The Tone Scale in Action (500714)
Date: 14 July 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Now, anything that an engram can do, can be done only because the analytical mind has ways and means to do it and does it naturally anyway The engram exaggerates and renders, punched-in, all the abilities—renders chronic certain abilities of the analytical mind. A person cannot have a manic saying “I’ve got to write”—or “You’ve got to write the greatest book in the world. I know you can write it”—he can have this manic, but if the analytical mind is not capable of writing the greatest book, oh-oh, now we have trouble, because it keeps what ability there is to write the greatest book continually soldered into the connectors. So now he has to write the greatest book, he has no choice in it, the engram says so. But let’s say he has the ability to do so, now that thing . . . [gap] . . . psychological error in believing that people did things only because they had neuroses and psychoses. They watched the analytical mind in action, they saw that sometimes it got out of alignment and then they assumed, because something had pushed it out of alignment and pushed in certain buttons on it, that the whole thing was, and that was the only way it could think, which was a short way of looking at it. Because the mind normally goes all the way up and down the Tone Scale in the business of living.
If a person can do something and they happen to have an engram that coincides with it, this gives them a compulsion to do what they can do and cuts down—because an engram has anaten, unconsciousness in it too—cuts down the ability to do it. Now you knock out the engram, the analytical mind can do it, it will do it, if it is necessary to do. So bringing up that, we have the endocrine system. The endocrine system is a very, very interesting gimmick. It has this mechanism of turning on certain endocrine responses in order to encourage the body to do what it ought to do at that moment or during that period.
Now if a kodiak bear suddenly walks forward and slaps the hunter, blap, the hunter who gets up again and starts to box with sixteen hundred pounds of carnivorous bear is not likely to live to fight another day Right away we get a tone 0 as the natural solution, which is “I’m dead.” And he lies still, the bear sniffs at him and maybe the bear goes away. If the bear goes away, he lives to fight another day. If the bear doesn’t, he’s just out of luck. He should have been a better shot in the first place. But this is a natural computation. This is apathy. But this is the natural mechanism of apathy.
Now, here we have a person in the —this is apathy and this is anger and this is boredom and this is just general cheerfulness. All right. As your scale goes up this reaction is quite natural here. He’s on the field of battle. He’s fighting for, well, let’s say he’s fighting to preserve the world for the corn sellers of America or fighting to preserve the world for—oh, I don’t know—some shoe sale organization, something rational like this. He’s out there and the bullets are flying thick and fast and all around his head and they’re whizzing and snapping and he doesn’t happen to have paid any attention to all the propaganda stories and so forth which tell him that war is glorious and the thing for any man to do and the most ultimate goal for any man to do is to go out and murder his fellow man and then lie down in the mud and blood and die, having accomplished the wreckage of a few trees.
This mechanism he’s running into—and I just got through fighting a war, I get bitter about it once in a while—he lies down in the mud before he’s shot and the bullets go by overhead. Smart guy. He doesn’t get any posthumous—posthumorous Congressional Medals of Honor. But there he is, in apathy He clicks it in. Now, if the fellow has an engram which says that he must be very apathetic, and so on—fear paralysis, instead of being a natural useful mechanism, will turn on, bing! And then it will stay on because the engram is soldered right there. And it says, “This guy’s now dead.” And he’s lying along here in this Tone Scale. But, right part of this Tone Scale, what drives him down into it is a fear reaction, an endocrine reaction and so forth.
The fellow who hasn’t got sense enough to be afraid some time or other in his life just hasn’t got any good sense. I’ve been scared a lot of times in my life and I never thought afterwards any the less for it particularly, but there are a lot of social aberrations: the thing to do is to be brave. Now suppose the fellow feels fear but the engram says “be brave,” so he goes out and drinks a bottle of poison. Or he stands up and lets the machine gun cut him down. I mean, that’s being brave? So in other words he’s completely aberrated. So here he is on the bravery level—comes up—if a guy is really feeling brave and so forth, his tone’s clear up here, actually and naturally. There’s times to feel brave. The body can turn on mechanisms—he feels brave. When he is depressed out of this, he meets too much force, he’s being suppressed too much by the factors he’s meeting, and so on, he comes down here, he starts to turn on adrenaline. That’s a pretty solid mechanism. A fellow can run a hundred-yard dash with a shot of adrenaline in him and practically beat the world’s record. So that’s good, that’s fine. The only trouble is, the endocrine system has got a delayed reaction and when you turned on too much of this stuff, why, it seems to react to kill the organism afterwards.
In other words, there’s too much power there; there’s toxic action. So this is, bing, he gets mad. He overcomes the obstacles and he’ll go straight up here into—he’s overcome the obstacle. Fine. But this time he really meets an obstacle, he comes clear down here and he can’t fight. This is down in resentment—he can’t fight very much because the force is too much and he maybe starts to propitiate a little bit but he’s fighting back. Rawwrr! “Oh dear, what a lovely hat that is. I’ve liked it since last year.” You know—covert hostility.
Now, when he comes down into this range here [drawing on blackboard], his dramatization, you might say—this is in regular life—gets broken to a point where there is an actual level there where he looks around and starts computing and he says, “Hey, this is dangerous.” This tells him he’d better be afraid and fly, quick, or do something about it, quick, because he’s scared. He’ll survive if he gets scared at that point because rationally he sees that he can’t win.
Now, if he gets very scared, he can drop down into this apathy range which is a counterfeit of death. Also, Mr. Kodiak Bear, he goes away and the guy might live to fight another day. So these are all good survival mechanisms.
Now, anytime these things become pushed in too hard and held in with an engram, the person can be chronically here or chronically here or here or here or here. [tapping on blackboard] And he can even be pushed so that this mechanism is up there, pushed in tight but he can never vary it.
The statement that fear is at the base of a great many manifestations, that it is the base of all aberrated manifestations would be a statement which was much short of cause. They’d look at the effect and call it a cause.
Here is fear as cause, tone 0, upper range tone 0. [tapping on blackboard] That is an effect-cause engram, but you can get the effect. And when people have a great many engrams which have been broken back, society has said, “You must not dramatize, you must not dramatize it.” Here [tapping on blackboard] he’s attacking this rage, resentment and so on. He’ll become depressed down to the point where he becomes afraid. That’s a mechanical reaction. Life is breaking his dramatization continually and therefore it will set in. He can set into a period here of chronic fear.
Now he can also set into chronic apathy, and here’s your catatonic way down here. So they’re chronically afraid. So there is fear. But fear is also computational because fear is a natural and analytical mind mechanism. It says in the engram bank, “I am afraid.” The restimulator for this is a dropped fork or the smell of apple pie. So, he hears a dropped fork and somehow or other he feels afraid and the endocrine reaction turns on with that level, totally computational.
Male voice: Ron, someone was asking me the other day in a discussion about this, “Well, how would you go about curing a psychotic, let’s say, in one shot, you know, so to speak?” I said, by trying to find the incident— (which I had in mind particularly at the time) by trying to find the incident he was stuck in and knock it out. And he said, “All right, now, is that person cured?” And “Well, he’s not psychotic anymore.” And he said, “No, he is psychotic because you still have fear” Now what about that pitch? He said, “The incident is . . .” Aw, wait a minute.
Male voice: “. . . may be knocked out . . .” Here, let’s not deal with a classification such as the word psychotic. Bad word to use. If you, by knocking out this incident, produced in this person the ability to make what are now considered fairly normal or even slightly neurotic computations, you would now consider that, as far as the catatonic state was concerned, it would be cured.
Here—by the way, the general tone of the individual as engrams are deintensified and erased—if it is primarily in this range, and it normally is—can start up. And it will go through an anger range, general anger; a person will start getting mad at things. And sometimes when the person has started out on this level, he’ll be angry at things all the time more or less and he’ll come up. He has a shorter distance to go actually, as a general manifestation. And just as an engram will recount from here [tapping on blackboard] through this stage to this stage, boredom, till a person is even cheerful or flip about it, so can the whole general tone of a person move from apathy and fear up through anger at the things that have been done to him, just as a general computation, up through boredom and then into a cheerful state of mind, and here’s your Clean [gap] For instance, although the dramatization contains the word Isabel, the wife’s name is not Isabel but Gertrude. And if you’ve ever listened to a dramatization running off that has to have words changed in it, you get a little choke, just ahead of the moments when the change has to occur.
Maybe the scolding is about not putting the buggy whip back and the dramatization may come on and one has to substitute the frying pan. Something wasn’t put back so he’s called forward to scold his wife about something so it has to be frying pan or something. But it can’t be a buggy whip. So you’ll get this much check.
The analyzer will sit there and listen to this stuff rolling out because when an engram goes into a dramatization it’s going straight that way into the voice and muscles and here is “I” sitting up here, and of course the more solidly the dramatization turns on, the more restimulated this engram is, the less “I” you’ve got to observe, but “I” is still in some shadow sitting there watching this thing carry forward saying “What the hell is going on here? Here’s this guy murdering somebody. Ahhh!” After that, “Why did you murder him?” “I” has to sit there and think, “Now let me see, I’ll have to think of a good idea because I can never be wrong, I’ve got to be right. Now let me think. Oh yes, well, yeah. Oh yes, he—he was about to rob me.” All right. He’s got a big, fancy explanation. And the analytical mind is supposed to dream up computations in relationship to survival. You’ll get the whole analytical mind devoted to explaining why this happened. But it didn’t know that this happened because an engram was restimulated and it went into action.
Now we can say, “Well an engram went into restimulation, I wish to God I’d get rid of it.” But “I” up here says, “Well, I tell you, it’s like this.” This engram, let us say, says, “You can’t get sick.” It’s got a circuit in it says, “You can’t get sick,” or—no it’s the circuit going straight in, you see, “You can’t get sick” would play on the analytical mind. But “You can’t get sick” dramatized would be “I” or this person as an organism, telling somebody else, “You can’t get sick.” When they play off these engrams on the “you” basis as a dramatization, it is the being telling somebody else. The whole being is acting as the being that laid in the initial engram, see. But it sets up a circuit in “I.” So it tells “I,” “You can’t get sick,” too. Same thing.
Anytime some fellow is pulling a dramatization on you, you can be absolutely certain that the “I” in that body is also subject to that dramatization. But in psychosis, in permanent—or that is to say chronic psychosis, this is ones demon circuit, we just get this as the demon circuit. You see how that works. Temporary “I” is the demon circuit. But this is temporary too. “I” becomes to a large degree the whole circuit. You get the idea—the whole body. “You’ve got to mind me.” This little thing in here is always saying “I,” always. When it’s restimulated that “I” has to mind the demon circuit. But when he flies into a dramatization, he just swamps the whole thing temporarily and he tells somebody else, “You’ve got to mind me,” in a high state of rage. You get the idea? Or, in a lower state of restimulation he merely feels that the people have to mind him. See how “you” is used?
Now “I,” “I have a headache” means I have a headache. It can’t be dramatized except by having a headache. Now if the person says “I have a headache,” somebody else says to them, “No, you don’t have a headache, you know darn well you don’t have a headache. It’s all in your mind,” the headache is going to get worse, every time. Sometimes you say, “Yes, of course you have a headache, poor thing.” It goes away. That’s faith healing—complicated.
Now there are of course many frontiers in Dianetics which are not exploited; we don’t know about structure. There are many things we don’t know even about one person’s life span. But as far as aberrations and psychosomatic illnesses are concerned, and clearing the individual, we know what we need to know. I’ll now give you what I say are the definitions.
The definition of the aberrated individual is one who has engrams which are susceptible to restimulation.
A Release, technically, is a person from whom the chronic psychosomatic illness has been taken and from whom painful emotion has been removed. You can count on him as a solid Release. Then there is the Clear. The Clear, people tend to interpret as an absolute term. But the definition of a Clear is simply this: that all the engrams from basic-basic forward have been removed and all their locks have been blown. That is the technical meaning of Clear. He is clear of engrams.
Now, I’m sorry that there isn’t a better test for them besides taking them three months after the date of clearing and checking the bank to see if one can find any—see if any thing’s jumped into view and checking them in another three months to find out once more if anything has jumped into view because they knock out very easily.
Now, you can get a deceptive condition in a Clear and one which undoubtedly exists in a certain percentage of the people I have cleared. I heard from one the other day, he was only considering himself three quarters cleared. I suppose he’d found an engram someplace. He was aware of it and it hadn’t been swept out.
The last time I saw him I considered him a damn good Release, probably a Clear. I didn’t have a chance to check him—couldn’t find anything else in his bank. All right.
Here we have all these attention units up here with “I.” [taps on blackboard] “I” is in command of them. He can still send these attention units down the bank, he can pick up every memory in that bank. He can use them to compute, use them to inspect. He is not affected by psychosomatic illnesses.
On a thousand units we’ve got so much horsepower, there can still be fifty units tied up in this bank down here which—never be able to get any kick out of it, fifty units wouldn’t be enough to turn on a psychosomatic illness. They could, perhaps, if they were all locked up on the same engram, but they wouldn’t be. There might be fifty units left in the bank, up and down the bank or trapped in a lock someplace. And it would require a little bit of study to free those darn units.
Furthermore, you’ll see this in the process of clearing, that after a while, we’ve got, let us say, six hundred units, five hundred units, just half of the units free, this person will feel so good, he’ll be doing so much, he’ll be getting along so well that he sometimes is pretty hard to pin down to get out the rest of the five hundred units, get them cleaned up and cleared. Why, it takes a little push on somebody else’s part at that time.
We have this Mike McClintock of which I’ve spoken before. The guy, he doesn’t call me or anything else. He’s busy tearing around New York. I suppose he’s had about three hundred units freed. There’s probably about still seven hundred tied up in the bank someplace. He should go on through to Clear; we need a Clear in the magazine field. Then they’d be as efficient as the book field. (laughter) All right.
You’re on a continuous gain proposition. As you go up your curve, your curve is a steepening curve, as you start knocking out attention units on engrams and start freeing them, your curve gets steeper and steeper. In other words, it isn’t a straight curve and it doesn’t go off like this, it goes like this, [demonstrates on blackboard] As the more units you free, the easier it is to free units. The more mind the fellow has, the more mind he can free from engrams until you get up along the level of the last fifty units.
It’s a wonderful thing when you start back down the track, look these things over, they promptly kick out engrams. You look at an engram, start to recount it in some cases and it goes whooo. Gone. There’s just that little left on the thing.
You’ll notice as you progress on an erasure, by the time you get up to the third or fourth month in a case, that if the thing isn’t going by one recounting you’ve missed a hell of a big one someplace back down there.
In such a way, we can also postulate how clear is Clear. There may be some other way that these units get latched up of which we’re not aware. All I know is, definition of Clear is you just free all the units out of the engrams in one lifetime and you have a Clear. It’s not an absolute term, we may find some way to free some more units someplace else. And the way to start a case is to free the maximum number of units in the shortest possible time at the beginning of the case. That can best be done by knocking out painful emotion. They really tie up units. And the next thing is to knock out the unconsciousness off the case which glues the units, so to speak, in place, and start your erasure. And then that really starts it on the way up. And the first part of a case when we need the most units, we have the least. That’s why cases are a little bit rough to start.
As you get them going, start knocking out units, be satisfied to knock out a unit here and a unit there, take a little tension off here and get him remembering something else there and so forth. It’s building, and it goes up on almost a logarithmic curve of increasing strength.
Now I hope I have answered some of these problems that have beset people with regard to the anatomy of the engram.
Female voice: I have a question, I sent a book on Dianetics to a couple as their wedding present Should I have warned them that they shouldn’t start clearing and the wife shouldn’t audit or be cleared . . .
While she’s pregnant?
Female voice: If she—yes—is not using birth control. Would there be a danger there . . . ?
I don’t know. I think that’s a danger to which the society is going to be peculiarly liable for a while. I am at the present moment advising known cases of pregnancy against Dianetics during the pregnancy, because I’ve seen some awfully bang-up emotional discharges come off so suddenly, nobody suspected were there, but they transplanted, there is no doubt of it whatsoever.
The things start running, the patient thinks of nothing but that discharge. And of course did not check any part of it and still discharged. And the case was going off, “Yow-yow-yow, oh mother, mother, how I would miss you, I know you are dead, you will be back no more, yak-yak-yak-yak-yak,” emotion, tears flying in all directions, convulsing. Oh, the poor kid!
Of course, there would be this dividing line. If Mama is so morning sick that the child may experience what we call an AA, or if Mama is just so damn sick and so miserable and so nervous about it that birth is going to be a very difficult affair, the transplanting of a few engrams into that kid by Dianetics wouldn’t begin to match the number of engrams that kid is going to get in real life. So there is a break point in this line. [gap] . . . one of the primary targets not only for dub-in but it’s easier to discharge the whole case. We’re working forward to get better and better methods of discharging emotion off a case. That’s because it’s lying on top of the case and suppressing it. After that we can get to the real cause which is physical pain and unconsciousness down the line. These things have emotional content in them.
Male voice: But you can’t get to it easier after the emotion is run off?
Now, I’m talking about a whole case, let’s not talk about an engram. On a whole case, if you can discharge the painful emotion from the case, the case will work easier. But that painful emotion is lying in engrams, all by themselves up the bank which are dependent for their force on physical pain engrams. And you can unlock emotion off the case by running the physical pain engram first and the emotion second. Or the emotion first and the physical pain second.
The case shows its most marked improvement when a great deal of grief is discharged from the bank. It shows marked improvement at this time. The cause is still there and new painful emotion can be received—it can just go on and on and on converting it. Would be an endless process merely to remove painful emotion from a case.
It shows its greatest forward step and I’m talking about real grief engrams; running the emotion out of an engram first—out of one engram first, then running the other part—you couldn’t do it anyway, an engram isn’t that selective.
Male voice: Would you say that an engram that has caused fear could be recognized by its relationship to a factual cause?
Mm-hm.
Second male voice: Can a man without engrams go into battle . . . ?
Hah! Hah!
Second male voice: Well, would he or wouldn’t he?
Four years and four months I spent of my young life monkeying around while red tape tangled and, here we go again boys. Don’t let out though that we’re against war around here. It’s not nice to be against war.
Female voice: If you’ve reduced an engram way down, is it safe to leave it . . . ?
You mean if you’ve just reduced one?
Female voice: Yeah.
If you know of an engram that you couldn’t reduce very well, if it’s pretty well reduced, you know of the existence of this engram, yes. But you’ll find it on your way back on an erasure anyway.
Female voice: Unless it’s balling things up or getting in the way, it’s pretty safe to leave it?
Oh, sure.
Second female voice: Well, Ron, you might state over again if you would how much ‘going over’ you do before you call it reduced.
When the somatic has disappeared, when unconsciousness has come off, you can call it a good safe reduction. When the somatic has disappeared utterly but the words tend to remain on two or three additional runs and no unconsciousness has come off, you can still call it reduced.
The best reductions are those where the words remain, the unconsciousness comes off, no further somatic present. But just on running an engram over and over, they vary greatly. Some engrams reduce in fifteen runs, some reduce in three runs. It’s up to the auditor’s judgment and never ask the file clerk if this is reduced. Don’t ever ask the file clerk if this is reduced, or “Is it safe to leave this now?” The file clerk won’t have a chance, “I” will get in there and say, “Yup, yup, oh-ho—safe. Let’s get out of here.” And they’ll leave the thing.
Male voice: Is it safe to say, “It is deintensified?” No.
Male voice: Can you ask how is the somatic the last time through?
Why sure. Sure, well, he’ll tell you, yes, he’ll give you a real straight answer on that. But you give him a chance to leave the thing, he’ll very often think, “Well gee, that’s a fine idea, let’s get out of here.” And he may protest about going through it again. That is the very time you must go through it again.
Now you’ll get real material off of this engram. If the preclear suddenly says, “No, I—let’s not go through this again, it’s all reduced and after all I’m perfectly fine and—let’s not go through this again,” you can’t adopt the attitude that this is a perfectly reasonable statement. Because it’s not. It’s an effort to avoid the next run which is the run you want.
Female voice: One of those dark holes opens up.
Yeah. That’s the one, so don’t ever put up with his protesting. And never argue with your auditor about it. (laughter) [gap] If you can take word content and more or less aberrative content out of it you can get yawns off of it, that would be a nice test. That’s a good datum on it.
Female voice: Well, would you agree that, sometimes they’ll yawn for a while and then repeat it a few times when they’re yawning and then start yawning again? Then the auditor has been careless enough to permit the existence of a bouncer undetected.
Female voice: Well, you mean if you re going to yawn, you yawn straight through?
The auditor let the preclear skid off the incident and then run it a few times replaying, which was a waste of time, and then gradually, in some way or other because he went over the bouncer two or three times, he got back on the incident and now he goes through it again and yawns.
Whenever you find a bouncer like that or all of a sudden the fellow stops yawning and he’s yawned about halfway a couple of times, and now you’ll still run it but he isn’t yawning anymore, you got a bouncer in it.
Second female voice: But don’t you also sometimes when you re running an incident and you’ve got it all off get the yawns all off and then all of a sudden some more on the tail end of the incident will show up and it will be demonstrated by yawning?
That’s right.
Second female voice: But that wouldn’t mean a bouncer . . .
She was talking about running the same engram three times, four times, let us say, or if we got yawns off of it, and then we ran it three times more, same engram, we didn’t get any yawns—now we run it a couple of more times, now we get more yawns. Yeah. Well, what’s happened there? A bouncer.
I must warn you against one type of engram. This is the stretcher-contractor engram. It’s a little jim-dandy magnetic engram which has the bouncer in it and which throws the person off of it with a bouncer “get out of here” and “come back here.” He says, “I’ve got to get out of here.” Papa in a fight sequence says, “Come back here.” And now we’ll run this engram, we can’t get rid of the engram, but we’ve bounced off of it. And we’re running it up here and the words appear to be up here and the somatic is down here.
The best way to cure that—by standard technique (your file clerk and somatic strip should be working) — is to say, ‘‘Bouncer?” (snap) “Yes.” “Call-back?” “Yes.” “The bouncer.” Knock the bouncer out. Knock the call-back out. Now it’ll operate easily and smoothly.
You’ll see it one of these days. You’ll see it. Now the whole bank can be stretched out of shape with the words up here and the somatics here. In the basic area somebody says, “I’m going to come.” And that’s in the basic area and it seems to stretch all the words up out of the engram because this thing is aberrative down there, below it, and the somatics are down here. So, a person’s trying to run the words, then he can run the somatics. Then he can run the words, then he can run the somatics. It’s very confusing.
In fact I must warn you against all engrams. (laughter) Male voice: “Leave them there.” Sure. Sure, he wants his engrams. So, why don’t you leave him his engrams. Don’t take them away, he needs them. “He’ll lose his mind if he has to get rid of it, he will lose his mind.” Ah yes. These “I can’t get well” computations are awfully interesting. I ran into one of them that Mama practically every other day— when Papa said, “We’ve got to get rid of it”—he never talked about the baby or anything specific, he just kept saying, “We’ve got to get rid of it,” and Mama would say, “But don’t make me get rid of it, please don’t make me get rid of it. I’ll work, I’ll slave, I’ll do anything if you’ll just let me keep it. Please, I’d lose my mind if I got rid of it. I’d go all to pieces if I got rid of it.” This was in the bank about forty or fifty times, with a lot of punishment.
Because Mama, when Papa went to bed, would go to the bathroom and try to get rid of it. This preclear was quite confused at the whole thing.
Well, okay. Well, thank you very much for being very good students. I wish you lots of happy hunting and I wish you all a very early Clear. If anytime in the future we can be of assistance to you on tough cases or anything of that nature, call up and we’ll try to do what we can.
Thank you.