snap) Shift. And he stayed shifted.
Of course when he got out of uniform, I suppose, and got home, I don’t know what happened to him. [gap] It isn’t just a gimmick that you can startle people with by shifting them over from one valence to the other by asking about mannerisms, it’s something that is an operating mechanism of aberration. You follow me? When it’s “you” and it has a command in it or contains a statement, particularly if it says to think, talk or control, any of these things—it can pick up part of the analyzer, think with that part of the analyzer and shoot it in at “I” or at the valence “I” is in.
Now, right as a person goes into valences, he drags over a little bit of this “I” into this valence [drawing on blackboard], and sets it up with this “I.” Or he drags it over into this “I” and sets it up with this “I.” That’s the way your valence is going. Here’s the shadow of “I” set up in here, [tapping on blackboard] You’ve got a lot of valence shifters in the case, you get a carbon copy of the individual. “You’re just like your grandfather.” My mother used to come in every time I had been caught fighting and I would be all bunged up, she would get very mad at me, my grandfather would try to take up for me, so we have a big ally computation and my mother would say, “You’re just like your grandfather.” Well, I started this when I was about two and a half, something like that, and I suppose it was in the bank about seventy-nine times, at least. Consequence, there was a big shift over to Grandpa. But those battles didn’t really key in; still could take care of “I” till many, many years went by and I got a key-in of this sort of stuff. I shifted over into my grandfather’s valence. I started to be fond of the same rattletrap cars that he was fond of. I would go and watch running horses rather than do anything else. I was picking up all of his likes, all of his dislikes, all of his political beliefs. In other words, really a nice carbon copy. I was riding over here in his valence.
Came up the line on the thing and broke its back again, and all of sudden I found out that I peculiarly detest running horses. I do. I think it’s dull. That’s of course a matter of educational level experience—when I was a kid they used to step on me.
You get a clearer picture of what we’re talking about now when we talk of valences? When you find somebody in somebody else’s valence, I suppose you haven’t paid a great deal of attention to it as a vital mechanism in the case. Perhaps that’s right. But it is very vital Circuitry can be shot to pieces, but supposing Mama was the dominant party and Mama was continually saying to Papa (and you’re getting that circuitry all the time), “You’ve got to control yourself, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that,” And “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself and get ahead in the world,” That was a funny one. We used to run into that circuit, and boy, getting down the track against that demon circuit was something—it was “get ahead in the world”; finally dissolved it too. He got ahead, all right. So you’ll get this kind of a setup. And if he’s in Papa’s valence, you’ve got a pseudoauditor. Well now, you tell the person to go back and this thing’s liable to say, “Go ahead, I’m going to control you,” Well actually, whether you like it or not, the auditor is doing control of certain portions of the patient—the file clerk, the somatic strip. Unless those things are in his hands it’s like driving a twenty-horse team without any reins. So the first thing you want to do is to get that out. Now, you can actually work with cases on a valence-shifter proposition that will make the cases much more amenable to therapy without getting out any control mechanisms. Now, that’s another little gimmick. If you’re having trouble, try it. Pretty hard to shift a whole valence without getting anything else out of the case, but you can try. That’s one of the things nice about basic area. You get a person down into basic area, he’ll shift through valences, tock, tock, tock, tock, nothing to it, even though there’s a lot of valence shifters in the upper part of the case.
Incidentally, that’s one of the reasons evidently why sonic turns on so often in the basic area and doesn’t turn on anywhere else. Of course sometimes the circuitry is so great that you come clear down here to the sperm sequence before you get anything like sonic. Then you run out the sperm sequence and you can get sonic.
Sometimes you go three or four engrams ahead of it, you get sonic. There are sometimes a few little engrams ahead of it, I’ve talked to this class about that, haven’t I?
Audience: Yes.
If you’re doing a lot of auditing you’ll find people doing it. It’s pretty hard to distinguish what those engrams are or where they are. But if the sperm sequence won’t reduce, it’s computable that the next coitus engrams that you get are below it.
Male voice: I have been running something like that last night on a fellow and he went to the cell that was going to do the sperm incident . . .
Uh-huh . . .
Male voice: It was horrible.
He didn’t like it.
Male voice: Not at all. Something was attacking him with pressure, he noticed another type of cell.
No kidding? Another type of cell? I ran across a fellow one time that had two germ cells attacking the sperm as they came out. And he got nicked by one of them. And his description of this would raise the hair of the most hardened science fiction readers.
I don’t know what visio is around the sperm sequence, I’ve seen an awful lot of visio out of people in that area that didn’t have any prenatal visio otherwise.
Male voice: Runs right in the same way in an awful lot of people. I ran three . . .
I was going to say . . .
Male voice: . . . sperm sequences last night on three different people. And at the moment of ejaculation all three of them described what they saw . . .
Mm-hm.
Male voice: . . . at ejaculation in the same way using the same imagery and then Jan ran it on me and I saw it. Now, maybe that’s suggestion.
No, I could write down what it was and show it to you and you would say, “Yes, that’s what these people saw.” Male voice: Very common then.
Yes, because I can take it out of patient after patient. It’s a strange thing but the sperm seems to be a bit cat-eyed.
Male voice: What I mean, Ron, is that almost always—once you’ve heard about three of those things, you can . . .
You start picking them up out of people—you start picking them up out of people who haven’t been in contact with anybody and you will find pretty much the same thing.
Male voice: They run the same thing but they use different names for it. I mean they’ll use the . . .
Well, sure, they describe it differently.
Male voice: I’d like to get back to that valence shift I’m getting back to it right now.
Male voice: Something I’d like to clear up. You said that when you get back to basic area, you weren’t troubled with the circuitry. Let’s assume that the demon circuit was installed at the age of two. Does that mean if you got back earlier than two, the demon circuitry would be nonexistent?
Sure, you’re back through the two-year-old engram, you’re back of it. If you can get back of it down into basic area, why—there’s an equation on it: A person is affected by the engram nearest to him plus the composite of all the engrams prior to that engram. So as we go down the track we have less and less engrams prior to the moment till we get down to the bottom, we have no engrams to amount to anything prior.
Male voice: Does that mean if the bouncer were installed at the age of three, let’s say, that the bouncer wouldn’t affect any engrams before the age of three?
Now, wait. If you’ve got the patient back to the age of two and a half, the bouncer at the age of three will not affect him. But if a bouncer happens to be—lucklessly for the case — in the sperm sequence, the case is affected all the way down the line by the bouncer. Now, if you have one of these somatics riding one place, and the words running another place, you start suspecting one of these contrivances in the basic area which lifts a fellow off engrams. It’s an additive effect as you come up the bank, engram after engram.
Now, that is not a law. That is merely a rough observation of what happens in order to communicate it to you.
Male voice: I understand it’s quite a job to shoot the problem circuit full of holes and then to get it out, I was wondering, if enough passing over, for instance—sending him let’s say through a sexual incident that he experienced in later life which he goes through, perhaps on memory, until he settles into it, and then sending him back into conception and passing over it enough times that you do get it out and then working up the bank-perhaps wouldn’t it take less time that way?
The first thing you really want out of a case, just as it says there in Standard Procedure, is you want to get painful emotion off the top, and basic engrams off, and get some unconsciousness off the case and get it rolling. This other is important only when it raises its ugly head and makes it impossible for you to do this. And you do this by hook or crook, any way you can do it to get down to the early part of the bank and get an engram off with some unconsciousness off. And you get a few of these off down the early part of the bank and the whole case loosens up. That’s actually your target. And that’s always your target: the earliest engram, the earliest engram. Talking about circuitry, this is trouble-shooting a case.
There are these various mechanisms of running a dramatization of the parents fighting, let us say, and then running into the early part of the bank and getting the first on the fight chain. Settling a person in a dramatization, let him run through it three or four times, some light lock of some sort, and then try to get the same lock the earliest time he can get it.
There are these mechanisms—there’s the mechanism of putting a person into a pleasurable sexual moment or a moment when he is courting, or she is courting, and there’s kissing or something like that, stimulation going on. Get them settled into that incident and then throw them into the early part of the bank.
Now, there was a gentleman today who was not moving on his track. His auditor was very worried about him, he said he wasn’t getting very far. And this case was strictly a proposition of running off some dramatizations and getting in the early part of the bank, running off some more dramatizations and trying for the early part of the bank. Starting to run off the dramatization, we had the fellow finally—he was swinging in the swing, he was doing what he was supposed to do.
That is to say he was in an engram. But up to this moment the fellow was convinced that he was in present time. In a very few minutes, just by running a dramatization of something, which was a dramatization of somebody getting mad . . .
Male voice: What do you mean, running a dramatization!
Hm?
Male voice: Elaborate on that Well, what’s a dramatization? You know what a dramatization is. Fellow has an engram, engram says, “I have to drink cider, I just can’t get enough cider, I just hate to leave it, I just can’t leave it alone, once I start drinking cider I can’t stop.” So a fellow comes up and he grabs ahold of a mug of cider, he gets the smell of cider and there we go. Dramatization. He’s drinking the cider. That’s the dramatization, the other’s the engram.
Two people are fighting, quarreling with each other in the engram. Let’s say Papa and Mama are quarreling with each other in the engram—this basic area engram maybe. Now, later on in life we find Mama suddenly throws him into Papa’s valence. He’s married a pseudo-ally—Mama, pseudoally. All of a sudden if Mama says certain things and does certain things, then he starts into the beginning of this engram. It’s restimulated now, he’ll dramatize it.
Now, if you want to get back to the basic area, you run the dramatization off, get the person well settled into the dramatization. He may not want to touch any engram at this time . . . [gap] Now, you said, “What’s a dramatization?” Now, how do we find the dramatization? That is a problem of straight line memory. And you keep plugging away at straight line memory hard enough and you’ll eventually turn up some dramatizations in this case that you can use.
Dramatizations immediately give you wording which may be part of the circuitry, they give you the general temper in the bank. You can run off the person’s own dramatizations. These are the easiest to find—“Let’s go back to the last time you hit your hammer on your thumb. And what did you say, what did you do?” And the fellow would go back and you get him hitting his thumb, bang, and he’ll say, “Blankety-blankety-blankety-blankety-blank.” “Well, let’s go over this thing again.” This time you get into it a little more closely, he’s “Blankety-blankety-blankety-blankety-blank.” Finally he’s got a little thumb somatic. Now, don’t bother with that, that’s not an engram. Just take him, “Let’s go to the first time that occurs in the bank.” You’ve got him on an emotional restimulation, he’ll quite often follow down to the earliest part of the bank and run off there somebody who has just hurt himself, as the engram. And you’ll get the engram out.
Yes?
Male voice: Pseudodramatization works sometimes . . .
Psychodrama?
Male voice: No, it’s pseudodramatization, Man says he lost his temper What does he do when he lost his temper? You create a little scene for him to lose his temper . . .
Sure. That’ll work. That’s setting up an imaginary—Joe calls this the “jaz ne vem theater trick.” Male voice: Say that again? “Jaz ne vem” in Slovenian means “I don’t know.” And you get this “I don’t know” or “I don’t know” and “I don’t know” and “I don’t know,” and after a while you say, “Well, let’s see, there’s a theater by the name of ‘I don’t know’ or ‘jaz ne vem’ —and you’re up there on the stage and now let’s find out what happens and let’s see if you can imagine a little play.” Or “Let’s put your parents on the stage and let’s do something like that.” This is very effective. It’s using the person’s (quote) imagination (unquote). And people, when they’re talking about engrams, imagine in terms of engrams. All right. So you can turn on a pseudodramatization. That’s a good name for it, thank you.
Male voice: Commonly known as “projection.” Well, I’m very leery of using terms like that suddenly because there’s so much attached to them. There’s too much attached to them that give them a different interpretation. It’s like I could use the word “conversion” in Dianetics; could use just tonnage of these words. But every time I have started to use these words, immediately somebody says, “Ah, I know what you’re talking about.” And then you say, “Well, all right. Then you understand so-and-so.” “Oh, no. That isn’t the way it is.” Male voice: Definition of psychodrama?
Somebody want a definition of psychodrama? You mean what technically is psychodrama as practiced as psychodrama?
Male voice: Mm-hm. How do you use it in Dianetics or don’t you?
Well, you use something in Dianetics which is very simple to understand, you don’t have to understand psychodrama in all of its ramifications to use this in Dianetics.
There is an example of it: the “jaz ne vem theater dramatization.” You take a psychotic—psychotics will very often dramatize for you on request—and you say, “Well, let’s dramatize—let’s you be Grandma the time she died.” And the psychotic will say, “Da di da da da. (singing) Oh, okay, I’ll be Grandma.” And the next thing you know, why she starts running off what she thinks is Grandma, and then suddenly she will say, “No, that hurts too much,” or something like that. “I’ll dramatize something else for you.” And you say, “Well now, all right. Well, what do you want to dramatize?” “Well, I’ll dramatize a collie dog.” “No, let’s dramatize Mama.” “Aw, I can’t dramatize Mama, I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t do that.” And you say, “Oh, I bet you you could. I just dare you to.” And the first thing you know, “Be Mama at the moment Grandma died.” And you know that there’s a kid there. So she’ll go off, yakity-yakity-yakity-yakity-yakity-yakity-yak, and she’ll dramatize Mama. Well now, if you can get her to dramatize Mama a few times and go over it a few times and go over the act a few times, she’s actually running an engram. It’s not imagination, it isn’t something she’s playing. But you have persuaded her to do it because you have said it was play. And then she runs off the real McCoy And the first thing you know, why, she’s half seas over3 with emotion, and you slide her into being the kid—once you get the tension off Mama, you slide her over into being the kid and you spill tears.
Now, psychodrama uses an effort to counterfeit an emotion to reach an emotion. It does comparative lines like this. We don’t use that. No particular reason we don’t except that it just hasn’t been investigated as a technique, hasn’t been found at this time necessary Male voice: Do you have any patients who have been through psycho-drama in reverie, gone through any of their sessions? Anything unusual? They do a lot of valence shifting You could have seen that it would have been very, very useful had the person been regulated in the psychodrama so as to deintensify an engram. If you know about engrams, boy, you can play psychodrama just zippity-bing You know what it’s supposed to do, you know why that patient is running that particular engram, you know the holders, you know the call-backs, you start spotting them, you get him out of these shifts. And you start to get him to repeat the holders, repeat the call-backs, take the tension off of the thing. You can very often persuade him to do it. If you could do that you’ll see something like Robert Moore Williams4 with the psychiatrist who no longer had an open mind. You saw that on the board.
Every once in a while in Dianetics you’ll shoot an engram full of holes, the holders and so forth out of it, on a psychotic. And the person has been raving mad, let’s say, for three years or something like that, and you just shoot the holes out of one engram and then they come up to present time and talk to you lucidly and sane. That really takes people aback. Unfortunately it doesn’t happen that sudden or that often. I mean, it doesn’t happen often enough. I’m trying to find out some way to make it happen every time. Because it’s really a startler. The person is raving mad—take the tension off the engram, up they come.
You understand a little bit more about circuitry, about what you’re doing, about how valences add up, how circuits affect valences, why a circuit is different than a valence? Do you understand why a circuit is different than a valence? Pretty obvious. A circuit is one place, and a valence is another. That isn’t the only reason they’re different: a circuit actually carves off a piece of the analyzer and uses it, a real circuit, and does computing. And a valence is a carbon copy of the individual down to the brand of cigarettes he smokes.
Male voice: Is it a circuit which prevents a person from being hypnotized? Is there any correlation whatsoever between a person being subject to hypnosis and a person having recall? Any correlation there? I mean what is it that allows a person to be hypnotized or not?
What allows a person to be hypnotized and what doesn’t? Do you want me to go off into hypnotism tonight?
Male voice: No, I mean . . .
It’s quite a subject, in case you never looked.
Male voice: . . . I was asking because I thought you said some sort of circuit which says that . . .
No. . .
Male voice: . . . “I can’t go to sleep. You can’t go to sleep.” A hypnotist will occasionally install this circuit in an hypnotic command. It’s not a circuit, it’s just a command, one command. It operates a little bit as a circuit, but it isn’t circuitry.
Male voice: Then it’s not a circuit which . . .
It says “You cannot be hypnotized by anybody else.” Somebody tries to hypnotize the patient, he won’t go to sleep. Usually what prevents hypnotism—the fact the patient’s stuck on the time track someplace in an incident that if he went back through this he would go right straight into an engram.
Sometimes just by pretending you’re hypnotizing a patient you can shove him right into the arms of the engram in which he’s stuck. I have said to some patients sometimes without any intention to do so whatsoever, “Now, in view of the fact that I am an accomplished hypnotist, I’m going to hypnotize you. Now, just look into my eyes.” You’ll note right away whether or not he’s stuck on the track because after he looks into your eyes and you count a few times he’s liable to start sounding like a hebephrenic. “He-he-he-he-he.” And he comes right out of it again. He’s stuck on the track.Actually if you wanted to really hypnotize him, just shoot that engram full of holes that he’s stuck in, get him up to present time, tell him to look into your eyes and knock him out.
Male voice: If you started to hypnotize a person in that way would there be any indication of where he’s stuck?
No.
Male voice: Does he show signs?
No. But you can use spinning mirrors on a phonograph record and it’ll sometimes just sort of drag the person. He feels like it’s being dragged out of him. Actually he’s sinking back a little bit into a trance state, right into the incident he really is in.
Male voice: Is that then a possible method that could be used in Dianetics to find out where a person is stuck?
Yup. Yup. As a matter of fact, one of these days when Don Rogers gets on the job here completely, why, I’m going to get him to build a little gimmigahoogit that goes on as sort of a mask, and it has a couple of flashing lights in the thing. And you put that on somebody who’s stuck on the track, you’ll really hear him scream. Well anyhow, that’s mechanical aids, a portion of research.
You understand on circuitry that a person can have a circuit, too, which is installed on a two basis, you understand, [drawing on blackboard] Here is the circuit and here is “I.” This is an engram with the valences of “I” and one other person. You can understand how that would be. It doesn’t have to be three-leveled.
Now, this funny thing happens. You can see this in people, “Don’t do as I do, do as I say,” this sort of thing. Now, this fellow, he has this command. Let’s say this is Mama, and here’s “I” as a little child. And Mama’s saying to him, “Now, you’ve got to pick up your shoes and you’ve got to be tidy, and if you don’t do this, I’m just going to spank you. And you’ve got to, you understand? And don’t . . .” A little kid!
I mean “I” gets back on the track in his own valence and he gets toward this thing and it’s like this. He gets sore about the thing. If anybody tells him about this and so on, he won’t do it. Just ordinarily if he’s drifting along in this, he leaves his shoes on the floor and he’s untidy. You try to coax him to do so and he’ll get more untidy, too.
Very often you’re persuading a person against a negation. He’s negating against this circuit. He’s not accepting it at all. He doesn’t want anything to do with this circuit. So anything this circuit says for him to do he’s liable to do something else. He’s liable to make it worse. But now we take this “I,” let’s say, and this “I” grows up and becomes Mama. And what do we find? We find Mama’s clothes all over the house and the negligee over here and the shoes over there. And Mama raising hell with this little boy because he’s not tidy.
That has been an inexplicable thing to a lot of people, how come people could do one thing and say another so often. Man, that is really chronic. You’ll find people who are moral cesspools, you might say, walking around giving the damnedest lectures on the subject of how people have to be moral. Well, that’s this setup here.
This is saying, “You’ve got to be moral.” Here’s “I” saying, “To hell with you. I’m not going to be moral.” So when this person slides into this valence, then he dramatizes “everybody’s got to be moral.” He sees immorality, instantly he’s got to preach against immorality . . . [gap] . . . a fellow one time, he would get furious. This is, incidentally, a setup that you’ll find in most people who get in lots of arguments. You’ve got a negation of “I” against a circuit. And it’s in an engram, it’ll restimulate. Here’s this person who’s forever saying, “No, you’re not right, that isn’t true.” Now if you go around and you say—hardly anything to disagree with—“Are you sure you put that cap down on the shelf?” The person will say, “You’re always disagreeing with me. You’re the most disagreeable person in the world. If there’s anything I detest, it’s a person who disagrees all the time.” And then the next five minutes the person is saying, “No, I won’t, that isn’t true, that isn’t right,” and they’re carrying on a crusade along one line and behaving quite another way. That’s a typical type of circuit at work. It depends on whether “I” is standing here fully or shifted into a valence, or here or in the valence. Just a shift mechanism.
Male voice: What causes a person to negate? Is it analytical that the person doesn’t do it, or is there some other reason?
You ever try to hold a little kid? Did you ever really succeed, when he became aware of the fact that you were holding him? Take a little kid—this is a nice natural survival mechanism. This is right down at the bottom of the survival chain. Take a little kid and he’s perfectly willing to sit on your lap. Let him sit on your lap for a little while.
Make this experiment if you never have: You just suddenly wrap your arms around him, kindly and everything. Wriggle, right away. Grip him a little tighter, wriggle harder, until—you’ll have him in a screaming fight if you really hold on to him. He just starts up the line on this because it’s nonsurvival to be held. It’s just typically so. After all, man at one time in his period of development was a food animal; still is, in some parts of the world—long pig.
Well, you see how this could be? There is negation. A person struggles to survive. Now, if we get him into this engram where he was struggling, he will struggle, you see. He is dramatizing “I” all over again as he was.
Male voice: Will a person dramatize his own thoughts?
If they’re part of an engram and if the thing is sitting on a lock in the bank, it’ll add up to a point where a person’s dramatizing his own thoughts, yes. But his own thoughts are not engramic to him. Those own thoughts are usually, if they add up to something like this, installed engrams prior to the fact. “Don’t do as I do, do as I say,” is an observation in the society. Now, just that, “You’ve got to pick up your shoes and be tidy, you little brat.” Whack, whack, whack, whack. “You got to pick up your shoes and be tidy. Now, what the hell’s the idea. Now, you be neat around the house, you understand?” And the little kid, all he can think of is try to get away from that switch. He isn’t being convinced. Any time you get a kid completely convinced, you’ve got a kid that’s licked, he’s no good.
The saving grace of mankind is that he’s a battling animal. So that’ll start one of these things and somebody comes along and starts harping on how he should be tidy or mentions the fact he should be tidy, of course it restimulates this engram. This is also childhood tantrums. See, you’ll see grown people going into childhood tantrums. How they malign childhood. Where did they get that tantrum? They got it from grownups in the prenatal bank. Tantrums are not native to childhood.
Occasionally a person can have a flock of commands. Oh, you get some real loopy circuits on this stuff. “I only believe what I hear myself say.” And you’ll get a fellow whose every phrase thereafter becomes a lock on the engram. It is circuitry really; it’s a loop. So he keeps saying this and you go back and you read the first four pages—let him read the first four pages of Webster’s dictionary. Then the first four words, let’s say, just in the first page. And that’s “A,” “ah” and . . .
Male voice: “Aardvark.” “Aardvark.” (laughs) And so here he goes, he’s reading the first four words, and then you put him in reverie and you start running over these words, and you find out that you’ve got a lock which runs out like an engram.
That’s very interesting. That’s particularly interesting when you’re running off line charge off a person who has some kind of a mechanism like this, when they’re going into false tone 4. Somebody who has had his case pretty well released and he’s starting to blow off the superficial computations that had him held down and aberrated. He’ll start to laugh. Sometimes he’ll laugh—it’s not a hysterical or hebe-phrenic laugh, it’s a good, hearty roar. I’ve seen them do it for forty-eight hours, twenty-four is not uncommon, seven or eight is very ordinary.
Male voice: It’s not a manic.
No, that isn’t a manic. Don’t be frightened if you see somebody doing this, by the way, because they’re just getting off tone 4 line charge. Well anyway, there’s where you test what’s been engramic in a person’s life. Ordinarily if a person doesn’t have a circuit like that, you can feed him some such word as “Empire State Building” and you know that’s not down in the prenatal bank.
They’ll laugh at anything that is in an engram, but it has to have been in an engram for them to have laughed at it after this charge is broken loose, see. [gap] It’s sort of a reversal of stuff that’s been aberrative before and it just starts knocking out all the way up the line. So you feed this guy “Empire State Building” and the guy will say, “Empire State Building, Empi—— ha-ha!”—very, very funny now, Empire State Building. Generally when they will do it on such a thing as “Empire State Building,” you’ve got one of these feedback circuits. But “you believe everything you say”—that’s the reversal of it. And I saw one case one time that had a “seeing”—”seeing is believing.” So that you had all the stet data up the bank and he was getting visio up and down the bank and getting this line charge off things he saw in the bank. He actually had to practically look his whole life over again. They were all locks on an engram.
I want to tell you something, if you’ve got that fairly well digested. You’ll see this in people, switching them around in valences and so on, you’ll get accustomed to it. I want to tell you now about something a little more subtle. This is how you get a person into an engram without ever telling him he’s in an engram.
Example: Newspaper reporter sitting at lunch with me. I wish they’d send around more reporters. The supply of them is getting used up. (laughter) He says, “Well, what’s all this about reverie and what’s this about this and that and so on?” I say, “Well, it’s very simple.” “Well, how do you get a person in reverie anyhow?” “Well, it’s not very hard.” “Well, how do you do it?” So I look at this poor guy. He’d been giving me a bad time, so I said, “Now, for instance,” I said, “you ever had any dentistry done to you?” “Oh yes, yes!”—”No!” he says, “no, I never had any dentistry.” “Well now, think it over. Now, you can remember a time when you had some dentistry done. Surely you’ve had some dentistry done.” “Oh yeah, about fifteen years ago. Yeah, yeah, I had some dentistry done.” “Well now, you remember how the office was set up there?” “Mm, yes.” “Well now, who was working with you? Doctor?” “Oh, yes. Dentist.” “Dentist. Tall guy, short guy?” “Mm, short.” “Well, was there an anesthetist there or wasn’t there?” “Yeah.” “How’d she look?” “White dress and so on.” “Was she a blond or brunette?” “Oh, umm, brunette.” “Now, what did they do when you walked in? Did you sit down in a chair?” “Uh, oh sure. Awful hot, sticky chair.” Volunteered information. He’s into the engram. “Now, what did they do with the mask? Did they put it on your face or . . . ?” “Yes.” “And what did they tell you to do?” “Well . . .” “All right,” I said, “time shift back five minutes and come up to present time.” I didn’t want to get him to have a tooth out, it was in the middle of a restaurant. But we got him on another one a short time later that was much more serious. So anyway . . . (laughter) This only applies to reporters.
Male voice: How about Time reporters7.
Well, I’m not much interested in the Time reporter. They did a very, very good job of reporting out in Los Angeles. They called up four or five people by telephone. Then they moved several people in that were strictly lunatic fringe, on some doctor of psychology out there, and the Time reporter came in. “All of a sudden,” she said, “I never saw such seedy characters in my life, there they were walking in.” Time reporter comes in, she tries to give them a talk on something or other, she finds she’s talking to, I don’t know, the Brothers of I Will Arise or something. And the Time reporter stays for a few minutes and shoves off. That was the total investigation of Dianetics. Nobody came near the Foundation, nothing. But everybody’s going around congratulating Art Ceppos and wondering who he had to bribe to get this wonderful story, and only they’re serious. That story will sell books, whereas another one which just said yak, yak, yak, yak, yak—that wouldn’t. This will make people curious.
If the newspapers of the country just go around reporting everybody’s engrams as opinions on Dianetics, we’ll get some wonderful hot spots. Let’s just hope they hit a few manics and sort it out.
Male voice: Getting back to valences and demons, what happens if you are in the valence of an antagonist? How does that turn out? The person who finds himself doing things . . . [gap] Male voice: . . . give us an antagonism. “You’re just like your father.” Then when he’s in that valence, Father beat up the child so “I” living in the two places finds it incompatible. You get a guy who’s pretty badly upset, analytically. He can’t compute any of this. Here he is being the fellow who he hates and so finally he starts to hate himself. Very interesting computational mess-up.
Parents are very often ambivalent, so that you have an antagonist and an ally in the same individual But the same individual is two different individuals if one is antagonistic and the other is sympathetic. So you’ve actually got the number of valences . . . You asked for this! (laughter) Here is “I,” [drawing on blackboard] Here is Mama, drunk. Here is Mama, sober and nice. Mama, drunk and horrible, Male voice: It seems to me the impression was that all of these are extremes. I either hate Mama or love Mama. They really happen in all degrees.
It seemed so obvious, I forgot to point it out. You’ll get your most trouble, however, out of the extremes on the scale.
Let me tell you about this reporter and the dental operation. Well, that’s one example. Now, you trace through what was happening there, I just kept calling his attention to elements in the scene. Now let’s take another example. You keep calling his attention to them, calling his attention to them, introducing a new element which you know must be in the scene. If you have a dentist’s office, there must be an office there. There’s a chair there, there is a dentist there, there’s an anesthetist there, there are desks there. There may be phones there. It may be upstairs and it may be downstairs. And you get him to explaining this.
Sometimes you can make a fellow argue himself straight into an engram by just disagreeing with his data. And you start naming odd things that really aren’t in the scene. And he’ll start to get annoyed and just to prove it to you, he’ll ease in on it. And he says, “And then, of course, in all the girls I knew, there was Mary.” And you say, “Well, you didn’t like her.” And he’d say, “Well, I liked her! She was a nice girl,” “Well, yes,” “Well, she was! She was a nice girl.” “Well, not pretty though?” “She was pretty. She was very, very pretty. Very pretty. Oh, nice. Oh, very nice. Very nice.” “Well now, what made you think she was so nice?” “Well, pretty, and she—so on and I—I remember very well she said to me . . .” And you’ve never been able to touch this character before. You just argue the fellow into being there so he can prove it to you. Now, that’s one little method of going about it. But that isn’t quite adroit.
I’ve argued into lots of people just talking that way or sympathized them into an engram. Or just explained them into an engram. I’ve had a pilot, for instance, explain to me in some detail just how an airplane crashed and just what folded up. And I pretended not to get these things clear. It’s an awfully good trick for an auditor to pretend that he didn’t hear or didn’t understand. Because it makes the patient repeat the thing again. And you’ll say, “What was that?” And he says, “Oh, and she was a blond—blond hair.” “Yeah, but what did she say?” “Well, she said, ‘I love you.’” “I beg pardon?” “‘I love you.’ She said, ‘I love you.’” You’ve fed him repeater technique, see, he doesn’t realize it. You can go on talking with a person like this, adroitly, and you can pull him right square into an engram. The pilot crashing the plane would never go near this airplane crash. So I made him explain to me why he would never go near this airplane crash in therapy, while he’s sitting wide open, you know, wide open on it. “And why won’t you?” “Well, it’s too horrible” and so forth. “Well, what’s so horrible about it?” “Well, I don’t know. You know, come down, and the plane starts coming down, and the next thing you know, why, the ground starts coming up at you” and so on. “Well, it doesn’t sound very horrible to me. Can’t you get out in the parachute?” “No, it’s stuck.” Now he’s getting a little bit grim about the whole thing. So you can get him right on down the line and then just as she hits, see, why, he tries to pull out of it. But you’re explaining it to him wide-eyed so he thinks it’s all right. He thinks he’s immune to all this and she goes in, crash, see? And he’ll get it in the back of the neck. There’s his somatic turn on.
Now, “What do you hear next?” And he’s knocked into a little bit of unconsciousness, so now he tracks with you and he tells you what you want to know out of the accident. And if you can get into the accident once, you can bully him back into the accident a second time, a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time and you’ve gotten him into an incident which may have been very painfully emotional to him or something like that.
Now, the somatic strip and the file clerk won’t go near painful emotion by command that I’ve ever found out, if the painful emotion is really deep and aberrative.
Let us take a cathode-ray tube. Here’s the ray tube here [drawing on blackboard], and it’s scanning. It’s scanning back and forth, scanning like your television tube. Let’s put the same charge, a spot of charge on the front of this cathode-ray tube, right there.
Now the thing starts sweeping like this, [drawing on blackboard] Then it finally flattened out, it wouldn’t wait that long. And when it comes down here again, it’s going like this again, or rather “pop-up,” here. It’s missing a memory. This is just an analogy of scanning. You ever notice this little test? Now, it got warped in the scanning.
Now, you try to scan the somatic strip through and it’s just as though it’s going through and it’s hitting this and it’s doing a bounce. It’s going over the thing. Now, actually you’ll find exteriorized views on painful emotion all too frequently.
Male voice: How about asking for a valence shift as they do in the psychodrama there, so that the painful emotion is less painful dramatizing it for a while in a way?
Not necessary, ordinarily. A person just ordinarily will be. I’ll give you a trick on that in a moment. That’s a little bit ahead of me. [drawing on blackboard] Here we get a sweep, sweep, sweep. Now, as many times as you can actually bring the somatic strip through the incident, you can get a little bit closer to this spot. Just a little closer; finally you go right straight through it and you’ll get the incident. So a person may be some distance off from the incident at first. And you get exteriorized views on the incident. He sees himself.
He can be in somebody else’s valence or he can be in a synthetic valence. He can have some sort of commands that just make him set up valences for himself, but not be in anybody else’s valence. That’s an interesting one. You’ll find many actors have that valence-type circuit.
Male voice: In other words, he could possibly have visio of himself crying without actually feeling it Yeah, that’s right.
Male voice: Is that a help?
No! But here’s the way you handle that. As it goes across this first time, let us say he gets a visio of himself crying. Now, if it’s going to close at all, if it isn’t also computationally shut off and shut off with a valence shift and a couple of other things there, you run him through it the next time and he’s a little closer in on it. And he’s not so far outside himself. And then he’ll go into it and through it. But asking him to go through it if he has circuitry, just asking him bluntly to go into the incident and recount it is often fruitless. He’s telling you, “Well, my grandfather, my grandfather died” and the fellow starts to sort of leak tears and you know that there’s a charge on this. And then you say, “Well now, close your eyes, let’s go back to the moment when your grandfather died.” And he runs it off, “Well, I get this letter. It says my grandfather’s dead.” “Well, go over it again.” “Well, I get this letter my grandfather’s dead. Well, I get this letter and my grandfather’s dead. Yeah. Mm-hm. I’m right there.” No charge.
Sneak up on it. You’ve made it mechanical, you expect him to cry. This, because of computations in the engram bank, now becomes impossible. You’ve made him self-conscious of the artificiality of the situation. At the moment when you first started talking about his grandfather, the situation was very real to him. Now you are enforcing it upon him that he is going to recall this in reverie. So you have taken the artificiality out of it and if you can do that you will have enhanced the reality a great deal. He starts to tell you, “My grandfather died.” “Yeah, my grandfather died too. I know how it is. Where were you when he died?” “Well, I was at school, and they had me come home, so forth.” “Bet it was an awful shock to you.” “Yes, it was. It was, it was . . .” “Well, how’d they tell you?” “Aw, they gave me a bad shock. I got it by wire, and it just simply says my grandfather’s dead.” Boo-hoo-hoo!
You haven’t interrupted the reality of it but you’ve just stressed little points.
Now, by talking to the patient, being clever about it, you get up to the point finally where you can coax the patient. This is skill. By the way, this is a little art that I’m telling you about, a little art that you should master, because you’re going to have more opportunity to use this little trick than you think probably at the present moment.
A professional auditor the other day said, in teaching his class here, in professional class, that—this was a good auditor that he was instructing, good auditor, nice fellow, had lots of imagination, but just couldn’t seem to get the knack of coaxing somebody into an incident. He had to do it mechanically all the time. And he considered this a serious flaw—and it is—in the auditor’s technique.
That’s a hole in it. You want to do this mechanically all the time, there are incidents which depend for their reality upon a real approach instead of an artificial approach through therapy on the discharge line. So you master this little art which is, “Well, what did she say to you?” The fellow says, “Yes, my grandfather died.” “Well, who told you about it?” “Well, my mother told me about it.” He’s right there, wide-awake, and he’s in diagnosis. He’s in straight line memory as far as he’s concerned. But you start talking to him now on the basis of, “Did they send you a telegram or something?” “Yes, telegram.” “Well, what did it say?” “Well, it says Tour grandfather’s dead.’” “And what did you do? Stand there reading it?” “Yes.” “Well, what did it say?” “Why, ‘Your grandfather’s dead. Come home at once.’” “Now, I beg your pardon?” “ ‘Your grandfather’s dead. Come home at once.’” “Well now, where were you when you received the telegram?” Each time he has to look up and check where he is. He has to, in other words, keep paying attention to the incident, keep giving you information. The more he pays attention to the surroundings of this incident, the more thoroughly he’s returned to it.
Sometimes you will break the mood by guessing wrong if the patient is going in for painful emotion. [gap] If you have decided that he probably received this when he was at school, that he received it at home, the fact that you don’t agree with him seems to indicate to him that you’re in disagreement with the whole incident because you’re bringing him down to something where he is doing a lot of identified thinking.
His analyzer’s kind of badly shut off, if you’ve really got him on top of something. So a disagreement about anything, that is to say, you guessed the wrong data, he thinks this is it. Now, let me be very blunt about that. You say, “Oh, your mother told you?” “No, it was my sister.” But sometimes there’s a little borderline there. You want to know “Who told you?” just remember, “Well, was it your mother or your sister?” “Oh, it was my sister.” Now, you see, you’ve made it. But you suddenly bluntly suggest to him that it was his sister but it was his mother, he takes a little bit of umbrage at you. Sometimes you’ll be quite amazed at the slash you get back from a patient when you’ve guessed wrong when he’s going in toward painful emotion. He’s irritated with you for being so unsympathetic. In actuality you’re trying to get more data. So it’s better to be very—kind of doubtful about your own data, as though you didn’t quite know, as though you wanted to be informed. Don’t go over to the point where you are evaluating the situation for him. You are asking to be informed. You are not even asking for information, you’re just asking to be informed because you want to know. And when you pull that, you will get the patient back into an incident and he will run it and discharge it very often when you have missed before.
Male voice: I noticed you used past tense.
Well, wait a minute, I wasn’t using past tense. You pay attention to this again. She says—“Now, what is she saying?” “She said, They sent me.’” And you say, “And where are you receiving it . . . ?” Male voice: Well, when you spoke about “where did you get it” what was said . . .
Well, that’s perfectly permissible—“Where did you get the telegram?” Male voice: Oh, I feel more natural when I say, “Where did you get it?” When I say, “Where are you playing . . .” I have the feeling I’m doing it mechanically. So it’s all right to say it past tense?
Sure. Sure, it’s all right. Normally you use that, you’re pretty safe.
This is the second stage of this trick, is you talk first in past tense and then sort of slide out of using tenses for a moment or two and then start talking in present tenses. And you’ve brought him down on the tense level to a point where he’s talking about it as though it actually happened.
I have had people, by the way, who recounted painful emotion always in past tense when they were right on the scene crying bitter tears about it. And pretty hard to get them to break the habit. This is peculiar to people who have been in analysis. They’re awfully hard to break the past tense habit. But you would antagonize the person to change his mind all the time about it—try to coax him to talk in present tense when he is talking actually in past tense. You pay no attention to this in Dianetics, but you talk in present tense, “What is she saying, what is she doing?” And he says, “She said . . .” Sometimes you’ll get from a patient, “But I’m not there.” They’ve gotten onto this trick. “I’m not there, I’m not really there, you know.” “Well, I know. Well, what is she saying?” And it’ll break through. That’s the tense trick, getting them into it. It’s a specific trick.
Mm-hm?
Male voice: You said it’s more important than what particular word or tense . . .
Uh-huh. That’s right. You play it by feel. But there is a trick of trying to make him build up the scenery so he can tell you about it. That’s getting him into it, talking to him in past tense at first, then sliding over and start talking in present tense. And if he’s tracking along with you, he’ll start talking in present tense. And he’ll go right on through the incident and you’ve never put him in reverie, and you’ve gotten off the painful emotional charge. Or you’ve put him right into the middle of an exodontistry and left him there as I should have done this reporter, (laughter) Yes?
Male voice: I stumbled across a nice little trick that’s sort of down that alley. It was this: I get somebody who’s having a direct memory run. And I’ll merely say, “Now, this may be of importance. Would you please try your best to make me see how that really occurred.” And they say this happened and that happened. And they’ll run it over two or three times and they look, and the first thing you know they’ll just switch their tense themselves.
Mm-hm.
Male voice: Well, it just works so easy.
That’s a nice trick.
Male voice: I just happened to fall across it.
That’s a nice trick. Very nice.
Male voice: There’s another angle that worked today with an outpatient who wouldn’t remember, couldn’t remember anything. So I stopped for a little while and he didn’t know what I was doing. And using direct memory I said, “I’d like to see what you said. I don’t get—go over it again.” He said, “All right,” and he started looking for it. “No, the chair’s over there, you know.” But he was not interested in that, he was interested in seeing that I got the picture. So he had to build it up for himself. Yeah—good trick, very good trick. Yes?
Male voice: So far you’ve spoken of painful emotion and an emotion of loss, but the painful emotion of terror is also one of these physical points . . .
Fear, terror are specific engram lineups whereas grief sits all by itself, powerful enough in its loss to generate an analytical shutdown and latch up from the track several engrams and hang them up together in the charge. Whereas fear ordinarily comes from an engram itself It is a perceptic, an emotional perceptic of an engram which also contains pain and so on, unless it is a prenatal, which again contains a tiny bit of pain and unconsciousness, where Mother is terrified. I have not found fear and terror unaccompanied by or uncaused, as emotions all by themselves.
A child is badly hurt, it’s very frightened during it, or someone is very frightened around him while the child is being hurt. And then later this engram goes into restimulation, you have the child being very frightened.
When it comes to turning on an emotion it is extremely good, it is an extremely profitable thing to take a person back to a moment when he was afraid and get him to run through this moment when he was afraid. It’s his own dramatization of the fear, you see. He’ll run through this moment when he was afraid, and then just tell him to go to the moment, the earliest moment when he felt like this.
Often enough you’ll wind him up in the prenatal bank where Mama is saying, “I’m so afraid, I’m so afraid, I’m so frightened, I don’t know what to do about it, I can’t get rid of it, I can’t keep it, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” You watch repeating a dramatization. If you get a person to go over a dramatization very many times, they’re actually using repeater technique but they’re there at the moment when the emotional tone is comparable. When the emotional tone is comparable particularly, you will find the person sliding right straight back into the engram itself although he still thinks he’s recounting the lock, because the lock lies here and the engram is right here [tapping on blackboard], although on the time track the engram in time lies here and the lock lies here. Actually in the bank they’re lying right together. You’ll very often find a person start to run off a lock and you’ll drop right straight in. Just like you will find people running off engrams out of other people’s banks. Boy, never miss on that one. That’s a dead giveaway for an engram similar to it. Don’t just run it. Run off the other person’s lock. Say, “Well, let’s go over once what Jones said.” And the fellow starts recounting what Jones said when he was auditing Jones. And the next thing you know (this is troubling him), the next thing you know you say, “Now, where’s your own engram on the subject” and it’ll be lying right there and you’ll have him running through his own engram. And sometimes it’s that engram which is very necessary to resolve the case.
Male voice: Is shame a painful emotion? Shame or fear of disapproval?
Shame ?
Male voice: Yeah, Well, yes. The way to handle it is you find the time when the person was ashamed. He can recall this—his own dramatization of the emotion of being ashamed. You run this dramatization of him being ashamed and you say, “Well, now we’ll go back to the moment when this thing occurred as an engram.” And he’ll run the engram which contains it.
Male voice: I didn’t state my question the way I wanted to. Will shame act as painful emotion in auditing?
No. There’s one thing wrong here. It’s in terminology, and don’t become confused on this terminology, it’s going to be changed. But we can’t change it at this time because we haven’t got the rewrite of the handbook out yet. The painful emotional engram is going to be called a grief engram.
Grief, grief of loss is the only thing which will generate and twist around the engram bank as just a straight emotional impact.
Male voice: What about fear of loss?
Fear of loss is an engram. That is a physical pain engram—its source—which contains locks, and the person is getting a restimulation of the engram itself. “I’m afraid I’m going to lose it,” the engram says, and here is the engram and up here is the lock. And the person keeps dramatizing this “I’m afraid I’m going to lose it.” A physical pain engram is the source of all emotion except those of pleasure—all emotion that is nonsurvival emotion, you might say. Here is the physical pain engram. It says, “I am afraid I’m going to lose it, I’m so ashamed.” Maybe we have a hormone implantation at that time. Maybe we have other things. Maybe just the tone of voice and so forth that go in on this. There’s physical pain in this engram.
Now it gets keyed in clear up here. Now it just goes on getting minor locks, [drawing on blackboard] But a grief engram comes up along the bank here and here’s the physical pain engram, of various contexts. All of a sudden here is the death of Grandma. All of a sudden a person comes in and says, “Your Grandma’s dead.” The kid, bong “Poor little boy, don’t cry. Ah, that’s all right, she’s gone away to the angels and she’ll never be back and you’ll never see her again, and besides the Lord has taken the soul.” “What’s the soul?” “Why, the soul is something inside of you that the Lord takes away when you die.” “But I don’t want to die.” (Recording ends abruptly)