The Art of Processing (501107)
Date: 7 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I’ve done it by brute force. Not by beating the preclear but simply by requesting, being pleasant, being insistent, saying that the preclear will return to this and that and so forth. Not using repeater technique or anything like that but just telling them to go back. After a while it wears out the attention units and so—fine.
I don’t know how many hours some cases would take on this method. But what I’m trying to show you is the persistence, the endurance on the part of the auditor can in a large degree make up for his cleverness. But until you’re clever, you can expect to be able to furnish at least that patience and endurance and never get discouraged. Never!
People in Dianetics all have to be up to a tone 3!
Okay, let’s take a break here for ten minutes. [gap] Now, we have come down here to the point of starting in the basic area and proceeding to present time on an erasure.
I want to tell you something about erasure. This is something that has been to some slight degree overlooked: how one goes ahead with an erasure. Now, I want to tell you about a certain bit of dullness on the part of the file clerk.
The file clerk, of course, would get more money and better working hours if he weren’t stupid on this one point. And he’s very, very fine, he’s brilliant, does a good job, but never seems to have gotten next to this point: that the place to start is early. The file clerk doesn’t know anything really about how early you have to get. So the auditor on a case must bring the case up to a point where he can then start giving the file clerk a few tips and tell the file clerk to go early.
The file clerk evidently is sitting there, he has been unaware of the earliness of a lot of this material, so you tell him to go early. And when you tell him to go early and insist that he goes early and keep insisting The recording from which this lecture was transcribed begins with the lecture already in progress. that he go early each time, you will get a consecutive erasure. But unless you tell the file clerk that you want a consecutive erasure and that you want to get early, the file clerk will keep on handing you stuff on the late track or middle track and he can hand you an awful lot of engrams and what you’ll get is reductions, not erasures. And you can spend an awful lot of time on this. One erasure is worth forty reductions, anytime.
What you want to do is to get to the bottom of the case, earliest moment of pain or discomfort, and then get the next earliest moment of pain or discomfort and the next earliest moment of pain or discomfort. And as you walk up that bank, erase. And you’ll find out that by the time you’re up there around two months, something like that, three months, if you’ve got tension off the upper bank and some grief off the case, you’ll find out you’ll start getting erasures there in a pass. And the second pass you’ll get the yawns. But the word content will go, of that pass. Now, that’s a lot different, isn’t it, than running one of these engrams over and over and over and over and over?
Early in the case it may take six, eight, ten passes to get an erasure. But every time you get an erasure, there’s that much more available in terms of mental force and the stuff goes out after that that much faster, until, when you really get rolling on this case, really get rolling on an erasure, one pass, second pass, yawns—gone. One pass, second pass, yawns. Thirty engrams erased in two hours. I have erased fifty-five in two hours. Long ones! Swish, swish, swish, swish, swish—really mop up!
Don’t let anybody fool you about engrams coming back. They don’t come back if they’re erased or decently reduced. They do come back if they’ve gone into recession and they occasionally come back if you insist on running a case 100 percent out of valence. What have you done in that case? Should be obvious. You’ve run off one valence end of the engram or two valences out of the engram, and the person’s own engram is still left. You’ve run off the other people. Well, they’re not important, they’ll come off as the normal course of human affairs. You want to get into the basic area, get the preclear into his own valence and start the erasure as soon as you can.
I have done a little checking around and I was somewhat astonished to find that there are quite a few cases around which have been in processing for quite a long time and which are still fooling around rather late on the track and have not carried forward a systematic erasure. This is strictly an omission of Standard Procedure. It is something that would be incredible to me why anybody, when he could get an erasure started, wouldn’t stick with it.
Now, this sort of thing happens with an erasure: you can start in in the basic area and you can erase for a while, then all of a sudden you can’t erase anymore. And you’ll find out there’s a grief engram that’s come into view and that can be blown at that time. So you go up the case and you blow the grief engram. You come back down into the basic area and you continue the erasure.
Now, what happens is, evidently when the erasure is interrupted in that fashion, the people who go blow the grief engram then start relying on the file clerk and just picking stuff up all over the track and reducing it. Oh, the person gets better, but he is not progressing along toward Clear with any great rapidity. It was with some astonishment that I learned this and it is comparable with and right down the groove on why more Clears aren’t jumping into view. Evidently this is something that is being done all over the field of Dianetics at this time. A lot of Clears— there should have been, by this time, a lot of them.
Of course I’ve had a hard time trying to judge what other people could do with what I was doing, but there is the reason for it, is the file clerk doesn’t know how early you have to get or how often you have to get early.
You start up on a case and the fellow starts running reductions, he’s starting to reduce things and so forth; there’s some grief ready on that case or the auditor has simply overlooked four or five engrams right in a row. So you keep fighting down into the basic area and you get erasures.
Now, it is not necessary for you to go to conception or demand that you go to conception first crack out of the box; what you want is the earliest moment of pain or discomfort. And you want to be very insistent with the file clerk. The next time you want an earlier moment of pain or discomfort, keep getting the reduction. If he hands you up conception, that’s just fine. But if you start demanding conception, there is a case here or there where conception is misplaced in the bank and you have to get later material before you get the earlier material. It gets badly filed down in that quarter of the bank. I’ve seen this happen several times now. And people have willy-nilly entered conception and just demanded the thing and been very insistent on it and then conception would not reduce.
I never had any of this trouble myself for a good reason—I was always asking for the earliest moment of pain or discomfort which can now be reached, and the fellow would run something at two years of age and we’d run it, reduce it—“Now let’s go to a real early moment of pain or discomfort.” And get something around six months prenatal Very surprised file clerk—“What the hell is this stuff doing down here?” See? And then say, “Well now, let’s go earlier.” And the next thing you know, you get two months postconception. And the file clerk by this time is really scratching his head. “What the hell have I gotten into here? I didn’t know this stuff was lying around here.” And you as the auditor of course are always smarter than the file clerk as far as an understanding is concerned. But he has the edge on you that he can look right straight at the bank and he can pick up what’s handy there. But he’ll keep handing you late stuff until you demand and insist on getting earlier stuff.
I even went so far with a file clerk one time as telling him I wouldn’t accept an engram unless it would erase. And I’ll be a son of a gun, for about ten hours the file clerk gave me nothing but engrams that would erase!
Don’t lose sight of your objective. Your objective is to get the grief off the case first, get into the basic area and erase all the engrams in the case. And when the engrams stop erasing, you’ve got some more grief coming up so you might as well square that up and get back into the basic area again. [gap] . . . then you have painful emotion. Coming up to the point of painful emotion, that is to say, they work from worried, through fear, grief, down to apathy. Any one of these things actually can be summed up as painful emotion.
Now, I’m going to talk about today—I’m going to talk about the file clerk and the somatic strip.
In here it’s understood that you’ve made a test on the preclear by this time that he’s moving on the track and so on. The file clerk and the somatic strip should work for you in this way: “The file clerk will give us the engram necessary to resolve the case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of the engram. When I count from one to five and snap my fingers, the first phrase of the engram will flash into your mind.” The phrase flashes, he starts repeating the phrase, all of a sudden the somatic turns on as he settles into the engram and you then run the engram.
That is the way a case ought to run. If a case doesn’t run that way, you have a case that is stuck on the track, it’s out of valence or it has a tremendous amount of control circuitry. It’s one of these three things. It isn’t something else, it isn’t any wild or strange reason; it’s just those things.
Now, what you should do, of course, if the person is out of valence, is try to get him into his own valence. That’s a pretty hard job. The easiest way to do it I know is to blow some grief off the case, if you can get grief out of his own valence. And by the way, I can mention in passing that sometimes when a person is starting to run grief and you ask this person if he’s in his own valence, he doesn’t quite understand what you mean, you say, “Do you see yourself?” “Yes.” Just tell him to get inside of himself and every now and then just this simple act will put him into his own valence and he can blow the grief. Don’t expect anybody to blow any grief unless he is in his own valence. He’ll just be crying somebody else’s tears and they don’t count.
Do you see what I mean by that? You run a grief discharge or you’re starting to run one; the person is outside of himself, he’s seeing himself, you just persuade him to get inside of himself and the grief discharge will occasionally go off just in that process.
Remember this, too, that as you start through a grief discharge with a person out of valence, if you have that moment recounted two or three times out of valence, the preclear will slide into his own valence. That is the usual and ordinary procedure if you find somebody during a grief moment outside of himself looking at somebody else. See?
Now, another way and usually the best way to get a person into his own valence is get him into the basic area—he does not have any commands throwing him out of valence prior to the moments into which you’re placing him. He’ll get into his own valence and sonic will turn on. You shouldn’t overlook this fact—that down in the basic area a person can be gotten into his own valence and can get sonic.
Many cases get snarled up because the auditor is willing to run stuff which is too late and he runs quite a bit of material that’s too late and after that runs it out of valence and then has the devil’s own time2 getting the preclear into his own valence in the basic area.
Even Johnny Campbell gets into his own valence in the basic area. Peg Carney, by the way, is doing a fine job on him. He’s down working on the basic area now and he’s getting back to the point he was into last January. I had Johnny on an erasure last January and there was a terrific environmental upset, just went boom! right in his face, and he had got an engram restimulated by this out of processing. That engram was way up the track and it blew him so solidly out of his own valence and knocked so many things into line that after that one couldn’t get him into the basic area again without blowing off a lot of grief and terror up the track. The person who knocked him into this condition was of course consigned to Siberia, and that’s no kidding.
Now, if you’re not getting flash answers off of this person, its because a circuit or two circuits or two hundred circuits or two thousand circuits interpose between the file clerk and “I” And the flash will come up and start through to “I” because, mind you now, you’re going to get that flash and then it’s going to start through and hit three or four shunts and some resistances and go around and be reevolved, hit the dub-in circuits, go into a small slot and come out the other end saying something not even remotely similar.
When you’re running on these circuits, knocking them out, you will notice that the file clerk will start picking up in his efficiency and efficacy. There isn’t any reason to believe otherwise. When your file clerk is giving you strange data, it’s not the file clerk. And when he is giving you no data, there’s interposition. There is no reason to think anything else is happening than just circuits because there can be many kinds of circuits. There are occlusion circuits and so on.
The circuit which really gives trouble, however, is the control circuit: “I’ve got to do it myself.” “Nobody can do it but myself.” “You’ve got to control yourself.” “I have lost all control.” “You’ve got to have control.” Various commands which are restimulative.
Now, if the file clerk and the somatic strip work, you go right on running the case. Don’t fool around, don’t worry about anything else. If you can get them to work together, work efficiently, why, you’re all set. You can run this case right on out. The trick is to get them into shape so they work. Because in, I should say—I don’t know what the percentage is, but of the cases I have run lately, about 25 percent of the cases they didn’t work on. This is not a fair measure, however, because the file clerk and the somatic strip very often work for me when they don’t work for other people. I noticed that as a peculiarity.
Male voice: Altitude.
Yeah, it’s more a question of confidence. Somebody won’t be quite as confident and it could be not only circuits, it could also be BP—and I’m going to cover that now.
My percentages probably are off. Twenty-five percent of the cases aren’t working that way.
Now, when it comes to a broken-down BP, you do have a problem on your hands. Basic personality will sometimes quit. Somebody starts into the case and he picks up a prenatal and says, “Well, we’re not interested in that, let’s go someplace else. Now, let’s pick up a grief discharge” and run that halfway out, and say, “Well, are you in your own valence?” And the preclear says “Yes” and tries to go on running this grief .You say, “Are you sure you are in your own valence?” He’s crying tears, you know. And the auditor says, “Well now, are you sure this isn’t sitting on an earlier grief discharge? You’re still trying to get rid of this thing.” And, “Was this really your grandmother?” You know?
About that time BP, if he had a machine gun, would merely sit up and fire. But BP, unfortunately, is not in full control of the individual, so auditors go on living. Maybe that’s very fortunate. I’ve seen BP get pretty vengeful.
Once upon a time there was one of these chronic—this is a chronic cycle: material comes from somebody, they—you say that such and so and so-and-so should be done and it gets into a class. And the next thing you know, people in the class are doing some strange, outrageous thing that has nothing whatsoever to do with Standard Procedure. And then cases start to foul up. All sorts of things happen.
None of these things—right now you’ve got one that has to do with computation: the preclear must compute on his case. I could make a very technical opinion on that. I think I should. Again, I’ll mention it here several times in case it doesn’t really get through. The technical opinion I am going to have written down and published, and it sums up to this effect: hogwash. It is not necessary.
The reason I gave you before that people are asked to compute on their cases is because of the anxiety of the auditor. The auditor wants very much for the preclear to get over some chronic somatic or some aberration so he’ll hit a phrase which to him explains it perfectly and the preclear doesn’t see it. So the auditor tells him to compute on it and he anxiously says, “Now, think that over; isn’t that the cause of your rheumatoid bursitis?” And the preclear says “No.” And the auditor says, “Now, you’re sure now? Now, just go over those phrases carefully again. ‘I ache in every joint.’ Now . . .” And the preclear . . . You see, he is so convinced. But this is probably not the phrase. It isn’t a matter of computation. It just simply isn’t the phrase that causes the rheumatoid bursitis, that’s all.
Any one of these chronic somatics has on it—the phrase that causes it—has on it, charge. And you can run out all manner of explanatory phrases in a case. There would probably be in any case that has some particular condition, there will be hundreds of phrases in there which could explain that condition. Hundreds of them.
The trick is just to keep running Standard Procedure, just to keep running for a release and sooner or later you will run into the one which counts. And that one, when hit, or the incident, when hit, will suddenly find this preclear in excellent condition. You’re wasting time to tell him to compute on the case.
Now, another one, like this one that got to running wild was—some fellow whose name I well know (who is no longer with us) used to have an idea that what you did was get into the case and you have to get it restimulated to find engrams! Now, that’s just gorgeous theory. In other words, you have to find engrams and restimulate them so that you can find engrams. Now, this is silly right on the face of it. You’ve got your hands on engrams, so why do you want to restimulate these engrams so that you can find engrams? It’s totally non sequitur. And a couple or three students, as a matter of fact, practically ruined some cases because BP—the first thing that would happen on this practice was that BP would quit. The preclear lies down in full confidence of his auditor, the auditor sits there, the auditor says, “Let’s go to the prenatal area; all right, now do you contact something, you’ve got a somatic?” And the preclear just starts to run a somatic and the auditor says, “Now let’s go up postnatal and see if we can find some grief.” And he goes up and he just starts to find some grief and he says, “Let’s go to birth.” And then he says, “All right now, you tell me that you feel those contractions now, you feel them real good. Now let’s go to conception.” I’m not kidding you. That process was actually being done. This was quite a while ago, a long time ago, but about four or five cases just snarled, just one right after the other on this procedure. And this person to this day is doing this and thinks he’s practicing Dianetics. Wonderful.
Now, “you restimulate engrams in order to find engrams”; that’s very silly. You’ve got to knock out everything you contact; otherwise basic personality is going to get sore and he’s going to quit.
I had one fellow moving on the track one time, moving very beautifully. He had been stuck most of his life and he was going up and down the track and we were hitting engrams and reducing them and hitting them and reducing them and his visio and sonic were turning on and this case was just turning out beautifully. Oh, the file clerk and the somatic strip were just working in there one right after the other. I picked up this case—I left it alone for about three weeks and I picked up this case at the end of three weeks and started to run it and bleuhh. It was the file clerk, somatic strip—nothing. I might as well have been standing there talking to the wall; this case was in much worse shape than it had been when I first laid my hands on it and I really scratched my head over this one. And I found out that this person of whom I was just speaking a moment ago had been working this case for three weeks and worked it about six times in those three weeks and had taken the preclear down the track a little way and then contact something, and then bring him back up to present time so that he could go earlier to contact something else, and then bring the preclear up to present time and back earlier.
Of course, what was happening was a restimulated engram with a “come up to present time” on it (claps hands) present time—it just becomes in collision. So we move one up there, we move two up there, we move three up there, we move four up there and basic personality had quit. This person was evidently still somewhat willing to work, but couldn’t get anything. The file clerk says, “I hand these things up—I have enough trouble in life without handing these things up out of the file, because I can’t get them back into the file again after these dumb fools stop, don’t run them out!” And actually it’s a computational problem. You will recognize these cases. They go to sleep on you. That’s one of the things they do. They will dramatize rather than anything else or they will evidently just travel up and down the track without finding anything. Those three things happen on a case. So you want to reduce everything you contact; you want to do good Standard Procedure. If you do good Standard Procedure and work well with your preclear, basic personality gets more and more and more confident. And the more confident he gets, the tougher the engrams he’ll hand up and the case will resolve much more swiftly.
This is why a certified auditor gets a case running so much faster than anybody else. In the first place, as a certified auditor he has some prestige. Basic personality pricks up his ears and says, “Well, it’s not going to be Aunt Suzie running me now; this fellow knows his business. He’s going to run me.” So that’s fine. Basic personality will give some aid and assistance suddenly. Don’t betray that aid and assistance. Do it right, go right straight through.
If you do it right, according to Standard Procedure, basic personality will agree with you. And I’m not talking now about a basic personality that’s been educated in Dianetics; I’m talking about a basic personality straight off the street who knows nothing about Dianetics, knows nothing about a file clerk or a somatic strip, knows no terminology. Bring this person in, lay him down on the couch, don’t use the terminology, just use other terminology, just for a test. Just tell him anything.
You say, “Now, a moment of pain will occur to you. Now, the first words that were spoken in the moment of the pain will sort of come into your mind and now would you repeat those a few times.” And you’ll be running engrams. You’re right off to the start.
If this person doesn’t get that, you start shooting for circuitry, not by saying that it’s circuits or anything else but just saying, “Who in your family used to say Control yourself’?” And he thinks for a moment and he says, “My father.” “Just how did he say it?” “ ‘Well, you’ve got to take it calm and easy; you’ve got to hold yourself down; you’ve got to grip on yourself Yeah, that’s what he always used to say” So you say, “All right, let’s contact the dramatization,” and he contacts it. You don’t even have to tell him he’s traveling on the track or that he has a time track or anything else. And the next thing you know, you can run engrams all the way up and down the track.
It’s also fascinating that you don’t have to tell a person that prenatals exist. You tell them to go to the earliest moment of pain or discomfort and the first thing you know, they’ll be wound up in the prenatal area. They needn’t have heard any of this. So when you’re dealing with Standard Procedure, you’re dealing with a parallel to mind operation. And when you violate the way that the mind runs by gross and constant errors, BP quits on you. He just refuses to cooperate with the auditor.
You’re going to pick up cases where this has happened. These cases are likely to come into your lap. You’re going to be in the same situation that I am in constantly. Nobody ever brings me an easy case; not willingly. Once in a while I—on these demonstrations out in the countryside I’ll look through the audience and I’ll pick up a case that I’ll know will run. And it is with peculiar satisfaction that I see a running case.
However, if a case is suddenly thrown in my lap, you know very well that this case is stuck, BP has quit, an engram is in solid restimulation that nobody else has been able to touch, and that ten or fifteen people have monkeyed with this case and made all their mistakes on it too, and then finally it comes to me and I’m supposed to undo this thing in a half an hour and boy, that’s really tough. It’s something that I have become very quick spotting, bad auditing. I probably am the world’s greatest expert on bad auditing. I’ve had to run so very much of it out of people.
Occasionally it’s with great satisfaction that somebody hands me somebody who is just a tough case on whom fairly good auditing has been done; that is an exception. Usually people will take a very tough case and then complicate it with bad auditing. And then get hold of this case and I always do the same thing: I always go to the first time the preclear was audited; first time. Now, it is rare that I find the auditor and the bad auditing later than the first time. But if I had found good auditing there in the first time, I would keep coming forward trying to find out if there had been another auditor on the case and then run out the first time he or she audited this case. And by running the first session, go in immediately into the first error and drop into the first engram that was left unreduced and boom, boom! BP will buy this; he’ll buy it. I’ve never had him do otherwise. He says all of a sudden, “Well, that’s okay, I’ve worked this far; I’ve been over this ground anyhow and we might as well go into that engram; we’ve been there already.” And you go through it and you reduce two or three of these engrams and the first doggone thing you know, why, basic personality pricks up its ears and says, “Hey, let’s roll!” And this case starts chewing along lickety-split.
It was interesting—for your edification, Lamar Dye was loused up before he came to this school. The first session of auditing was done by his brother, at home, before he came here to Elizabeth. And the case resolved by contacting the first session of auditing that his brother had done on him. And by just starting to run that session of auditing, Lamar of course dropped right straight down the track into the basic area. It was basic-basic. It had been run one-quarter of the way out and then abandoned. It had a grouper in it which was also the grouper in birth.
Now, that had been triggered in his first hour in Dianetics and it had been abandoned afterwards. And though—to resolve his case it wasn’t necessary to pick up other things.
Now, we have this Step Two, A4. “If the file clerk and the somatic strip indicate a stuck case, try all prescribed methods to free on the track and, failing, go to Step Three.” That’s why I’ve been talking about Step Three—how you would go ahead on this.
I gave you a complete list of how you free somebody on the track. Freeing them on the track isn’t easy, but it’s something which can be done.
I want to talk a little more here, in view of the fact that it’s right there—“Try all prescribed methods”—the fact that a lot of people are partially stuck. Now, let’s take up the analogy of the attention units. I don’t know whether anyone has brought this home to you very forcefully or not, but the analogy of the attention units consists of saying that one has 1,000 units. You just postulate that a person has 1,000 units, that so many of these units are tied up in the reactive bank and that so many of these units are free to think with and to remember.
Now, these units are of various kinds, but we won’t bother to go into that. Some are monitor units and some are just free units. But we take this analogy and we find where a person sends back 2 units to a datum, he’s remembering that datum. If he sends back 50, 60, 70 of the 100 which he still has free after 900 have been tied up in the reactive bank, he is returning and if he sends back all of his 100, he is reliving. But mind you now, we have postulated there that about 900 of them in this one case are tied up in the reactive bank. I have seen people with engrams in an enormous state of restimulation all up and down the track who could still move freely on the track. That’s interesting. The person had enough units to spare, in spite of all this, to go on running more or less some semblance of pianola.
Practically every preclear that you’ll work on is actually stuck on the track.
Now, we could postulate two things here—one out of two things. We could say that there are monitor units or units which actually compose “I.” The central “I” of the mind, the “me.” There is a special type of unit which goes to make up “I,” and that when those units get tied up on the track, this person is really stuck. Or we could say that just the bulk of the units are stuck on the track. Whichever way you want to take, it all comes out the same way.
The person who is really stuck on the track is unmistakable. Anybody who is occluded has the majority of his attention units stuck on the track.
The reason why you are processing people is because they’re stuck on the track. So when we take up this problem of being stuck on the track, we are actually talking about a spectrum again. We are talking about a person who is 5 percent stuck or 10 percent stuck or 80 percent stuck or 90 percent stuck or 100 percent stuck.
Now, when we have a person who is 100 percent stuck on the track—of course, one could never be 100 percent stuck on the track because he would be talking with the accent and would know no more than he knew when he was that old. We’d have somebody that would have to be blasted loose, practically, with a pneumatic drill. That is the psychotic. He is 100 percent stuck on the track. He gets 100 percent stuck in prenatal, let’s say; he rolls up into a fetal position, has to be fed through a tube, can’t perform any bodily functions, has no control over the physical being, so forth. He’s 100 percent stuck on the track.
That’s one type of psychosis. Or he’s 100 percent stuck at the age of two, with attendant difficulties. That’s another type of psychosis. Or he is 100 percent stuck at the age of fourteen. That’s another type of psychosis. It all happens that they’re just 100 percent stuck on the track. In other words, they are really reliving the moment.
Now, the people you’re going to run into are those who haven’t enough free—that you’re going to worry about—they are sane enough to—you know, normal. They have so many units stuck in one place that they can’t move above or below this place; they aren’t free-running on the track. Now, those are the people you’re going to worry about. But the number of units which they actually have stuck there are less than you yourself return up and down the track on the normal preclear. I mean, they are only maybe 30 percent stuck there. But they still haven’t enough units to do any movement on the track.
That’s an analogy. Don’t take it as fact. We haven’t any substantiating facts for it; this is just the way cases behave and if you think of it in that fashion, why, you will be able to see a little bit better how to resolve it.
Now, what you’re trying to do is just spring loose attention units from this point. There are commands here, call-backs, holders, denyers, a few other things, that demand that the person stay right where he is. And these commands are forcefully enough restimulated so that the bulk of his attention units are right there. And you ask this person, “How old are you?” And he says, “Twelve—I mean, I’m twenty-nine.” And you say, “Now . . .” And sometimes you’ll get this one; it’s interesting how much you’ll learn by facial expressions and so forth. You’ll say, “How old are you?” And the fellow will say, (pause) “Twenty-nine.” (audience laughter) And you’ll say, “What was the first flash you got?” And he’ll say, “Why, I didn’t get any flash.” “Now, didn’t any number occur to you at first?” “Twelve.” You want to catch people on that.
Another little facial expression that might be of some assistance to you is when a person is stuck on the track and he’s coming back up the track from where you’ve been running an engram and you start him back up the track and you say, “Come up to present time.” And the fellow is there with his eyes closed and you say, “Come up to present time.” Nuh-uh. He’s stuck. He’s stuck right on the track, because his eyes—he opened his eyes there—this was present time as far as he was concerned.
Now, the way he should come up to present time is like this. You say, “Come up to present time,” (pause) And you say, “How old are you?” He’ll give you his proper age. In other words, there is time lag and the time lag is expressed by the eyelids. These are little things you learn in the course of observation.
You’ll run somebody that habitually his eyes just flutter. He’ll tell you he’s not stuck and he’ll tell you all sorts of things; you know doggone well he is. You don’t argue with him. You just try to go through the whole procedure of getting him unstuck.
Now, I want to make clear that in the process of processing you are continually sticking somebody on the track. I mean, any time you locate an engram and you start repeating the first phrases of that engram, you are bringing all the attention units available into that engram. Actually you’re sticking somebody on the track, you see, but you are sticking them on purpose and you’re running an engram with those attention units. And you go on through this engram running it off and you have poured attention units into it to get attention units out of it. You see, this is a problem of income and outgo.
Now, your outgo in this case must never be less than the income. We want to run this—a reduction gives you, let’s say, 100 percent income. Now you’ve got all the attention units available in the case running this thing except those that are still anchored in and orienting on present time and you start running through this engram and you’ve invested in this engram all the attention units you can possibly grab. Well, make doggone—the reason you did this is to get every attention unit out of this engram that was ever bound up in it. Now, you want to get all the attention units back. You want this to be an efficient operation.
The reason you are running this engram is because it either potentially or actually ties up attention units. Of course, an engram’s danger is in the fact that it can seize attention units and restimulate. When an engram is restimulated, attention units have to go down there and they get occupied in the thing. Attention units go into the spot where the engram is and they get tied up there. And they’re tied up there, they will stay there until the engram is run or until by some accident something else calls for more emergency and they sometimes pull out of it.
ACTH, by the way, has the wonderful facility of blowing attention units out of engram A into engram B. It doesn’t blow, except once in a blue moon—that is to say, the cases they write up and publish—the attention units out of engram A into present time, I think there have been enough cases so they can make a beautiful write-up on ACTH.
Actually what I learned about ACTH is simply that. It blows the attention units from engram A into engram B. This fellow is getting along just fine. Of course, he has some bad arthritis in his left hip, but he’s getting along fine otherwise; he’s not worried about his wife leaving him or anything. And then they shoot him with ACTH and he has diabetes and becomes very jealous. This has been very puzzling to the people in the field. It has been. In other words, the mans behavior pattern and his physiological troubles shift. And it’s about as safe to play with as a small panther because you don’t know where you’re going to go from the one you’re in. And very often it’s a question of one was better off to have left it alone in the first place.
How would you like to just take out of your hat the fact that this preclear is in an engram and you say, “Well now, we’re not going to look at the engram or inspect it in any way—some other engram in his bank—but we’re going to tie up the bulk of his attention units in a random engram in his bank and then we’re not going to do any more about it.” Boy. Well, that’s cortisone.
Okay. The point I’m making here is that you tie up engrams on the track. Therefore you might say that processing is the process of sticking people on the track and unsticking them again, so you’d better be awfully good at it. And you’d better pay considerable attention on how you blast people loose because the process of blasting them loose and the process of processing are going to get back to the same thing. You tie people up on the track and then you unlash them. Every time you run an engram you are running down into an area and running out, or trying to run out, something that would tie him up on the track some.
Now, if you fail to run out or reduce an engram and bring him up to present time again, you’ve tied him up on the track. In order to start the case again you have to unstick him. But usually it’s much simpler when you’re doing it in processing. There usually is no great trouble about this in processing because it’s the number of solid holders and so forth that are in an engram and the fact that once the engram is run it has—it’s being run; you know, the preclear knows where he is; he’s running it through and so forth. You’re not doing it in the dark.
What makes stuck on the track seem so very dangerous and so bad is when you don’t know where he’s stuck; you didn’t track him into this place. He didn’t know when he got into this thing. You know he’s stuck on the track but you don’t know where. And you’ve added to this the factor, a very interesting factor, of hunting for a needle in a haystack. This person has several thousand engrams and he’s stuck in one of them. Of course actually, for all practical purposes, he’s stuck in hundreds of them, but there’s one principal engram in which he’s stuck and you’ve got to find it—you’ve got to find that engram and unstick him and get the case rolling.
Now, bad auditing can stick somebody in an engram. The usual way it happens is for the auditor to get into the engram, hit a bouncer, not know he’s hit a bouncer, let the preclear bounce out of it. Now, it is not known to the “I” of the preclear or to the auditor that an engram has been restimulated and that the preclear has bounced out of it.
A bouncer is a species of holder. One thing about the action of a bouncer—it’s a very mysterious thing. I would say that a bouncer sort of puts an attention unit or set of attention units down there with a walkie-talkie. They’re in, very definitely in a connection with “I.” And once the bouncer has bounced, the preclear is obviously not in the engram because the somatic will to a large degree turn off. But he’s certainly not out of it; he’s still very much in contact with it and the engram is alive. So out he goes, but the engram is still restimulated.
Now, if we carried this through on a postulate that there is a certain type of attention unit which makes up “I,” we would say that this type of attention unit, “I’s” attention unit, comes out—but that standard utility attention units, the kind that you send around for memory and so forth, that they have been left stuck in when you hit a bouncer. So don’t ever make the mistake of believing that because a person is bounced out of an engram that he’s out of the engram. “I” units may be out of the engram but there’s enough there to cause plenty of trouble. Now, when you’ve let him bounce out of one engram and then out of another engram and then out of another engram and another engram, by the time you go a certain distance you have five, six, eight, ten engrams restimulated in this case, not thoroughly reduced, there’ll be trouble. You’ll find the case suddenly stalled.
The best way to start a stalled case is to go back to the first session of auditing and start running it, try to find out what was done wrong. Usually you will find one of two things: the person has bounced out of the engram or he’s hit what you might call an engram-ender. A false statement that is just—the phrase comes up “I’m finished” or “I’m all through this” and the preclear will tell you so—that’s the end of it. He won’t necessarily use the words in the engram. He’ll say, “That’s the end of the engram” and the auditor will not pay any attention to the bodily functions there, to the twitches and so on, won’t pay any attention to the aspects of this preclear, but will say, “All right, lets just go to another engram.” You’ve left one in restimulation. Now, you see how it is? So you could say that the art of processing is knowing first how to get somebody stuck in an engram, and second, knowing how to unstick them. That’s a fact. Just—you could say that it’s a continuous repeating process, one after the other. And when you start a case, you could start it on one part of the cycle or the other part of the cycle. You’d open one case and you’ll find out it’s already stuck on the track; you open another one and you’ll find out it’s moving on the track.
It shouldn’t mean any great amount of difficulty or sorrow to you to find somebody stuck on the track; you’re sticking people on the track all the time and unsticking them again all the time. The problem is no different running an engram one after the other and you shouldn’t get just completely broken down and bushed because somebody is stuck. That is the usual rather than the unusual. And in processing you must know how to stick and unstick people on the track.
Now, the way you stick somebody on the track is to tell the file clerk to give you the engram necessary to resolve the case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of the engram. Count from one to five and snap your fingers, tell them to repeat the first phrase four or five times. If he does, if there happens to be a holder along there anyplace, why, you can just walk off from the case at that point, just get up and walk off the case and you’ll have somebody stuck on the track. Now, you see what sort of a situation that is. You see?
Now, let’s say that Auditor A does this to a preclear. He fixes him up so he’s stuck on the track and walks away. Auditor B walks in and let us suppose now that the preclear has an amnesia on what has gone before; he doesn’t tell you anything about Auditor A. Auditor B comes into a case which is stuck on the track. Now, it’s his problem to find out what engram it was that stuck the preclear, and unstick him.
Now, of course that engram can be somewhere up and down the bank, fifteenth or twentieth on a chain or fourth or fifth, it doesn’t matter, on the chain, from the basic on that chain—you know what’s meant by a basic on a chain. That’s the first engram of a similar type; the earliest.
All right. Supposing—it doesn’t matter; that thing is somewhere on this chain. Could be the first, the second, the twentieth, it doesn’t matter which engram it is. The point is that it is on a chain; always on a chain. Engrams don’t exist which aren’t on chains! Now, if it’s well up the chain and there are many times—many similar engrams exist before this point, that’s going to be a tough one because it’s not going to reduce, it’s going to beat into recession. In other words, if you ran it two hundred times, it would temporarily disappear; three days later it’s going to reappear and then you can run it again and it will disappear. Many, many times you run it and then you let it go and it will reappear three days after that. This is recession, something you shouldn’t overlook as one of the main factors, that the thing could happen.
The only thing wrong with this engram, the only possible thing wrong with it is it’s just too far up the chain on which it belongs. So, you want to get earlier on this chain and you want to get the basic on this chain or something near the basic on this chain and get a reduction. The moment you do that, the one that was beating into recession will deintensify automatically; it doesn’t need any further attention. See how that works?
Recession, reduction, erasure. What you’re after are reductions and erasures. A reduction will occur rather rapidly; ten, twelve recountings should get a reduction. If it starts up to fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty recountings—if anybody was ever fool enough to recount an engram this many times—that is going into recession, if it’s going anyplace. And it will just get tougher and tougher. And it’s very, very simple—it’s just the fact that there are earlier engrams.
Now, it’s a funny thing about a chain. If a chain has a holder on it—if it has a holder in it, the holder will not be effective if you go back down the chain, earlier on this chain. In other words, you’ve sort of got a batch of stuff, a bin of similar engrams and you can go earlier or later on the same kind of engram. Similar dramatization or whatever it is.
Let’s say Papa has the habit of hitting Mama over the head with a baseball bat and saying, “Forget it.” Now, if you find Papa saying this once, you’ll find Papa—and doing this once, the probabilities are that it happened many, many, many times. So this action and this type of action made a chain. Now, there was a first time as far as your preclear is concerned, there was a first time that this happened. Maybe it was the five-hundredth time that Papa did this but the preclear wasn’t there before this point. So you see there’s a first time for the preclear. You’ll find the earliest time that it occurred, you hit that incident or that type of incident, it will knock into an erasure usually, or a reduction. If it’s up there around four or five months postconception, it will go into a reduction. If it’s down around a month or two weeks, it’s the first incident of that type and nothing precedes it of that type, then it will knock out as basic. So you want—got to learn to think in terms of chains and don’t consider it that these are isolated incidents you’re running into. There will be in a case a few isolated incidents. Birth is a chain of one in men, and in an awful lot of women it’s a chain of several because her delivery and her own birth—that is to say, her delivering herself of children, will latch up on her own birth so the maternal delivery chain has as its basic the woman’s own birth. That’s inevitable, I mean, that’s it; we don’t say yes or no about this, (Recording ends abruptly)