The Tools of the Trade (500823)
Date: 23 August 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Well, here we are, entering into the middle of the second week on these lectures, and we have covered about halfway up the line here. It’s very interesting to me that the educational cycle seems to keep repeating itself in Dianetics. Of course we have trained quite a few PAs back East, but right now we have the problem in pretty fair shape because we have staggered the classes. As a result, the people coming in can lean on the 50 percent who are halfway through the course. In spite of that, people coming in follow about the same cycle every time. They come in at first, they have read the book—somewhat restimulated, they come in to class. We have tried to avoid some of this, such as the first few days they’re there they audit each other or get audited or something by somebody, or they aren’t paid much attention to on the basis of certain observations. Then we start getting more restimulation.
Well, this starts to get very interesting after a while. People start walking around—you’d think the world was coming to an end with some of them. And then somebody will come around, “Why can’t we get started around here? We can’t seem to get started. There isn’t anything going forward at all.” “Let’s see. Let’s make some special sort of an arrangement.” And the guy says right away, “I don’t think I am ready to get started.” Then there are always the crop of rumors that go flying around about this and about that. The Research Department begins to figure out something and immediately it somehow or other leaks over into the school and everybody says, “Well, there’s something new to learn” and “There’s something much better” or something of the sort. “Well, let’s jump over to that 100 percent.” About the middle of the month, people starting to buckle down. A PA by that time can pretty well spot—I mean, the team captain can pretty well spot the certifiables, and he starts checking and cross-checking on it.
About that time you will hear PAs walking around worrying about people’s therapy, wondering whether or not the cycle here is terrifically normal As a matter of fact I am checking over things with some of the professional auditors and so on. I am particularly pleased with you. Very eager. Your processing and so forth is in some cases coming along very beautifully. The overall picture here is good. Dianetics goes out on an expanding bear market sort of a thing. You know, we are building a world with new tools. And we are trying to get maximal in minimal. Nobody will let us sit down quietly and say, “Well, now, let me see. It takes six months to make a professional auditor.” Well, we can’t wait for that period. We have got to have them right away, and that’s true. Nobody is letting us rest or stand still anyplace along the line. We try to keep these organizations squared around so that everybody stays happy. But back in Elizabeth a month ago, everybody was very certain that all was just going to go to rack and ruin. Elizabeth all of a sudden shook down and is running automatically. I haven’t heard an administrational problem, a quarrel, amongst the staff or anything back there. It’s been so quiet that it’s wonderful.
I suppose by about 1965 we will be able to go into an operation— giving you some of the idea here. Almost anything can happen. The mental hygiene setup in Washington, DC, the US Public Health Service and a couple of units there in general are quite interested in Dianetics. It was stated by the setups on this new mental hygiene merger that they needn’t worry about a program—this fellow said, rather snidely, “It looks like we have already got a program. Why should we worry?” Meaning, let’s coast along on this administrational fifty million dollars that’s dropped to us so we can buy a few desks. And, “We needn’t put out any great effort,” because that was a fact, in view of the existence of Dianetics. They aren’t helping us. So I said, “If guys say that Dianetics is potentially a mental hygiene science for the United States, why don’t you do something about it?” “No.” “What are you going to do with the administration—your own administration lineup? What are you supposed to do there?” “Well after all, this was put into effect by an act of Congress.” That finished that.
We are really carrying, actually, whether you can see it or not, a very terrific load. The pressure is enormous. My life since spring has been one consecutive row of crises, you know. You say, “Present time is—or, the time track is consecutive moments of now.” Well, crisis, crisis, crisis. There’s some possibility, for instance, that we might up and clear the US Army or something like that. You know, I mean, it’s little things coming up like that. That gives you some idea, doesn’t it?
Now, as a matter of fact, all we did in Congress was to set up in the Senate so that a couple of boys up in the Senate, quite influential, would say any time any bill went on the floor that would try and put Dianetics under security, try to relegate it to governmental control, which would try to suppress it in any fashion or legislate it, would immediately get up and say, “No.” And we set up that roadblock and we went over to the House. There’s a chap over there, an amputee with phantom limb trouble. You know what that is. A person has a stump and it feels like he still has a leg. And we shoved some books into his hands, and several of his friends. We blocked it in the House. All right. There’s two roadblocks on legislation, and after that, why, what can you do with Congress?
Male voice: How about lobbying?
We didn’t need any lobbying. Actually, there are a lot of people down in Washington doing lobbying for us. Well, that’s all beside the point.
I am just telling you that you are—this current operation is going off considerably better than it may have in the past. It may not be perfect, but we are going to have some more professional auditors here, and then we will have some more brains to apply to the program. More skill. And then we can have some more auditors. Right now, there’s a big project going on. There’s evidently going to be some mass clearing started here in Los Angeles. One trouble with all this is that—insufficient staff, insufficient hands, everything else, but you have been very, very easy to get along with. The staff here really appreciates it. Some of the boys who were back in Elizabeth have had experience on how tough it can get.
Now, this morning we are going to cover the remainder of Step Two, to see if we can’t get over into running of engrams. I know that for a lot of you I seem to be covering ground with which you are already familiar. But you’d be amazed how much there is to know about just running—the running of an engram. It’s a very precise business.
If you don’t know how to run one precisely, if you don’t know exactly what the beast looks like, you can practically ruin somebody. You won’t do him any great harm, but you can restimulate him, make him very uncomfortable. And it may be just some little missing scrap of information which you have that causes this restimulation to take place.
Back East, somebody sailed in—he’d read in the book that you take the somatic strip to the point of highest intensity and then you would run that. And two or three people consecutively became extremely uncomfortable. Because what he was doing was—here’s the beginning of the engram, (drawing on blackboard) like this. So he would take them to this spot, you see. And then he would run it out from this point on and leave this. “Says right there in the book, ‘take it to the highest point of intensity,’” so, uh-huh, he did in every case. Now, that’s why I’m going to draw you some pictures this morning.
Going to show you how you handle a somatic strip, I can’t tell you much about the anatomy of the file clerk, he’s a mystery But I can certainly tell you a lot about the behavior of the file clerk, his possible point of origin, what his purpose is.
Now, the first thing we have to know about an engram is, of course, that it’s a moment of pain and unconsciousness. Now, that’s what an engram is. It has recorded in it the perceptics, the sense messages that were present during that moment of pain and unconsciousness.
Now, that seems very simple but I think we had better begin by considering the appearance of an engram. It has an appearance which is a little more complicated, perhaps, than you have understood.
You have quite a problem in handling engrams in that they were well protected from view. The first one, as I talked about yesterday: anaten. The next thing is pain. Now, you wouldn’t think of pain itself, perhaps, as a protector, but it is. It protects the engram. Because a person starts, perhaps, into an engram, hits a moment of pain and immediately goes out of valence, (ptock!) Now, you’ll see this lots of times.
Fellow starts into the engram, starts on through the thing, hits the pain charge in the thing and he just barely ticks it and rolls right straight out of valence. He’s lying right there in front of you and he goes “Wow!” and then it settles off immediately. And he will go on and he will run the thing nicely out of valence, very carefully, not touching any of this pain and then he will go through it again, not touching any of this pain. And you say, “Are you in your own valence?” And he says, “Yep,” And you say, “Well, let’s feel a little moisture. Can you contact some moisture?” And he, “Well, no, tough case at that. After all, what do you think I am? One of these pianola cases? No, I’m a tough case, I can’t contact any of this, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” Sure, The guy has been knocked out of valence by the pain and he’s not going to get back into it again. And you, knowing that people can have perceptic shut-offs that prevent them from getting tactile and getting the rest of the perceptics, are all too prone, I have learned—I haven’t examined your auditing, but I have found it to be the case with almost every student auditor—all too prone to say. “Well, those are shut off!” and let him run it on out, out of valence and so on, without trying to adjust this case.
Pain, in other words, will knock a person out of valence. The cell tries to avoid pain and reach pleasure, escape pain sources and obtain pleasurable sources. Now, in trying to do that, it has just that basic idea. Out of that, the analytical mind, in its lower areas particularly, can build the most fantastic complexities. So, hit pain, it doesn’t only avoid it in the environment exteriorly, it avoids it in the interior world. Go back down the track, get ahold of a pain—(ptock!) avoid it. Many tricks of avoiding it—go out of valence. So you will see this particularly in Guk runs. A fellow will be running along and you will be giving him heavy auditing while he is on Guk. And he will evidently kick in and kick out of valence. I have noticed this in standard therapy, but it seems to become quite pronounced sometimes in Guk and it’s a matter of running the person back to the moment when they went out of valence as they’re coming on up the track. “Let’s go back to the moment you went out of valence,” and “Are you in your own valence?” and “Go forward again, this time get the somatic.” Maybe there’s some little tiny excuse of a valence shifter there and there may not be. This case, however, by the commands in the case, is already predisposed to being shifted in valence; otherwise it wouldn’t keep on doing it.
A fellow who is frozen in his own valence, that is to say, commanded into his own valence, has less tendency to do this. But even so, still will.
Two ways to overcome this, of course, is a valence shift. You put him into Papas valence, and you put him into Mama’s valence and you put him into Uncle George’s valence or the doctors valence and let him run the engram in those various valences. Well, you get him moving around from one valence to the other and you take some of the charge off these valences and then let him settle down in his own valence and run a relatively uncharged engram. That’s one solution. The other solution is just coax him into feeling perceptics.
Now, another method is this—of course, there’s the overall behavior protection the engram had. It had the fact that, although received, let us say, postpartum one year, it would lie dormant for many, many years and suddenly one day without much excuse, it seems, would key in and after that would restimulate. It would displace the apparent cause of aberration of chronic somatics. It displaced them, not by hours or days, but by years, decades. And it was on cursory observation—people would look at this thing and they said, “Well, it’s an obvious thing that when this man’s wife left him, it caused an emotional disturbance and so he’s all upset about life. That’s why he’s trying to blow his brains out. Obviously, his wife left him and that’s pretty sad, after all. We know human nature, so therefore we know that it is essentially weak and that it goes crazy without much cause. And then his wife left him so he wants to blow his brains out. Well, that’s very easy to explain and furthermore, every human being . . .” Lets see now, there’s another arbitrary I’ll point up to you there—that human beings blow their brains out. So, let’s look this thing over and try to find out why.
Well, instead of finding out why, they postulate something like a death wish. “Every human being wants to die.” Huh! Solves the whole problem. Of course, it doesn’t predict new data. It’s just a dead end. They just disposed of it. They got this very embarrassing thing out of the road quickly. Yeah, and the way we explain the death wish is we say, “People have a death wish. That’s why they commit suicide.” And somebody says, “But yeah, but it doesn’t seem very rational. The guy, after all, he’s had happy periods in his life and . . .” “No, there is a death wish!” “So, yeah, but lookee here . . .” “Listen, we’re going to flunk you.” So the guy says, “All right, it’s a death wish.” It didn’t predict new data, but it certainly dead-ended a lot of old data.
That death wish, by the way, is very, very old. I’ve run it back at least five thousand years. It showed its ugly head in a decadent, perverted Europe a century or two ago with a whole school of Germanic philosophers, a bunch of guys that had about as much on the ball as . . . Well, they had a bunch of suicide engrams, so they pooled all their suicide engrams and they said, “You see, this is what cooks with us, therefore it has to cook with the whole human race.” So all of this nonsense, postulating the introduction of an arbitrary here, an arbitrary there, all worked in favor of the engram. So all this line of cultural thought, these delays, so on. In fact everywhere we looked, this engram had put up armor plate and smoke screens, so on.
Well, don’t be surprised, then, when we can come right down and look at this engram that it’s still got a few tricks. It is a very tricky thing. Its behavior, however, once understood, is very, very easy to handle. You can really maul engrams around when you know what they consist of; you better know all that they consist of.
That’s one of the things I’m going to tell you about this morning. For the protection of pain, and with the lag and other things, we now have the fact that they bounce people out of them, misdirect people, call people back, suppress people, make them evade, there’s all sorts of little word mechanisms. Many combinations of devices actually, practically as there are words in the English language. But those can be grouped into these five or six groups that we use: denyer, holder, bouncer, so on. We’ve really pulled a lot of the teeth out of an engram.
Now the anaten, of course, exists over it. And grief as a sort of a converted anaten exists over it as a mask, smoke screen. The grief—one has to have it spilled off in tears and the unconsciousness boils off or yawns off.
It’s interesting to note, by the way, that unconsciousness is an anesthesia as far as an engram is concerned. Fellow goes into the area of the engram, hits the unconsciousness, off go a lot of attention units and it just lies there and he boils and he hallucinates, or he just drifts sort of, you know. And obviously if you didn’t know that lying under this thing was a bear trap you might be prone to say, “Well, it’s just late at night and he’s getting sleepy.” That’s evidently what the engram wants you to think. Very cagey. So here it is. No somatics will turn on as long as there’s a boil-off over the top of it. Of course these somatics will come around by the back door. This thing has a terrific back pain in it and this is this fellow’s lumbago, that’s all right. It’ll come around underneath the anaten and up and strike the fellow. But when he goes back down on the track he gets on the upper side of this anaten and sort of rides it. And the boil-off—sometimes he’ll give you five, six, eight engrams in the middle of this boil-off. They’re sort of suspended there. You ever see two magnets with their poles reversed, one of them sitting on top of the other so one magnet floats?
Male voice: Yeah.
Well, it’s like your second magnet there is sort of locked in a field, this boil-off, and it’s floating there. And the fellow will be giving you this little engram and that little engram without much sonic, just muttering away about them. There’s this stuff; they’re sitting on top of this—the one that’s hidden.
Now, as the boil-off takes place the person goes on down through and hits the bottom on the thing and there you hit the somatic. No somatic until the boil-off is off.
You’ll find a whole case, particularly one which has had electric shock therapy and a lot of punishment with several holders on the track, which will do nothing but boil. God knows how many hours the case will boil. The top limit of which I know is around fifty hours from the start—no somatics contacted. This is all because of boil-off. This chap closes his eyes and he is immediately in the boil-off. He isn’t returned to anything, he isn’t moved on the track. He just closes his eyes and he gets to hallucinate and the boil-off starts. It wasn’t that he could do this without an auditor, because he couldn’t have. But he’ll lie there and boil and boil and boil and boil. Little scraps of words drift up through and he’ll give you this scrap of a word and that scrap of a word—not very aberrative. After about an hour or so of this, why, he’ll start feeling good. And he’s gotten a lot of boil-off and a lot of anaten off the case already and he feels good now. And ordinarily you will contact the somatic somewhere around about that area. He starts to feel more alive and he’ll wake up a bit.
However, on one of these cases which is thoroughly snarled up into a boil-off, at the end of the period, why, he’ll get up and he’ll feel fine and you really haven’t contacted any engram at all. So you say, “Well, we’re getting noplace with this case, this case is bogged down completely.” Only that case isn’t bogged down completely. The test on such a case is: Does he drift back, does he get dopey? Does he sort of sag, occasionally mutter? And you have to jar him once in a while and you say, “Well, let’s repeat the words “Go to sleep,” and he doesn’t seem to respond, so you hit him in the bottom of the feet. And, by the way, don’t joggle people by their arms—this is an important point—tap the bottoms of their feet. It’s very annoying, it’s not particularly restimulative. They will jog up out of a boil-off quickly. So they lie there boiling off. . .
What?
Male voice: What about someone who moves the couch? That is by leaning against it or pushing it?
You mean an auditor who moves the couch? He ought to be shot. An auditor should never move the couch, never put his feet on the couch, never touch the body of the preclear. The only place he should contact the body of the preclear is touch him on the feet once in a while. Leave the couch and so forth alone.
Now that’s very definite. That’s so damned obvious, I think it’d be something one wouldn’t have to mention. Because the guy who’s going back down along the line through engrams is very often—most closely resembles a hand grenade with the pin out and with the handle but poorly depressed. And somebody startles him or joggles him, why, he’s liable to go into a dramatization right there, “Yappity-yappity-yappity-yap.” Because he’s right on top of the dramatization. Sure, why can’t he use it? He will!
Now, most of the trouble that you get into with preclears is just because the body has been touched or they have been disturbed, some outside noise has happened, somebody has come in the room, they think the auditor hasn’t protected them well enough, something like that has occurred.
Anyway, back on this boil-off. A whole case can be stacked up on boil-off. You try to—just carrying on with that—you touch him in the feet and you say, “Repeat ‘Go to sleep.’” And he says . . .
You say, “Repeat ‘Go to sleep.’” Then you give him a good hard jog and he says, “Oh, well, Figueroa.” And you say, “What?” And he says, “No submarines.” And you say, “Now, please repeat, ‘Go to sleep.’” “. . . most beautiful picture in the world.” And he’s hallucinating. That’s a real deep boil-off.
A sleep command, it just puts the person to sleep. He just simply goes to sleep. He doesn’t dope off, he just skids off in a rather steep curve and goes to sleep.
That’s a sleep command.
The way one awakens him, again, is to tap him on the bottom of the feet. One doesn’t go out and get a bucket of ice water. That is not done in the best Dianetic circles. Don’t joggle his arm or shake his body or shake the bed or anything like that. You’re liable to—it may say, “Go to sleep,” but it may also be “I hate you” right after that. Somebody is saying, “Well, I hate you, I hate you. If I could I would leave you but I can’t.” And the other party in the engram says, “Oh, go to sleep.” Well, he triggers just this one command and he goes to sleep. Now, if we startle him awake, what’s he going to do? He’s liable to shift valence and say, “I hate you. If I could only leave you I would.” Sure, and miss the “Go to sleep” and then when you get him calmed down again he’ll just pass over into the “Go to sleep” command and go back to sleep again. Then you wake him up and he says, “I hate you.” It goes over and over like this. I’ve seen a fellow replay these dramatizations. They’re almost inexhaustible when they are replayed without knowledge that they are an engram. As soon as one knows they’re an engram and starts replaying them they wear out. There’s the therapy discharge line that this stuff travels out on.
So, talking now about these various protections—well now, there’s another protection which is something you have to know about, something you have to be very practiced in. And that is the—you might say, the shape of various engrams.
There are different engrams; they have actually different unconsciousness and pain shapes. And you should know what kind of an engram you’re running and what kind of shape it has or you’re not going to be able to get all of it very easily. And you may get one engram up and the next one you may only restimulate and then you can’t complete the erasure. In other words, one can get in pretty bad shape not knowing about engram shapes, because you’re going out and use the word shape, for instance—and there are few if any of the PAs present and that’s the first time that word’s ever been used. So you’re going to say, “Well, what is the shape of this engram?” and the PA is going to look at you and he’s going to say, “Huh?” And “You know, shape!” And “They don’t have any shape!” [At this point a gap occurs in the original recording] Female voice: What would that indicate?
Well, that indicates that somebody had cringed while the snap of the fingers has been snapped. And it means as well that the noise of (snap) (snap) snapping fingers and so on is in itself— whether or not this means a slap in the face or a snapped finger—that that noise is restimulative. And when you find your preclear is jumping every time fingers are snapped, stop snapping your fingers at him. I mean, that’s an easy one to solve.
There’s nothing to it, because snapping fingers happens to be of very good assistance in the majority of cases. When you find somebody jumps when fingers are snapped or if you find somebody is leery of having you snap your fingers or if he starts to get irritated about it, just don’t snap your fingers. I mean, that’s very easy.
I’ve had this question asked me about twenty-five times in the last six weeks and I have—let me make that announcement here today and let’s make that one stick. Now, I can understand that a lot of people do object to it, but there is not reason to say immediately, “Well, nobody should, because it restimulates some.” You find out immediately if it does.
Furthermore, counting: If you say, “One to five,” “One-two-three-four-five”—you know that anesthetists very often say, “Now let’s count, let’s count now, one-two, breathe deeply.” Or somebody says, in the middle of an operation, “Well, that’s five,” something of the sort. Of course you start to count from one to five, “One-two-three-four-five,” and you get incidentally a reaction. You ask this person how old he is, he’s liable to say, “Five.” You say the word “five” and he jumps. You are expected to be alert for anything which restimulates your preclear. It means that, one, that you should avoid it, and on the other hand, that you have a clue as to an engram which is probably in chronic restimulation and bothering him.
Well, the whole rule on this is just: Whatever bothers the preclear is contained in an engram and you don’t want to bother the preclear so you avoid doing that.
Now, you’ll find preclears will start to take refuge and the engrams will start to hide themselves by putting forward this beautiful computation: Anything you do restimulates me. And you’ll say, “Let’s go back . . .” “Don’t say, ‘Go back!’ “ And “Well, I don’t mean to have a bad effect . . .” “Don’t say, ‘Bad effect!’ Don’t you realize these words are restimulative?” At this point I usually sit on his head. (laughter) Now, let me draw you some pictures of these shapes. I’ve talked about this several times but never bothered to assign a specific word to something on it. You’ll find out that there are several types of engrams. There’s the engram which comes on smoothly and gradually and quietly and the anaten proceeds to a considerable depth accompanied by a steady pressure of pain and then recedes quietly, smoothly and goes on out. Now, plotting here, we would get this engram as having about that shape. This is your level of awakeness and this is your lowest level of the engram and right in here someplace, everything in here is reactive mind.
See, so you get the beginning of this thing, you get a little pale end on the end of this that is almost analytical awareness. Now, this engram is peculiarly receptive, because you can find the beginning of it. Well, there’s nothing easier than finding the beginning of it because it’s right there, it’s got a handle on it.
We proceed along then and first thing you know, we’ve got the end of it. So we will run this engram more or less on this order. Beginning, we’ll get this many words, and then we will get this many words. Actually, what we have then is something that looks like—(drawing on blackboard), see. And we’ll run this and it might even make sense.
Well, this whole body in here is nothing, and the deepest point of the engram is the most aberrative point of it. So, you can run this engram like that—running a little bit of the beginning and a little bit of the end. And you say, “Well, that’s an engram. Okay. Let’s go to the next moment of pain or unconsciousness.” Well, you have got to realize that this thing is, on the next recounting or two—isn’t up there—and then opened up there and then here and then here. There’s a lot in it. The engram is expanding like an accordion. You will find this peculiar to anoxemia, lack of oxygen. I had to use one technical word today—lack of oxygen, caused by several things. Occasionally, when you are rolling an A shape, you will sometimes find that they have nicked the cord and the baby isn’t getting oxygen for a little while, and you get one of these curves. Now, that is a curve of a lack of oxygen. It’s the curve of anesthetics. The curve of drowning—all manner of things here. The quiet, you know, sweeps in through and then comes on back up slowly You run a drowning engram, its liable to go with water sounds all through here. Along about here, let’s say, they haul him out. And, as far as you can learn at first they hauled him out here and this seems to be the first word. Now, we start recounting this thing and we get a few more words on this beginning of it. Now we start recounting this thing and we get a few more words. See how that is? Here they said, “Well, turn him over,” but just before “Turn him over, somebody said, “Well, that’s him,” and just before somebody said, “Well, that’s him.” As you recount it, you’ll pick up phrases more and more backwards into the engram.
This will become very plain to you when you understand that the last words to appear are the words in the period of the deepest unconsciousness. So that the words appear roughly on the same order that the unconsciousness deepens. There is a definite curve there. These are the last words to appear, these would be the next to the last, next to the last, next to the next to the last, so on.
In other words, these would be the first to appear, these the next to appear, these the next to appear, these the next, these the next, these the next, these the next, so on.
Not consecutively though, you understand. You get a run on this thing and this time we got the whole run consisted of this many words. We didn’t find the end of it.
Now, the next run, we get this many words and a part of the tail end of it. And then in the next one we get this much run and then that much on the end of it. See how this works?
Apropos of this nicked cord, you’ll find that’s fascinating. You will occasionally find a preclear trying to strangle to death but unable to do so. He has a definite sensation that he is strangling, and yet there’s nothing wrong with his throat or breathing. And he’ll try to relieve it by (panting) breathing like this. But that doesn’t do any good, because he’s strangling to death there. In other words, the umbilical cord has been carrying in the oxygen and he starts to feel the lack of oxygen in this area of his body, without any lack of oxygen up here. Because the child of course is not breathing before it’s born. If all the oxygen is coming in through that umbilical cord, it’s nicked, the supply of oxygen becomes too slight and it’ll pass out along on one of these curves.
You can best detect this condition by the fact that words seem to be appearing consecutively. It lifts along one run of the engram and the beginning of it was very easy to find. Always suspect an engram where the beginning is easy to find. It’s one of these gradual curve engrams.
That means, if you’ve got a gradual curve engram, that there’s data in this thing at its lowest depths which you haven’t maybe contacted yet. It may even read consecutively, that—the dialogue in it might be excellent. But you know, there’s a missing chunk.
Maybe there’s a missing chunk when the nurse came in the room and walked out again. There’s a big conversation there about the nurse. You see, this would be disrelated to the conversation before or after she came in. If that occurred through there you could miss the whole nurse sequence in this thing, and you’d think you had it reduced but there’s this much engram left, and left in restimulation. You see how this would work?
Male voice: Are file clerk’s answers in regards to this always dependable?
No. No.
You’ll find out that people have a habit these days of using the devil out of this file clerk. They’ll say, “Well should I go downtown?” File clerk says, “Yes.” They say, “Am I in present time?” The file clerk says, “No,” something like that. People giving themselves their own flashes, busily engaged in talking to a demon circuit about 50 percent of the time.
You’ll get some very nice stuff on this. Once in while you’ll get somebody who says, “You know I have a very, very good file clerk. Last night he was telling me . . .” File clerks don’t tell anybody anything.
An analytical demon can think. It actually can compute. So whenever you ask the file clerk for data which has to be computed and you get an answer, you’re not talking to the file clerk.
The file clerk is just that. You wouldn’t go down to the office manager and ask for a high-level decision to be made which would ordinarily emanate from the president and his board of directors. That is if you walk down here to the Coca-Cola company and you wanted to know whether or not they would put on a five million dollar campaign to advertise Coca-Cola, you wouldn’t go find the chief clerk, would you? And yet people do that all the time with the file clerk. They say, “Well, is this erased?” And the file clerk says—get a flash of some sort.
Male voice: Usually, “Yes.” Yes, almost always, “Yes.” And it’s wrong. The file clerk hands out yea-nay data when it is just that, just data. That is it. You can ask, “The file clerk will give us the date when the ambulance ran over the preclear,” and you’re liable to get the date and the day of the week and everything else. All right. That’s the file clerk. But you say—lets put it now on a basis it has to be—a little adjudication has to be made. “Was the preclear badly hurt when the ambulance ran over him, yes or no.” Well, if that isn’t—now, that’s something that has to be looked up in the files: “Let me see, what is ‘badly hurt’? Badly hurt. Yes, I would say he was badly hurt,” But just that much computation is beyond the scope of an actual file clerk.
The file clerk knows about topic and index. He knows about dates, he knows names, people, places. He can count. But he can’t think. That’s an analytical demon.
Treat the file clerk as you would treat an actual standing file of data. You want specific data, you can get it from the file clerk. But if you wanted to know something that requires judgment, don’t go to the file clerk. Because when you try to, a demon will generally step in.
Demons, by the way, seldom give you this kind of data. It’s a good—I mean they seldom give you flashes on dates and things like that. Demons are pretty stupid.
Male voice: They compute.
They compute, that’s about all they do. And they don’t have good access to data ordinarily. Sometimes, however, you can get a demon who is set up with full access to the standard bank. Then you have a psychotic, Male voice: How about a flash regarding the accessibility of an engram, in other words which engram is accessible next or is there one accessible and will it present itself and so forth?
That’s data, isn’t it? That’s specific data. He’s got a pile of engrams and you ask him. “Now is this the engram which is next in order to resolve the case?” And of course that means. “Is this the engram which is on top of the pile?” And the file clerk says. “Yup,” Yeah, he’s perfectly willing to get these files cleared up and get these engrams out of here. But he’s kind of dumb in some respects. He doesn’t know, for instance, that you have to get the earliest engram in the bank to sweep the rest of them out.
He’s looked here on top of the pile and it’s not the latest engram. It would be the engram which has been causing the most trouble, and which was accessible. In order to get the thing it has to be loose. Evidently in order for him to view the thing, it has to be fairly loose. And he doesn’t know this business about earliness.
You have to go down—you’d have to look way down at the bottom of it. So you have to tell him to look down at the bottom of it and give us the engram, the earliest engram. And you’d say, “How many engrams of this kind precede the one which we are running?” He’ll look, “Five.” Very easy. But that’s data you’re asking for, specific data.
Yes?
Male voice: How high can he count?
He can count as high as there are numbers in the standard bank.
You’re under a misapprehension there, evidently regarding this character. I think I had better then go into the file clerk just a little bit further. I was not going to say too much about him this morning. I was going to give most of my time to the somatic strip and the shapes of engrams.
Don’t forget to spring this word shape on your PAs.
Now, let’s say that this is your standard bank. (drawing on blackboard) Here is your circuitry and so forth, blocks, curtains and so forth set up by the reactive bank. The reactive bank isn’t situated there, this is his circuitry. And here is “I” with the list of the data which had been filed with “I.” Let us say things that “I” has lately remembered and so forth. And it’s sort of a waiting file.
He gets something out of the standard bank, you see, and he’ll put it on a waiting list. You know, “The time we went down to the beach and I like to remember it,” so “I” will keep that data. Actually the data is still back here but “I” has taken a photographic plate of it, you might say, and put it up there.
You’ve got two time tracks working. The time track goes from conception on up to present time. This track here, with “I” — I draw him up there out of the—just to demonstrate to you that “I” can be in present time. There are some people who don’t know too well whether he can be or not. So here is “I” and he has this time track. Now this is just an analogy, it isn’t structurally arranged like this, it’s just so we can see it and explain it. “I” gets a—here are the originals. There’s a darkroom over here and “I” wants data and it’s instantaneously duplicated and it’s sent up to him as memory. He goes back down the track and asks for data. “I” can look at the original. See, he’s looking in the original list. Here’s the data all on file.
All right. Here are some attention units. You’ll find people talking about “the file clerk will now go back to . . .” The file clerk doesn’t move. The somatic strip moves, the file clerk doesn’t. So here’s these attention units and these are free units. These units have full access to the files, they have sonic, visio, tactile, they have everything back here in the file.
You can drop the person back in amnesia trance and you can contact these units and you can get the most remarkably accurate dissertations on any of this data, but “I” isn’t there. And these—just these units knowing about them is not much good. Because, after all, they know about it anyway Follow me?
Now, scattered in amongst here, so forth, probably in contact there and over here, engram bins.
These units can still get to those bins, but those units are standard bank units. There’s your file clerk. Now, the file clerk might be said to be just the monitor, the bank monitor. You know, the mind is so constructed there that there are several monitors. And the composite of these monitors—the monitor is aware. And “I” is aware of being aware.
You get the distinction? “I” is aware of being aware and these are merely aware.
Well, in other words, you can activate these things on a stimulus-response basis and they have no concept of individuality. But “I” has a concept of individuality. That’s the primary difference. So that “I” knows that “I” is.
That’s perfectly grammatical if I put it all in quotes—the “I’s.” So there’s just “I” over there. And you’re trying to get “I” back down the line to take a look at the originals of incidents, you see?
Now, in ordinary thinking—and oh, how much thinking is ordinary—the file clerk’s job is just the monitor on the file monitors, they’re the standard bank monitors.
Here is a librarian in charge of a library that has a lot of clerks, you might say, and “I” thinks of something or other and instantly—in order to think of it, he has to put in a demand. Demand comes through and the file clerk is right here, duplicate is picked up, comes back up, forwards to “I.” It takes a few milliseconds in order for this operation to take place.
Well, if it takes any longer, it’s being—it’s going through demon circuits and it’s being on a definite delay mechanism.
The demon circuit will set up an artificial bullpen over here. And this artificial bullpen is set up by the demon that says, “You’ve got to think things over carefully and take your time in making a decision. After all, you can’t know everything there is to know all at once. You’ve got to consider it.” Now, this is a demon circuit, you might say, and when this data comes over here and this demon gets it routed through him—and he’ll put these things in here and he’s got a time mechanism there and it says, “Release in three days.” All right, the optimum operation is from “I” to the file clerk and down to the bank and back to the file clerk to “I.” This is your communication center.
Now, when he picks up data down here, he generally files it through in concepts and groups of data, rather than a single datum. It’s of course much harder to select out—I mean it takes a little more time to select out the datum.
These units are also embroiled in the business of filing conclusions. The computer has made conclusions of which “I” has been aware and they have all been filed with the data and the perceptic of the time— terrific cross-filing system.
One begins to look at this cross-filing system and after a while he really gets groggy. Because it is so enormously complex. It’s filed with the—every scrap, every perceptic gets filed here. Not only that, but gets filed in coordination with the conclusion. And every time it is remembered or used in any way, the data of its being used and the conclusions are filed with it and in addition to that, the environment of the individual at the time he made the conclusion is filed with it, and the imagination circuits are filed with it as well. So the more times this data is used the more conclusions are filed in there with it. And you start to think of how much of a library it would take to file one lifetime and we start to stretch across at least the area of southern California. I mean it would just go on for miles on this punch-card system with the terrific complexities of this.
This staggering complexity of filing in the human mind has, I believe, been the primary balk for investigations of the mind. Instead of taking it down to particularities and discovering something resembling this system by which it was done, people looked at the enormous amount of work that was being done and they said, “Well, obviously that is too complex to be understood,” and didn’t pay much more attention to finding a new system.
Therefore people like Rollo May and other normals can say, “Well, naturally the human mind is too complex to be understood. Everybody knows that.” This system of filing goes on all the time, use cross-references and so forth—may be awfully complex, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be understood. Actually, data comes in. I have drawn you “I” with the file clerks communication center. But I haven’t shown you the draft of the internal workings of this communication center. And that is very interesting because it’s a network which must number thousands of channels which are used as the “clear channel.” That is to say that these channels are kept clear for traffic. These channels don’t have data filed in them. And there are thousands of these things at work. Poof! We want to know of—all about the, now lets see— “expositions.” Male voice: Boom.
Yeah, boom! And it’s—a terrific amount of superselection has to be done here in order to keep this data from just coming through, crash. And seeing Chicago, New York, Paris, the Eiffel Tower, the two or three expositions that were down here in southern California and San Francisco.
All of this data, you see, you say, “exposition?” Right away, “I”— “exposition” — this communications center is reactivated and down the line, “expositions.” And of course expositions are filed all the way up and down the line here. And they’re filed in addition to that in a bin which says “expositions,” and then they’re filed with all the conclusions about expositions, and then all the associations of expositions and the people who were with one when one went to an exposition and it’s just thousands of data. And for each data there are about twenty-six perceptics on file with it. In addition to that, somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen or sixteen perceptics that seem to be perceptics that are synthesized by the imagination. All of that, all together, all at once. So we say the human mind is too complex. I’ll tell you that the data is too numerous to be easily checked. But the system of its checking, filing, recovery and so forth is awfully simple. It is a very basic, simple idea. Any well-run office has more or less the same organizational setup. They have, in effect, set up the file clerk again right there in the office. They’ve made a duplicate of it.
All right. Here he is with all of the data at his command. Now we say “his” and “him.” We’re practicing here something that is not too good. We’re saying there’s a little man here. And nevertheless, it’s easier to see it as a little man. So regardless of that, we know there isn’t—it’s just the system of filing and monitoring at this point.
So, “I” over there wants the data. This is the way he gets it. “I” gets this data on file and this is what he keeps in consciousness. At all times “I” has at his disposal the control computer circuit, which makes the big difference between “I” and a monitor that has to do with files. “I” is keeping a tabulation on a central computer which is fed by thousands of computers. These computers are, all of them, geared up and connected up to the file clerk. They get their data without that data being processed through “I.” In other words, the whole computer circuit system of the mind has in each one its own monitor which is in contact with the bank monitor, and each one, as it requires more data, has the data forwarded to it.
Almost every bit of computation in the mind is done completely out of the sight of “I” That is very interesting because education makes a person sit down and makes “I” grind and grind and grind. And he isn’t the one who’s supposed to be doing it.
It’s something like an educational system or something of the sort-deciding that it was all wrong and going down and finding the janitor or somebody, and saying, “Now listen, you are the one who is going to do all the reading and selection of books.” Because this system of computers probably runs on the basis of your big central computer, and then right behind the big central computer you have a series of computers which are doing the real computations which are to be combined up here.
Draw you a picture: it’s just a progressive sort of a logarithmic system of, here is your central computer of “I.” Here would be “I” served by several computers which are doing the high-level computations and here would be—well, under this computer we have all these computers and all these under here, all these under here and all these under here. Then we would have each one of these served by ten or twelve, so that you have weighting evaluation. What these computers are doing—you can simplify it with this order of saying, “This line of computers is weighting, that is, evaluating the data which is fed through from the file clerk in order to arrive at a conclusion so that a datum can be weighted by this computer, which can then be combined into a conclusion by the front office.” Male voice: Is this the bullpen?
Yeah. It shouldn’t be very difficult to grasp how this is. Anybody who works in a complex organization knows that the front office cannot arrive at a conclusion unless he has been rather well informed by his subordinates.
Well, the subordinates had to go out and get data. And each one of those had to conclude that this was the important data. And we have very grandly overlooked in the past, in dealing with the mind, the importance of evaluation. And that’s about all those computers are doing. They’re evaluating, evaluating. “What is the relative importance, the relative importance?” and up the line it goes.
Now, that’s “I” at work. That is his computer system, that is awareness of awareness, that’s being. And here we have the file clerk and his whole job is to do nothing but forward data. It comes in from this computer circuit and that computer circuit: data, data, data, data, data. You see how that would be? And most of this data is forwarded without being inspected by “I.” Just as any data, for instance, relating to the processing plant of Universal Pictures, would be very thoroughly boiled down before it ever crossed the president’s desk.
Male voice: Mr. Hubbard?
Yes.
Male voice: What would you say about this command, which is continually associated with education: “You must learn how to think Study science, mathematics—they will teach you how to think.” What would I say about the command?
Well, that’s all on the same system. It’s a computation that says one has to learn how to think, one has to learn how to derive. What we have done is put into the standard banks more data, which can be fed through these computer circuits.
We get up to a point finally where the computer circuits themselves are doing evaluation of how to evaluate, and do it more quickly and more rapidly. So that they are doing evaluations of evaluations. And they learn this by practice and so on, because they get their own channels clear.
It’s something like—they would do the job sloppily or automatically in a broad way, and it’s like some efficiency expert suddenly stepping up to some big corporation and saying, “Look, you have 119 too many channels down there in the accounting department. We can reduce those to four channels.” Because these four channels are similar channels. Immediately the mind can put, on one board, four channels where it was using twenty boards before.
I don’t want to go into analytical computation with you because it’s not something with which you’re going to be terrifically concerned. I’m giving you this mainly on the order that there is a vast difference between the file clerk and “I,” and the computer system of the brain.
That computer system is very complex, very able and just works on evaluations of evaluations.
Here is data and stored conclusions. Now, some of the data has been weighted; some of it’s been weighted correctly, some of it’s been weighted incorrectly. Every datum which comes through insofar as possible is reevaluated by the mind before it is used. In the absence of engrams, this weighting can go forward very automatically and very swiftly. But the second engrams come in, they forbid the weighting of certain classes of data. And as a result you have held down a number of “sevens,” and “I” will achieve an incorrect solution.
Now, I didn’t mean to go off this far on a dissertation. The analytical mind, after all, this is a part of Educational Dianetics. And there will be a two-hour lecture on Educational Dianetics, which covers most of these points on how the analytical mind does it. Therefore, this particular lecture will probably be just—I will just remember that I have told you this much, and we will get more in next time.
Well, all I’m trying to demonstrate to you now is what mechanism you are consulting with when you ask for a flash answer.
Now, this analytical mind setup is not in contact with the engrams themselves. In other words the hidden portion of engrams are not here, ready to be thrown forward. The file clerk, however, is very close in to engrams and he has a list over here. And it’s an incomplete list—a lot of these engrams get hidden. So although he will give you very accurate data on everything he knows, sometimes he doesn’t know everything there is to know at once. If these engrams exist, sooner or later he will find them and hand them up—sooner or later. He gets ten off the pile and then all of a sudden he can find twenty more for you. So when you’re asking for the information from the file clerk you’re asking for data. That data is coming out of a library. It is not figured data, it’s not computed. It’s just data, (ptock!) Now, when you ask him about missing phrases, whether or not there are any missing phrases in this engram or not, he would know, but he wouldn’t be able to tell you to what extent those phrases are missing.
What does happen is evidently that when you’re asking “I,” the analytical mind is being dictated to already by the hidden portions of the engram and it’s not supposed to be in that vicinity, the engram says, or something like that. So you say, “Is this engram erased?” You get your flash from a computer circuit. And they say, “We’re not supposed to be here.” And so they say, “Well, sure.” However, the file clerk, you say, “Is a bouncer here?” “Yes.” “Denyer?” “Yes,” so forth, he’ll give you all the data because he’s looking, you might say, at the underside of the case.
Now, as far as missing phrases are concerned, you ask him that question, you will probably get a computed answer. Anytime you get a computed answer, it’s not from the file clerk. I want you to understand that very clearly.
The somatic strip is something else entirely than this setup. The somatic strip is a word—well, it’s just a combination of words in order to indicate one small group of data which is not really standard bank. Could be, but the data has very little relationship with standard bank— what you’re consulting there is the muscular system. Now, there’s a sensory strip and a motor strip up here on either side of the forehead.
On the outside is this motor strip. It contains a full list of the physiological conditions and moments of the body from preconception forward. A full list of material is there. It’s all complete.
The sensory strip is intimately hooked up with the analytical mind—the sensory strip—you’re just inside the somatic strip. This is even now too close to structure to be used much in that fashion. Consider that again as an analogy, not an actuality.
The apparent state of affairs seems to be that the sensory strip is hooked into thought and the motor strip is hooked into form. They are switchboards. Where the monitors for these strips are, I don’t know. But the somatic strip is very easily taken under the control of the auditor. It can be operated completely independently of the sensory strip of the preclear.
The auditor can operate the somatic strip. It is operated normally by the monitors who operate the sensory strip or run unmonitored to some degree. There is nothing easier, for instance, than to get a muscular rapport, as they say in hypnotism.
Very interesting that the somatic strip will obey so literally and exactly on such a precise time schedule. The auditor says, “Go thirty seconds before the impact” and the somatic strip will go thirty seconds before the impact.
Now we say, “The somatic strip will go to the beginning of this engram,” actually the somatic strip does go to the beginning of the engram. But we say, “The first phrase will flash into your mind,” we’re dealing with another mechanism. We’re dealing with the first phrases that the file clerk can get out of this engram.
You see, there’s a difference. So the somatic strip is so easily handled, it’s practically anybody’s boy The auditor tells the somatic strip to do so and so, he is commanding it. He can send it all over the track. He can operate it as a time clock. He can say, “Go to 2 o’clock of August the 14th, 1941. Now go to 2:01, 2:02, 2:03 30 seconds.” And it’s there.
That is what the auditor, particularly at the beginning of his practice and study, fails to realize. He doubts whether or not that somatic strip goes there. Sometimes I’ve given demonstrations to people, I won’t bother to now, on the subject of this.
Here is this person who, “has never been able to contact any engrams, and just doesn’t know if any engrams exist or not and Dianetics might be all right—besides, psychology is a wonderful thing, particularly when it allows one to protect one’s engrams so well.” Didn’t you know modern psychology was a mechanism to protect engrams?
That remark, by the way, is merely said as a kid to a couple of members of the class who were telling me something about modern psychology knowing about engrams.
It’s true that the word “engrams” occurs in modern psychology. But we stole it and gave it a new meaning.
The somatic strip, then, obeys literally and accurately, exactly, the auditor. The auditor says “Jump!” it jumps. You can take a person, sit him down in the chair, have him sit there, and say, “The somatic strip will now go to the beginning of blank.” And I’ll use “blank” here, because if I didn’t, about half of the class’s somatic strip, or any that were free, would go right to the beginning of it. And you say, “Sweep on through blank and come to the end of blank and now go back to the beginning of blank, now sweep on through.” By doing this sweeping, we’re not getting any perceptics. The person’s “I” is sitting up here very solidly in present time wondering what the hell is going on. Because, “I” was never aware of having any control over this monitor setup. And you can run the person from the beginning of blank, halfway through to the middle of blank and then stop the somatic strip there.
If it happens to be in a moment of drowning, your preclear will damn near drown. But the somatic strip has to be moving in order to accomplish this. So, we’re moving two objects: the “I” goes back down the track to take a look and the somatic strip runs along pacing with “I” because its supposed to pace with “I.” But “I” is going down independently. But your command to the somatic strip—he’ll go down and take a look. Sometimes “I” will start to tag along with the somatic strip. But they’re not necessarily right there together.
The file clerk, on the other hand, all he’s doing is—you say, “The next incident necessary to resolve the case,” he looks over the pile of stuff and he says, “Well, there’s one.” (ptock!) Pushes the button. “The somatic strip will go to the beginning of that incident.” That incident’s sitting there now. But nothing will happen with that incident unless you tell the somatic strip to go through it. Now, you won’t get any perceptics out of it unless you tell the preclear to run through it. You’re handling three separately operating entities—three — “I,” the somatic strip and the file clerk.
Well, running on Guk, the somatic strip—the file clerk is just told to keep feeding engrams and the somatic strip is told to keep sweeping. We keep “I” more or less in present time when we use this operation.
When you put a person into reverie and send him back down the track, you ask him, “Now, what’s happening with this incident?” “I” has to go back and take a look. That’s when you have commanded “I” to go down there. You see how this works? But the diabolical timed accuracy of the somatic strip is something which you had better take into account. Because I’ve seen a lot of processing go slowly and fail because the auditor was not aware of the literal complete obedience of that somatic strip. And he would wait for a while and finally say, “Well, is your somatic strip at the beginning of the track?” Who’s he asking? There’s nobody there to answer. “Well, let’s see, I wonder if it’s there or not?” He can ask the guy, “Well, do you feel something?” at this point. And they can say yes or no. But he is doing a check on the somatic strip on another route, you see?
You told the somatic strip to go there and it goes—if the somatic strip is not frozen on the track somewhere. There is what we do with repeater technique when it’s misused on holders, is we start feeding the person holders, holders, holders and the somatic strip latches up in the first or second one or is latched up already.
Now we start feeding attention units around the thing, we start robbing “I,” all sorts of things start happening there to ball up the situation. It’s not that you’re going to—you can’t get into trouble with this, so long as you realize that the somatic strip does what you tell it to do, goes where you tell it to go and won’t go to two places at once and will turn out an order before it will follow a second order.
In other words don’t give two or three contradictory orders. Don’t keep changing your mind. If you tell the somatic strip to go to birth and the somatic strip can move, that somatic strip will go to birth, bang! It won’t idle around at two years of age or someplace else, it’ll go to birth. And you’d better be aware of the fact that it went to birth.
Now, it isn’t necessary to bring the somatic strip up to present time, it’ll wander on up after you’ve brought “I” up to present time. It’ll gradually come up and resynchronize. If you’ve noticed, the preclear looks rather dazed for a few minutes after you bring him into present time; the somatic strip isn’t with him yet. The thing has to be synchronized and put into effect.
Who are you speaking to?
Male voice: “I.” You’re speaking to “I” and don’t think that T’ does not have a valence. “I” is an individual, “I” is not a collection of mimicries. “I” is a genetic individual, personality is there genetically. It is formed and refined and made more complex educationally and by mimicry. But “I” is a definite individual.
Some people have an idea that “I” is—they follow out this old saw that “everybody knew,” that “man is a composite of his past” or “man is the sum of his experiences” or something of the sort. Well, maybe so, but that’s an awfully indefinite sort of thing. “I” is definitely “I.” When you swamp somebody up you find about ten times as much “I,” about ten times as much personality as you ever saw before. Let’s not go off too far on that.
What I’m trying to communicate to you here is something very specific then. Give specific, definite orders to the somatic strip. Ask for things in a generalized way from the file clerk. Ask the file clerk in a generalized way for things. In other words, he can only get to what he can get to.
He will give you what you ask for, but he knows what he can get to most easily because, after all, on just a mechanical arrangement it’s lying right there with him. He’s got a pile of it. He’ll give you anything that he can take off of that pile.
You ask him for the next experience—bang, there it is. It’ll be the most troublesome one, because the topic index filing system of the reactive bank is a very bad one. It looks like a hurrahs nest. And he’s trying to clear the logjam. So he just grabs what’s on there and then he’ll hand it to you.
If you ask him for the next incident to resolve the case, to his best ability you get the next incident which can be reduced or erased. You’ll get that incident. Sometimes you ask for the next incident to resolve the case, it is very definitely the incident which resolves the case.
Well, there it is. There’s been a lot of traffic across this incident, it’s easily spotted. So you’re just asking the chief clerk to hand up the intelligence that you need. Now, “I”—you ask to look this thing over, “Tell us what you contact.” So you are working with the file clerk, you are commanding the somatic strip and you are requesting “I” to look the situation over, to do the inspection. So I’ll repeat it again, because this is a point you’ve really got to have. Anybody who is not getting very good results in Dianetics right now, it’s through a misapprehension of the accuracy of the somatic strip—the precision of the somatic strip, the good judgment of the file clerk and the desire of “I” to really contact it.
He is perhaps doing tricks like this, unknowingly, that he is giving one set of orders and is then countermanding them. And then wondering whether or not the somatic strip got there because the file clerk hit the bouncer “and after all, there isn’t any.” And then he says, “Well, go over it again.” But he hasn’t told anybody what to go over again.
He has not positioned the somatic strip anywhere on the time track but has just left it drifting somewhere. That’s right. He tells it to go to conception and then he says, “How old were you when you were five?” And so then when he gets the question, “How old were you when you were five?” the somatic strip rather confusedly and neglectedly may try to wander in—because “I” looks over five, the somatic strip will try to wander in here and pick up five. Before it gets a chance to get in there again, why, they’re liable to say, “Well now, was birth a rough ordeal for you? Why, let’s go to the beginning of birth. Let’s go to the beginning of birth. All right. Run birth.” No further assistance is needed, just run birth. But nothing happens. “So,” he says, “well, let’s see. I guess there’s nothing in birth.” The somatic strip has already dropped into a holder right there. “Let’s go now to a recent pleasure moment.” The guy says, “I can’t reach one.” He’s been latched up in birth to some degree, which is very interesting. By countermanding orders, by having a cloudy idea of what is being performed there before your eyes, of being slighting of the tremendous amount of cooperation which is given you always, you can slow down and almost wreck the case. You see? Literal, complete obedience is the role of the somatic strip. Desire and cooperation on the part of “I.” Now, there’s another factor in here. These attention units and the sum of them, yet not having an “I,” form basic personality And basic personality wants out. Now there is a watchword in Dianetics. Basic personality— (drawing on blackboard) this is basic personality, aberrated personality. “I,” even though aberrated, will still go look, but sometimes he has to be persuaded a bit.
Basic personality is in there saying, “Ah, let’s get it.” Basic personality knows Dianetics. You try it. Somebody came up here just a couple of minutes ago and said to me, “I was talking to a nine-year-old boy, and he talked to me for about an hour and his grasp of Dianetics was remarkable.” Why sure, why not? Little boy. You’re talking much closer to basic personality than you do an adult.
Basic personality has been trying to monitor this whole setup and does do an awful lot of the monitoring. All basic personality is, is the sum of the monitor units.
It’s not anything esoteric, it’s just the sum of the monitor units. These monitor units have a definite characteristic, they have definite personality in each individual.
When these monitor units are trying to monitor this, here is “I” all deluded and talked to by demon circuitry and everything else, and sometimes you’re talking to “I” and sometimes a demon circuit has jumped across it and you’re talking to a false “I”—it’s very wonderful. But the sum of these units—the reason “I” gets that way is because circuitry is coming up on this computive circuit and aberrations are being handed through to interfere with computation in these circuits. They are handed through to occlude and block lines of communication back to standard bank and so on. And all “I” is, is the awareness of awareness unit which is inspecting the front board-that one.
The units which inspect that front board, that’s “I.” And of course all “I” gets is the data and conclusion handed forward to him—the computations here, making up the conclusions. He recomposes these things and that’s the way he sees the picture. “I” does not alter one iota in the whole process.
People think basic personality suddenly emerges up and rises to the surface like phoenix from the ashes, and the “I” which he now is, disappears and flies away.
That’s not true. These monitor units are just getting better computation than they ever got before, that’s all And basic personality and “I” are in unity as to the purpose. Because now “I” is looking at the front board which has proper conclusions on it as based on the data which is in the standard bank, that’s all.
It’s the same “I” but his conclusions are a lot different. There’s your situation. Basic personality and “I” will be identical.
They will be the same thing when you end up clearing this individual. They’re just the sum of the attention units. Now, the somatic strip is an individual switchboard. It’s a switchboard over here, rather than a computer in the front lobes. If I were drawing it, I would bring it over here and set up a switchboard system. Now, that somatic strip can get so good that you can synchronize a somatic strip and “I” at any—synchronize them completely at any past moment in a person’s lifetime.
In hypnosis, this is known as revivification. You will get it in Dianetics sometimes. It isn’t revivification. Call it “reliving.” He is all there at that moment. He is no older than five. He will talk to you like he is five and so forth, the English he uses will be five-year-old English. He is computing on the level he computed when he was five. In other words as a person grows, the boards are still setting up, reducing back down to there. The data comes through on the board, it’s five-year-old data; the computation which is being done is five-year-old computation.
You can get a preclear back into this area and get him to reliving— and, by the way, things really hit him with high intensity. Because he’s right there, he’s all there at that moment, and he’s reliving. And you say, “Well, now”—you’re trying to scout up an area of occlusion or something—you say, “Did you have a good time in school today?” “I don’t go to school.” “Well, tell me something now, is your papa nice to you?” “You want to ask me something?” This guy may be four years old. “You want to ask me something?” “Yes, sure.” “Well, if you promise to give me some candy I’ll tell you.” “All right. You can have some candy.” Okay. He gives you all the data. You never have to bother to give him the candy, if you bring him out of it.
All that is, is you have synchronized all the units across the board, the somatic strip and so on has placed the body in the position, physiological position and so forth, of five years of age. “I” has gone across, is using the computer boards of five years of age. The data is sawed off here on the standard bank at five years of age, no more data beyond that or anything else.
You’ll find occasionally some preclear starts going into an incident and it appears to be terrifically intense. And if it gets too terribly intense and he seems to be revivifying—maybe he starts lisping, using English too young or something of the sort—you can say, “You can remember this.” And say it to him rather sharply, “You can remember this,” and enough attention units will come up to present time; because after all, he’s supposed to remember this. It has a tendency to stretch him back up into present time. Now, once in a while you get a person revivified, for instance, at one month postpartum. And you’re working on him very nicely and he’s been very rational, everything’s fine. He goes down the track and the somatic strip and everything else winds up at one month of age and you say, “All right. Now let’s contact a moment when somebody is burping you.” And he says, “Whaaaa!” It is very startling because actually it is the perfect replica of a baby’s cry.
I had a person revivify in birth one time and got the whole performance and protest before I could finally bite through with enough “You can remember this” to bring him on up the line. Nothing would have happened—if he’d gone to sleep everything would’ve wandered up into present time synchronization.
Now insanity—we have a parallel in insanity of the person who rolls up in the fetal position, has to be tube-fed. That person has revivified prenatal. That’s the form it takes. You can duplicate any kind of insanity you want to, with anybody. But people are very, very jumpy about insanity because it has been such a terrific mystery. But you can duplicate any part of it. And once in a while you’ll see a preclear while he’s running an engram giving a manifestation that anybody suddenly observing him would immediately adjudicate to be insanity. And yet you bring the fellow up to present time or he gets through the thing and he gets it deintensified.
It’s usually a great relief to a class, by the way, when you’re giving a demonstration on somebody who is quite convulsive and there’s a lot of line charge. He goes down to the point of the engram, starts running the engram, goes through terrific gyrations and very loud and so on. And then about the last recounting, something like that, all of a sudden breaks down and chuckles or laughs, something like that, “Well, if that isn’t the damnedest thing.” He’s perfectly sane—you’ve been running this engram and he gets caught up, too many attention units get caught up as he’s running it.
There is no particular great danger in running somebody down there and abandoning it, but when you run “I” up next to an engram and then don’t reduce it, that engram is going to pick up some of the attention units of “I.” Then you don’t get enough of it up to present time. Insanity is almost wholly the problem of people not being in present time.
Male voice: If a person revivifies in an engram, is he still reducing it?
What?
Male voice: If a person revivifies in an—during an engramic moment . . . ?
It’ll still reduce. It’ll still reduce. But it’s very terrific in its impact.
Well, this should be of interest to you, this present time proposition that “I” and the somatic strip can get together and that the file clerk then starts operating with them and the three of them sort of get together and everything up above that point is not operating. And that a person will be again one month of age or something of the sort. Nothing is more startling.
You could go into any institution, I am sure—I’ve never tried this trick but I’m sure you could do this—go into some institution and see several psychotics around the place and walk up to them and one after the other say, “Come up to present time,” and the fellow would turn sane on you. It might happen, two or three cases in a big institution, just like that.
One little girl with whom I’m acquainted used to have a terrible time waking up. She would fight her mother, bite, scratch, scream, every time Mama would try to waken her. And so one night she was at a house where I was and Mama had to take her home.
Went upstairs and I heard this dreadful ruckus going on and I went up to find out what was happening. And tried to give her a hand. The little girl liked me very much. She was a little seven-, eight-year-old kid, and I talked to her for a minute and she started to bite and scratch at me. So I stood her up on her feet and she fought a heck of a lot worse. So I laid her back down again and I took her mother out in the hall and I said, “What happened to this kid?” “Nothing.” “Well yeah, but has she ever been operated on for anything?” “Well, yeah, she had a tonsillectomy.” “Mm-hm. How’d they wake her up in that tonsillectomy?” “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s right, she used to be awfully angry with the nurse in that tonsillectomy.” So I went back in and I jostled the kid and she started to scrap and I said, “Come up to present time.” The little kid came up to present time, smiled sweetly, stood up, fitted on her clothes in a very orderly fashion, told everybody good night in a very ladylike sort of a way, went home. She never did it again.
Actually she was probably groggy and I probably laid in on top of the engram, right in its area, the words “Come up to present time.” And they’re probably still there. Every time she hits that particular area of the engram she comes up to present time again. Well, she’s never done it since, in a long time. So that gives you some sort of an idea of the seriousness of being stuck on the time track. Well now, just a few units can be stuck on the time track or the somatic strip can be stuck there. And by the way, if you’ve seen people who look like they were five years of age — I mean they’re full stature but they have a physiology of five years of age . . .
You’ll see some chap with perhaps a very delicate little-boy face. He may be thirty-five, something like that. That’s a dead giveaway—this somatic strip is stuck at five years. And according to its genetic blueprint at five years, the structure is supposed to be so-and-so, and so structure just goes right on being built along the lines of so-and-so.
It expands in size, but that’s all. His endocrine balance and everything else will be right there at five years of age.
Now, there is a certain limit of no return. That is, the endocrine system can be so thoroughly bad, the body can be so thoroughly out of adjustment, that a person who has been ill for a long time, there is finally a point of no return. But that point is pretty extended. Actually, the endocrine system and so forth will rebalance unless the person is too old—oh, too grown down in mind. You can see they’re just like—you can bend steel an awfully long way before it cracks, before it fatigues. Well, in the same way, the body carried too far forward will fatigue, but the amount of recovery even then is amazing, although the steel, you might say, has fatigued. We can’t rebuild right now a body according to the genetic pattern that one should have it built on. The body will still do a remarkable rally. It’s a long way from perfection, but it is so damn high above normal that everybody says, “Boy, this is really something.” The best tests—there are a lot of tests on that I could go into, a lot of examples, but here you are dealing with the somatic strip getting stuck someplace. Now, when the somatic strip gets stuck, let’s say a half an hour after birth, we have a person who’s chronically tired and chronically gets sinusitis because that’s what the blueprint says. The blueprint has been aberrated by the engram. The engram adds in, it says, “Mucous membrane irritated, suppurating, eyeball inflamed/’ General condition of body chemical balance—weariness, because babies are always tired after they are born. You get these people who are chronically tired. Everybody knows that weariness is caused by exercise, and weariness is caused by lots of other things but they don’t get tired. What happened to the body chemistry? I have taken somebody, for instance, who was very, very tired who actually should have been—just hiked over a couple of mountains and rode a bunch of horses and so forth—pretty muscularly weary, run them back to a moment when they felt fresh and good, get this settled very smoothly, they go to a dance that night. So it’s something very peculiar operating there. The somatic strip has a set of meters and it meters everything, meters the chemistry, so on. The engram has meters on it and it can tie into the somatic strip and cause all sorts of things. But the engram can only activate when the somatic strip is there with it. Now you can get several engrams in restimulation simultaneously by getting lots of attention units and so forth from “I” into these things so they’re hooked into the computer circuits. But you turn on one somatic at a time, one somatic at a time—that’s the somatic strip. It goes to one place at a time, it is precisely at that place and you better trust it.
If it doesn’t go there then you know that it is hung up someplace else. Free it at that point and it will go where you want it to go. “I” may not have enough attention units to do anything very terrific when it gets to this new point. You might have reactivated a lot of holders and so forth there, so the somatic strip, every time it starts to come across something with units and so on—the somatic strip doesn’t care who commands it—the units there are tied up in the phrase “Stay here.” So, the somatic strip starts past this place and all of a sudden—“Stay here,” just as though it had been spoken to. It will stay there. Now you have to knock attention out and get those attention units out of the “Stay here” and the somatic strip will go someplace else.
Sometimes you can just plain bully the somatic strip into leaving it. “Move!” “Go to birth!” “Go to conception!” “Go to present time!” After all, “I” can command the somatic strip. “I” can command it; it can send it almost anyplace. But it was very dangerous the way this thing was rigged up. Because we didn’t have a blueprint of what could do who to which. So we find out that here is an entity sitting around in the body that—somebody comes along and he says, “My tooth hurts.” “Have you ever had any tooth trouble?” The somatic strip is liable to go down to the dental.
Now, it doesn’t mean, just because the somatic strip went there, went to the place you told it to, that the phrases are going to come through. It’s that they’re standard bank phrases that are supposed to come through at this time, you may be running through an occlusion on the area and the occlusions can be many There is an occlusion. So the word content and so forth of this standard bank incident—you know, little boy had an ice cream when he was eight years of age, on June the 21st at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Well, he’ll go there. Somatic strip will track with it. But the occlusions are such that the rest of the perceptics and so on won’t come through on it. In other words, we don’t get a good hookup. Well, we force that hookup, in Dianetics. We say “The somatic strip will go to this point.” We tell the file clerk to give us this thing—in other words, he just puts it on the ready line. And “The somatic strip will go to the front part of this engram,” “the first of this engram” or “the first part of this incident. When I count from one to five, the first phrase will flash into your mind,” you see. “One-two-three-four-five.” Or you can just say, “The first phrase will flash in the incident when I say flash. Flash!” You know, you don’t have to snap your fingers but you should give it an instant to jump.
Very often, a person who is very cagey about all of this will get a jump flash, way before, long time before it should. He’s got one ready, he wants to be prepared.
It’s like this age circuitry: “How old are you?” and the person says “Sixty.” And you say, “Did you get a flash? Oh, that’s it, that’s the flash. What’s your age?” “Sixty.” “Give me a number?” “Three.” “How old are you?” “Three—I mean sixty.” He’s got a circuit set up there so that he gets an automatic response on his age.
Now, in such a way, we’ve got to force through the data, and particularly an engram. A lot of people are around unable to contact prenatal in preclears. Some auditors can’t contact prenatal in preclears. But this is the way they are doing it: They say, “All right, go to an incident before you were born.” “All right, what do you find out? Well, what’s happening? Well, come up to present time. See, there is no prenatal.” They never bother to establish the contact. If they just told the person to go into the prenatal area and said, “A phrase will now flash into your mind. Flash.” And the fellow would say, “Heavens on earth,” something like that, “Heavens on earth.” “Repeat that, please.” Now you get this: “Repeat that, please”—this is very proper use of repeater technique. You say “Repeat that, please” in order to synchronize “I” and get attention units down there from “I” and get the somatic strip all tuned up with the incident and “I.” So you have him repeat it—wham, wham, wham, wham, wham, wham, wham-several times, and he settles in the incident. Now you can run it because it will run from there on, you’ve got the thing synchronized. That’s all there is to it.
Now, this is all very important what I’m telling you here today; I’ve got to wind this up rapidly, because I’m talking about your primary tools in Dianetics. These are the primary tools of your trade: the file clerk, the somatic strip, basic personality and “I.” You use these things.
The basic personality is working right there with the auditor. “I” is getting computations one way or the other and pretty well trying to work with the auditor, usually, unless he’s inaccessible; it varies. But the somatic strip is right there at the auditors command and the file clerk will do his best to get the data through to you. You may get analytical demons and all sorts of things interposed but the file clerk is trying to get that data through and the file clerk operates whether demons are operating or not.
A demon is unable to put any real muzzle on the file clerk. The file clerk still operates. I couldn’t say that too often or too many times to impress you with it. This file clerk doesn’t get strangled or put in jail by demon circuits—he is there, he is operating, he will work. Just because “I” can’t contact his working doesn’t mean he won’t work.
When you get terrific “control yourself” circuitry, the “control your-self’s” are commanding the somatic strip and you’re trying to command the somatic strip and the control circuitry is trying to command the somatic strip, and it’s stronger sometimes and it wins. So we blow the control circuitry out and then we command the somatic strip and it obeys.
The file clerk can become occluded; it can get behind data so that the data comes through on cards or ticker tape or some foolishness or doesn’t come through at all or comes through vocally. Anybody who has a vocal file clerk—this whole communications network back here is working continually. You say “Give us the engram necessary to resolve the case (pop).” You get it. It’s there poised and waiting for you. You tell the somatic strip to “go to the beginning of this engram,” it doesn’t mean that engram reactivates; it just goes onto the slot, it’s ready to be run.
Tell the somatic strip to “go to the front part of this engram” and start running it. Reinforce the thing, get it synchronized right there at the beginning of the engram and run it off. (snap) When you’re not getting flashes, don’t immediately suppose that you won’t have engrams presented to you. And if you can altitude down the analytical demon, if you can say, “The somatic strip will go to . . . What is the first phrase . . .?”or get some clue as to the phrase and get him to repeat that and return him into it anyway in spite of the analytical demon— because “I” will cooperate with you in the absence of demons. It doesn’t mean that “I” is flabby but “I” would want to do the same thing as basic personality wants to do. So he’d go to the phrase, run it through.
If you ask for an incident to be poised, it will be poised. If you ask for a flash, you’re going to get a flash. The flash might not come through to “I.” The incident might not be contactable because something else is holding or ordering the somatic strip in this area; it’s ordering the somatic strip to do something else.
You’re failing then, when that happens, to get the somatic strip to the incident. It doesn’t mean that the incident is lost or is not ready or that the file clerk is not working. Don’t say, “The file clerk isn’t working,” ever. You might say the file clerk isn’t getting through, but don’t say he’s not working, because he’s always working.
Now, in Standard Procedure, we want to reduce this whole problem down to a very simple one. We want to make every case a pianola case. That’s right. And until you have your case working like a pianola case and slugging through the thing, you really can’t consider that that case has thoroughly progressed.
You have to knock out the analytical demons, you have to adjust valences and so on, but when you get through with disposing of valences and demons and so forth, you’re going to have a pianola case. That is our target; that’s your goal. A lot of ways to achieve it—that’s Standard Procedure.
But, you want to be able to tell a case to do just exactly this: “The file clerk will now give us the incident necessary to resolve this case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of this engram. When I count from one to five, the first phrase of the engram will flash into your mind. One-two-three-four-five. (snap)” And you get it and you run it, and the engram reduces properly and then you go on to the next engram in the same fashion, that’s the way a case has got to run. And there is your first target in Standard Procedure, is to fix up the case so it runs like that.
Thank you.