Use of ARC in Auditing (501104)
Date: 4 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I will mention this later at its proper place, I will mention it now. I will probably mention it several times, some of these things. One is don’t invalidate your preclear s data. The next is reduce every engram you contact or the basic on its chain. The next bulletin is that there is a firing squad being arranged among the group captains for people who ask the preclear to compute on his data, because that is incidentally wrong. That’s nonsurvival.
Don’t ask the preclear to compute on his data. This one is a wild one that has wandered in from the field from someplace and it has about as much place in Dianetics as witch wands, holding them over the preclear’s head and trying to find out if the wand dips toward the proper engram. I’ve had that suggested to me, too.
Yeah, a phrase such as, “Now, put all your attention units on that. Now, what does it mean to you? Now, compute what it means to you.” That’s wrong. It’s an automatic process. What happens is that—and it might have come in from this angle—is the auditor becomes very anxious to find out, to dig up one of the neuroses of the individual, and in that anxiety he is prone to push just a little bit. And this fellow has very bad eyes and he runs across the phrase, “I just can’t see it.” He runs across this phrase in an engram and the auditor says, “Oh, there, there I got it. There I’ve got where this guy’s bad eyes are.” So he says, “Now, think about that for a moment. Now, just—just think about that. Now, what does that mean?” I can assure you that if it is the phrase which gives this person bad vision, that his eyes will automatically become good eyes. Right now.
Male voice: If it isn’t? But if it isn’t, they won’t. And the reason why, when you have hit a phrase that is obviously aberrative and you ask the preclear, “What does that mean to you? Now, does that explain your epizootics?” And he says “No,” don’t be crushed. And it isn’t because your preclear’s just stupid. It is simply that it is not the phrase that causes his epizootics. I mean, it’s as simple as that.
Now, there’s a phrase elsewhere or an engram elsewhere that causes his epizootics. Now that’s all there is to it. Okay, that is the end of the bulletin, besides this fact: they’re going to use .50 caliber rifles in the firing squad.
Okay. Now, all of this comes in this morning—the reason I gave you this lecture this morning—we’re not covering Dianetics chronologically, that is to say, from the first and highest echelon of Dianetics down through the line. We’re covering it via the Standard Procedure Chart. And this is the organization of these lectures, Standard Procedure.
We look right here at Step Two A2 and 3, and we find there: “Strengthen the sense of reality and get the preclear in own valence” and “Try for an emotional discharge.” All right. Try for an emotional discharge.
Practically all the people in the shop since time immemorial, when they’re very young have enough painful emotion on their cases which can be restimulated, that they rather like to avoid running painful emotion.
Besides in this great society of ours, there is an aberration against crying. Actually, at the moment of shock, a lot of the painful emotion comes off in tears. If there were no inhibition against crying, theoretically it’d all come off in tears. But everybody stands around and says, “Dear, don’t cry, after all it was only your father,” and they say, “Only little girls cry. Little boys don’t cry” and so forth. And a lot of suppression on this. Well, this is the suppression of the society that hates to be restimulated.
It isn’t that anybody is thinking about this kid that’s crying because his father’s dead. It’s because they hate to see somebody cry because that’s restimulative to painful emotion engrams which they have themselves. And so they say, “No, no, no, no, no, don’t—don’t cry.” Now, the psychiatrist who, in an institution, keeps pumping people full of sedation to keep them from screaming isn’t worrying about this patient knocking his brains out. He could put him in a padded cell. Those rooms could be fixed up so nobody could knock his brains out. It’s just noisy, you see? It’s restimulative. And the whole effort is along this line: Quiet him down, quiet him down, quiet him down. Actually, there’s nothing wrong with somebody screaming. It just happens to be restimulative as hell. Now you see, there are the two fields. I can see what they’re up against too. Because after I’ve run a screamer for a while, I can feel my own hair standing up. I can see what a psychiatrist is up against when he is up against people continually that he can do nothing for whatsoever. Scream and he says, “Uh-uh-uh-uh.” Scream, “Uh-uh-uh-uh.” Tough. Now, that’s what it’s like. It’s awfully hard on a man. When you have run a few psychotics who are completely disassociated and very bad off, you’ll know better what I’m talking about right now. There seems to be something else there, too. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this other thing actually exists. It just seems to exist. There’s a sort of a vibratory wave that comes off of these people and it’s a shocker. It’s like some sort of, I imagine like some fellow walking into a supersonic barrage. He knows something is happening to him, but he can’t tell quite what it is. So he’s restimulated.
Now, if you know this, and if you know that you might possibly avoid running painful emotion out of somebody simply because it might restimulate you, for God’s sakes, keep that fact when you come to this part of Standard Procedure and just lay it aside bravely and courageously and say, “Let ’em cry” and go and find his painful emotion. And really want to find it.
Don’t just go into the case dabbling because it says there in Standard Procedure to do this and he goes for all emotion in the case— goes oh! oh! All the tears come off. Phew! And don’t fall into the trap of believing that, you see, because of this one—get persuaded to believe that the only engram which is important is the physical pain engram. And the only area which is important on the case is the basic area.
Because that’s not so. These big painful emotion incidents up the track and so forth can seal that whole basic area in. So the first thing to do in Standard Procedure, after you’ve checked perceptics and so forth, is try for some painful emotion. But in order to try for painful emotion, and in order to get painful emotion, you have to know several things. The first one is what is painful emotion? And the next thing is how do you go for it?
The “What is painful emotion?” is right here. It’s on this strata. It’s an affinity. It’s the break point on the level of affinity. It’s just before the apathy sets in, which is fear paralysis or death. So you want to get that grief off.
All right. But we’re not dealing with a specific commodity called grief which is entirely disassociated from any other emotion. They’re all on the same line. So what would be—would you try to get the jackpot on any slot machine you approached, every time? Well, you can try, but you’d be willing to take a few two-nickel playbacks, too. When you pull the handle of the slot machine on this preclear, be satisfied for a while to get two nickels or four nickels, not the jackpot every time.
Nearly everybody will dive into a case and say, “Ah, let’s see if we can get these deaths off the case. Right away, right now we want to get these deaths off.” And you don’t get a death off. And you go to this and you know very well there’s painful emotion on this. And no painful emotion comes off. The person abandons the whole idea of emotion and goes down into the basic area and tries to do something down there. There you’re trying to hit the jackpot. That’s like walking into a slot machine, pulling the handle and you don’t get a jackpot so you don’t put in a nickel. Of course anybody is a fool to put nickels in a slot machine, but the point is—because they’re rigged. The odds on the preclear are very much rigged in your favor.
What you want to attain is a heightened sense of reality, and to bring out these turbulent areas. Now, when you have painful emotion on a case—and there’s painful emotion on any case that has a physical pain engram—there is a picture of the thing you should know about. I’ve told you something about this. Here’s present time, birth and conception. Here is a death, which is painful emotion, and this would not have caused painful emotion unless the physical pain had already existed on the case, because the physical pain is what gets latched up and makes possible this added turbulence.
It’s like there can’t be fog unless there are dust particles in the air. If there were no physical pain on this case, you wouldn’t get any painful emotion. A person can feel bad about death, he can be confused about it, he can be sympathetic about it and all the rest of that, but he wouldn’t go for a spin about it. So this death is probably depending on one down here in the basic area. Well, these two get sort of crowded together. So actually when this death is—he’s dying, it gets down here and it just magnifies the dickens out of the effect of. It’s a terrific key-in of some engram. There’s a lot of physical pain on the case and painful emotion, that is a super key-in.
Now, one of these days I’m going to look around and find out just what it is in common between painful emotion and a key-in. They’ve got something in common. A magna key-in would be what painful emotion is. Because the whole engram comes in all at once and then is sealed up, and you’ve got this great big lock which is big enough so that it has to be treated as an engram all by itself See how that would be?
All right, if this is a great big lock, so big that it has to be treated as an engram all by itself, how about all these other little locks on the affinity line? In other words, there would be lots of them. There are lots of them.
You find the guy who loses his car keys. That causes such minimal perturbation that it’s negligible. But it can be reached and it is on the grade of the affinity scale, actually a little, tiny, tiny, tiny bit of reversed affinity. It’s reversed affinity with existence.
Here this space ate up these damn car keys. So it’s a break in affinity. That’s right. So it’s a break in affinity with space.
Don’t think people just break affinity with matter. They break affinity with time, they break affinity with space, they break affinity with energy.
All right, so—first little perturbation takes place. Little theta trying to take over big theta, and big theta took this time. And there’s the broken doll and so on. Just little perturbations that don’t amount to anything. Well, they can go down into grief. And you get little kids and you put little kids in processing, it’s the most interesting thing. You can get more grief off of a little kid. You go back and it’s the time when he lost his mittens. Nobody scolded him, he just lost his mittens. He liked his mittens—and big grief discharge. And there’s the time when the teacher—usually it would be something terrible, a teacher looked at him when he was late. Never said a thing; painful emotion. In other words, there’s lots of this stuff on a little kid but as the guy gets older, these key-ins sort of adjust themselves and there isn’t this much grief on the case.
Don’t think you go back over childhood, you’re going to find all the painful emotion that is there at once.
Painful emotion sort of dissolves out a little bit—a little bit. And sometimes, if it’s real big, it gets other things thrown into it continually. In other words, no engram is a static commodity.
Now, the engram itself of course, you realize this, is nothing. An engram could sleep forever. A person could have a thousand engrams from birth to seventy years of age and if he never got a key-in anywhere along the line, he might as well never have had any engrams. See the difference?
Now, when a person has engrams, however, they key in a little bit, a little bit more. Maybe only portions of the engram key in. Little portions. Maybe only a phrase keys in today and something else keys in tomorrow Do you see how that fits?
Selective key-ins. You know, grief. There’s just a great big one. Now, it has a tendency also to key out. Actually once in a while engrams will destimulate. That is to say destimulate, key out. Pardon me, I made a differentiation once—destimulate I said was an engram going out of restimulation, that’s right. And that there could be a key-out of an engram.
Now—so what’s really active on the case are the locks. This was so apparent that schools of mental healing dealt only with locks and never looked for an engram, because it was apparent that this person was suffering because of these locks. That was a surface glance because there was nothing visible there but locks. Nothing visible on the case but locks. The engrams were very much hidden. Well, we know where the engrams are and we know that we can pull up—I don’t know how many locks there are in the average case, but good God it must be hundreds of thousands. It is just way up there. You pull up some of these physical pain engrams—if you had to treat every one of these locks, everybody would be in processing for about fifty years. But if you can knock out the engrams—and you’ll get whole chains of locks coming off the top of each engram. And as a matter of fact, if they don’t blow off they’ll square themselves around.
Now, the first line charge is actually these locks blowing. It’s all this laughing. All right, when we would ask him then for painful emotion we’re asking for something that’s just there just above apathy This guy has practically been killed by this impact. This is a super lock. A key-in. One might say that it would be too rapid a key-in. And its rapidity of key-in causes an encystment of everything happening there. So it would be a big key-in.
Let’s wonder how we are going to increase his sense of reality or get any painful emotion off this case or do anything with these things. Well, if we look at this thing as a spectrum, we see we just might as well knock off a few worries. Let’s knock off a few worries out of this case. That will pick it up, and we do that with Straightwire. You ask a fellow, “What are you worried about lately?” The fellow says, “Oh, I’m kind of worried about money” “Who used to worry about money in your family?” “My mother.” “Do you remember a specific moment when she worried about money?” “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. It happened a great deal” “How do you feel?” “I feel fine!” You let it settle just a little bit here. Now that is in the perturbation. See, he’s just worried. Right below worry is fear. A little bit frightened, fear, terror, painful emotion.
All of that’s more or less painful. Terror of course is just a super magnitude of fear. And grief—you get little gradients inside the other ones. For instance a little bit of grief, a lot of grief, more grief, more grief, more grief. And right above that is fear of having grief, lots of it, and you get terror. In other words, we’ve got magnitude in here as well as graduated quantity.
That is to say, you’ve got the force of it as well as its quality. Now, when we look at a case then, we can postulate that if you can’t get any painful emotion off of this case, let’s get a little—let’s see if we can get some terror off.
What is it? Well, we don’t find this fellows ever been terrified, but we can find right now probably he has. But let’s see if we can find a little fear. When did somebody jump out and say “Boo”?
Let’s just find that much fear. And let’s knock that out as a lock. If it doesn’t come out by Straightwire if we can locate one of these things, we can start knocking these things out by running them as locks. Running them as incidents.
The doggonedest break, for instance, I got on a case—the case just wouldn’t move at all. There were deaths all over this case. Everybody was dead, everybody was gone away. Oh, all sorts of emotion on this case. And where did the case finally get entered? It got entered with a Sunday school superintendent slapping the little girl and saying she had stolen from God because she had saved her money for four Sundays that she was supposed to put in the collection plate, and had bought potted flowers to plant on the church garden which had no flowers in it. And was told that by taking this money away and buying pansies with it, why—the Sunday school superintendent cuffed her and said, “You’re stealing from God.” And that was quite a discharge. Boom. That was the first entrance in—a little light thing but it had an awful wallop.
Well, shucks, I was going in for a little bit of fear thinking this child might have been frightened by somebody saying, “You are going to hell,” in Sunday school, and being frightened along that line, which is quite common. And I was looking over things: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” A gem! A gem of society I was trying to find one of those darn things, and I actually blew right straight into a painful emotion incident. There was painful emotion on that that came off the case. The case started to run rather well. So you enter this thing anyplace on a reversed affinity line.
Now, there’s been too much concentration in the field of healing on the subject of rejection. You know, Mama rejected him and so forth, that is the reason why he is now crazy. No. But rejection has an impact with it because the person goes out of communication and has disagreement and the affinity breaks pretty much simultaneously on the thing.
Smallest rejection usually is, “Shut up and go away, don’t bother me” or something like that, a rejection of that kind. The first few times it hits a little kid he gets little disturbances on this. If he hasn’t got any physical pain on the case, he wouldn’t get much disturbance on the line, he’d be able to adjust this thing analytically. But he can’t adjust it analytically, so there he is. He’s stuck with it. And you get this rejection. And sometimes you’ll get a little bit of grief off of that—affinity break, straight affinity break, and by knocking that out, you’ll pick up a sense of reality. But what is that affinity break? It’s a type of painful emotion. It’s a certain kind of painful emotion. So you can knock that one out.
In other words, you can knock out rejections, and you can knock out the time he was told that he couldn’t have a dog. And you can knock out the time in somebody’s job, if you want a little tougher one; those are loss and so forth. And knock out the time that he was out on Halloween and somebody grabbed him suddenly. And you can just knock out all sorts of little stuff in this case with Straightwire, or running it and so on, and you can keep picking this case up.
Now, what I want to stress is that when you run people who can’t believe it, who are saying, “I don’t know. I have no sonic, I can’t tell,” don’t start jumping them with phrases. One of these days we’re going to ask the boards of ethics and standards to knock together what is good manners and bad manners in the Foundation in general about engrams. And what is good manners and bad manners in auditing.
It is actually destructive to the individual to keep slapping phrases back at him just because he uses phrases. The individual who is sitting in present time is not talking out of his engrams. He’s using phrases which also appear in his engrams, and they might be handier around, but the only time a person really is talking straight out of his engrams is when he is starting to dramatize and he has analytical shutdown.
Now, you get the moment when a person starts to talk out of his engrams, A person’s sitting there perfectly relaxed and they say, “Well, I can’t tell,” and they’re in present time. They’re not talking out of an engram. They’re giving you a colloquial phrase.
You can jump into this case and you can knock out a lot of “I can’t tells,” but after you’ve been around for a while and done this for a few preclears, you’ll find out it doesn’t do much good.
This person isn’t dramatizing, so don’t feed their words back at them. It’s something like stuffing their own thoughts down their throat. It’s very bad manners. But if you concentrate him on himself in an aberrated point, and you’re giving him Straightwire, you can start him to dramatize by doing this: concentrating on himself and you say, “What are you worrying about lately?” He will tell you what he’s worrying about lately, and it will generally be in the exact words that he was told. Because you’re now dealing with a specific aberration. You have asked for a specific aberration and he has expressed it. And having expressed it, it will be in the words, usually, that were told to him. So that’s the way you work Straightwire, But you don’t say to this person, I’m just showing you the difference in this, see. You say, “What are you worrying about lately?” And he says, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I really can’t tell,” Something or other. He’s not giving you the dramatization that has anything to do with worry. You don’t just jump on his case at this moment and say, “Run repeater technique on ‘I don’t know, and I can’t tell,’” But supposing he says this: “Well, it’s the birds.” “What are you worried about lately?” He thinks for a moment, “It’s the birds.” “What birds?” “Well, you know, the way they cheep,” “Where?” And he says, “Well, every morning when I wake up, you know, there’s these birds, and they make so much noise, and I’m just getting kind of frantic about it actually,” You have asked him and you have restimulated, you see, the guy, by asking him just this. And he’ll start to talk about it so he’s restimulated. He’s starting to dramatize.
Until you’ve restimulated him just by that degree of Straightwire, he’s not going to dramatize, you’re not going to get any engramic phrases out of him. But he’s talking now about the birds, and now, the next question is, “Who used to worry about the birds?” and so forth. And he thinks for a while, and it happens to be his Aunt Agnes who was always worried about the birds starving to death, and used to make him go out in the snow and do this and that and you make him run this little incident about the birds, and after that he may just remember it but he doesn’t worry about the birds. You’ve run the lock out—it’s for the birds now. So we get . . .
Now, that’s in actual fact, it’s the way these things go. But you have to get the person thinking about what you want him to think about so that he will start to dramatize. Now, dramatization is another little, tiny spectrum, I mean, this can be a big spectrum, A dramatization begins at one end by thinking about some worrisome subject and uttering the words that are included in the engram or the locks that had to do with that subject, right on down to the point of going out and saying, “The thing to do is to throw all of our atom bombs at Russia tomorrow” I mean a complete dramatization of somebody strangling his wife to death and beating her over the head with a one-year-old baby. That’s a dramatization. So you’ve got magnitude. In other words, there’s a spectrum of dramatization. The analytical shutdown starts taking place. Up here the analyzer is all the way on. You’re not going to get any dramatization up in this band, down to here. Right about here, the analyzer is starting to shut off. It gets into here and boy, it really shuts off.
These gradients are not the gradients of analytical attenuation. Analytical attenuation goes on and off from each one of these bands. We’ve got again a magnitude here which is not representable on this graph.
In other words, the quantity of dramatization. Its quality would be its position on this scale. The quantity of it would be something else. In other words, this person is angry, and now you could more thoroughly and thoroughly and thoroughly key in this engram, you see; make him angrier and angrier and angrier. You’re getting magnitude. He was here, but maybe he wasn’t demonstrating it very much. Now as you start to get magnitude, you get analytical shutdown, you get greater and greater dramatization. So the dramatization is a magnitude. You see how that could be? It’s the magnitude that can’t be drawn on this thing.
It’s the amount of analytical attenuation which is taking place, and it’s the thoroughness with which this engram is being displayed. Follow that?
All right. When you get the preclear on Straightwire then, you get him thinking about this sort of thing, you’re shutting his analyzer down a little bit, and he starts to think about this and the analyzer will shut down as he tries to go in. And you, as the auditor, drive his memory back into it by persuading him to remember that thing and telling him what to remember about it, because he won’t do so well if he’s trying to think about it himself, although he can even self-audit this way, by the way. That’s the only way the person can self-audit is just trying to remember—remember some of these things and go back to them.
If a person ever finds himself running himself and he is having a hard time to stop, start remembering late-life incidents and the person will come right out of autocontrol. That’s said in passing.
So, you get magnitude of dramatization. Person starts telling you what he’s worried about. At this moment he really starts to worry, then he starts to dramatize.
You’ve asked him to worry, so he will and he’ll tell you what he’s worried about. You get a little bit of analytical attenuation. He won’t sit there and get all worried and gnaw his fingernails off the way he does every night after he goes home. He’ll just sit there and you’ll get the words back. Then feed him the words back when you can get him turned down a little bit, thinking about it. Now the words you are going to get are going to be engramic words because you’ve asked for them on a specific subject. And having asked for them on that subject you’re going to get it back. But if you ask the person, “Well, what about—what about these engrams now?” Of course he is to some slight degree thinking about his case in general and he says, “I can’t believe it, I don’t know.” Well God, you look at some auditors, you’d think that the only way a preclear could communicate with them was using Chinese or something because anything the preclear says is held against him. And people go around all the time trying to communicate in the Foundation and in Dianetics in general—they try to communicate and everybody says, “Aha, engrams!” That’s very bad manners and incidentally it’s very bad auditing, because—let’s look at this thing. What does it do? The analytical mind of the preclear is trying to communicate with the analytical mind of the auditor, and the auditor says, “Aha, right out of your engrams. You have engrams” and so on.
All of a sudden communication just goes off, bang Affinity goes down. Agreement has gone down. Sense of reality is down, down, down. And you can fix a preclear up so by doing this to him constantly so that he would get to a point where he wouldn’t work at all. Just by this process and by this process alone you could break him off not only from yourself as an auditor—from Dianetics. You could get him to a point where he’d get a complete break of affinity, a break in reality— everything else, with Dianetics. How? If you hammered him this far.
It takes a lot of doing by the way. I have never seen anybody completely knocked out like this. But I have heard of some cases that were. People get rather impatient about the whole thing.
A preclear shouldn’t take this lying down, by the way If he’s being given Straight wire and it is Straight wire and the auditor is restimulating him a little bit by asking him this and asking him that and asking him something or other, and he’ll start to worry about it and think about it, you’ll notice that when you start to hit the button on Straightwire, you will get physical agitation on the part of the preclear, no matter how slight or how minor. And a good Straightwire boy can take a look at the preclear when he’s asking questions and—with a little lag, because it takes a few moments there for any physical agitation to turn on, he’ll know when he’s hitting pay dirt, just by watching.
It is not 100 percent reliable, because of this: He may be asking him into a lock which says, “Sit absolutely still Be immobile, be like stone.” But then you would get a change, wouldn’t you? The person would be animated and all of a sudden . . . In other words, he hit a “Be quiet.” “Who used to say, ‘Be quiet’?” “Lots of people.” “Who used to say, ‘Be quiet’?” And all of a sudden—“Everybody.” The guy would be real quiet physically. Then you’d say, “Let’s see. Who used to be awfully restless around you?” “Nobody. Well, I don’t . . .” Now, you can watch this, and you can tell whether or not you’re reaching into the bank. If the person is just sitting there looking at you saying, “Oh, I don’t know, I can’t tell,” and so forth, he is not talking out of his bank, he’s just telling you simply that he doesn’t know and that he can’t tell.
You will find those phrases in the bank and be able to run whole chains, but what I’m trying to differentiate with you is the preclear trying to communicate with you, and you trying to find the channel into the engram bank. These are two different subjects. So when we try to turn on the sense of reality, the best way to do it of course would be to find some painful emotion. Well, what the devil is painful emotion? Worry, fright, fear, grief, apathy. Don’t mistake this fact: apathy, a magnitude of apathy. I mean, apathy being expressed without any magnitude isn’t too terribly bad, but a magnitude of apathy can be run as an engram. It is an engram.
You know this guy, just—boom, the whole world has just fallen in on him. He just goes boom; sit around and just look at a wall. It’s just complete apathy. That, if it assumes magnitude, is a hell of a lot worse than grief Now, just remember this. You can sometimes put a guy through a period of apathy. And this is not one that you should miss. You can put him through a little short period of apathy and you just knock it to pieces—then you get results, some results on the case.
Grief can be expressed. Because there is a period on this chain here where tears actually have some sort of a biochemical action of some sort. Tears do something, I don’t know what they do, but they do something. Expression, The person can express the grief; naturally if he can express the grief, why, it’s gone.
Now, communication. Why? You’re trying, if you’re trying to get this preclear to work better, you’d certainly better better your own communications with him. So don’t start jamming his phrases back down his throat, I do this little trick, by the way, I will catch some of the phrases he is using and I. won’t jump on him, I will let it coast for sometimes ten or twelve remarks before I go back and pick up the first one. And very often he’s forgotten that he said it the first time. So it doesn’t seem to him like it’s being jammed down his throat at all. Seems like you just got this one out of thin air. “My, you must be smart to be able to pick up these things and hit right on just exactly what Aunt Agnes used to say.” You picked it up ten sentences ago. Therefore you should tighten up your own sense of recall and reality, because that’s really—a good auditor is a fellow who can play back every confounded engram of every preclear he ever ran. That’s right, Johnny Campbell called me up the other day and he told me about some engrams that he ran eight months ago. Fitted them all into line and made a computation of them, I was very proud of myself. Now, that was really taking one out of the hat. They were minor, they weren’t major computations on the case. He was talking about certain dreams and he expected me to go on and dub in the rest of the dream. So I told him what the rest of the dream was and that refreshed his memory.
That requires a certain concentration level. But once you make up your mind you can do this, it’s surprising, but you can from there on out, A person shouldn’t interpose, in other words, limitations on himself by saying, “Well, I can’t remember these things because I have to have sonic recall before I can remember.” That is bunk.
All you have to do is make up your mind, “Well, I have a very fine memory and I can remember everything.” Then after that you do. That’s one way to overcome one’s own restrictions. The appearance of papers and pencils in the society was the most inhibiting thing that could have happened to human memory, because papers and pencils invalidate, automatically, human memory. They say, “You’ve got to put it down, because you can’t remember it. You’d better put it down,” all of that sort of thing. And just their mere existence invalidates the fact that people remember. It says, “If you don’t put it down, you’re not going to remember it.” Now, they have a specific use. They’re to be consulted. Nobody expects you to remember all of this stuff, because that’s this society. I imagine if this were the days of ancient Greece and we went to a lecture of this character, why, the whole society would have expected everybody to have known all about it afterwards anyway. Paper, papyrus and so forth were too expensive. Do you get the idea? So we’ve got another little tool again, that I’m just summing up there, with the fact that you are reassuring a preclear with Straight-wire—this may be its most valuable use—reassuring him continually that he is in contact with his past and that his past is real. Only you’re not telling him this as a positive suggestion, you are just insisting that he remember and you are telling him that he can remember. And you as a human being are giving him as a human being permission to remember. And that permission has many times been refused to him. And so he starts to remember. And the second he starts to remember this, that, something or other, his sense of reality will go on up because he’s in better communication with his own past. And then he will start to get better agreement between his mind and his body, which have been in disagreement for some time. So that’s the way she works. And I don’t care how hard you have to slug or how long it takes, you can work on the case—of picking up any one of these lines here on the level of painful emotion. What do you consider painful emotion? Painful emotion can be worry, can be fright, fear, grief, apathy. So you’d better realize that you’re not going after one specific commodity. You’re not trying to make all in a morning, this preclear cry. You are trying to pick up the painful emotion on the case.
Well then, let’s look at what painful emotion is. And painful emotion could be specifically designed as this: any reverse polarity on affinity. Affinity below a certain level has a reverse polarity which, you might say, is out of phase with the best interests of the individual or his ability to exert himself.
He gets out of phase with himself and the lower it is on the scale, the more out of phase it is. And then when he gets back clear down to the bottom of the scale, you can say that it’s 180 degrees out—he cancels himself and so he’s dead—you could say. But all through his life when things die around him, when he loses things around him and so forth, he more closely approaches 180 degrees reversed phase—you could say it was this way if you’re electronically inclined—180 degrees reversed phase on an object. And what happens to that object? It becomes occluded.
Do you know anything about Polaroid glasses? Well they’ve got a minute number of little lines; a fellow found out that by cutting these little, tiny lines on a piece of glass—a little engineering device. The great invention, by the way, in polarizing was not making anything like a piece of glass, but was making a micrometer screw glass cutter. That job was tried for and was being failed on for about one hundred years. Now, you find mentions of it all the way back along the line. They were trying to make a micrometer screw so tiny that when you gave it a twist it would come out about one wavelength of light. Well, when you got this doggone thing out, it cut the glass like this—you get enough parallel lines, this would accept in only those waves which were exactly aligned with this. In other words, they were going straight, so it acted as a screen for light waves. Now, that’s polarized glass, right there.
If you take one set that is oriented this way and you take another set that is ninety degrees out, and they cancel each other. You see, if you’ve got one set that’s polarized this way, and the light’s coming through here, and you take another glass and you start turning it and this light that is bent has more and more trouble coming through, and you turn it this way, and light is trying to come through. Your glass is evidently perfectly transparent and everything else, but (ascending whistle) it goes blind. No light can get through this thing. Now, that sounds like I’ve maybe departed a little bit but I haven’t. You’re looking for occluded areas on the track.
When affinity, agreement or communication—this is an analogy— starts going that much out of phase, you start getting occlusions on the perceptics, then you’d better bring them back into phase again. The way you bring them back into phase is just start knocking out the reversals here, and this is what you’re working on continuously—the person’s tone on that particular subject rises. And by getting a person’s tone to rise on enough particular subjects, his general tone as a whole starts up the line. You’re actually doing a job of pulling a guy up by his bootstraps. Whereas you are trying to raise, on any one subject, object or moment—you’re trying to raise his reality level. Or you can’t do that, so you’re trying to raise his affinity just a little bit on a particular subject.
You could say one of these things exists for every subject or object he has ever run into in his life. So you can pick up any subject or object that he has run into in his life and you can work on that, and you could raise each one up a little bit. And you could finally clear up the subject of—just with Straightwire, you could clear up the subject of barking one’s shins.
You could clear up the subject of sneezing because of smelling a woman’s powder puff. It doesn’t matter what you pick up. He’s out of affinity with a powder puff. He’s out of affinity with things which hit his shins. He’s going out of communication with big theta on these subjects. He’s getting this occlusion, which comes over this way.
These things are dangerous, so we close down perception. Now, we are trying to affect it; it turned around and affected us; so something dangerous came up in this particular channel on this subject, so what’s the best thing to do? Shut it off.
Now, we shut it off in ratio to the amount of danger which it opposed to the individual. We just get a perception on this thing, and although we may know about it, and we may think about this particular channel, we can’t see it. We say that particular thing is real dangerous. We don’t want anything to do with that thing. And we’re not going to look at it, we’re not going to have anything to do with it because the second we perceive it we go into communication with it; the last time we went into communication with it, it kicked our shins. So the devil with this thing. And so there are difficulties in shutting off any of these lines. If one shuts off and gets occluded enough on anything that runs into one’s shins, it’s almost certain that one is going to go on barking his shins wholesale. Isn’t that so? So it’s a highly illogical action. But what is an illogical thing? It’s a disharmonic in thought. Thought is not running smoothly along in that line so you get illogic. Now, when you go out of communication with all of these objects, so forth, the auditor turns around and starts putting the fellow back into communication. One point, one object, one thing, one person, one type of people, one subject, one thing after another, he can pick these things up and start putting them into communication.
Of course he can go on forever doing this. He just wants this fellow’s sense of reality up to a high enough point so that he can go down and find engrams. That’s what he’s trying to build up, and so when he contacts those engrams he will be able to contact them. But here’s this poor guy who knows—as far as he’s concerned a table is out of communication to him. Anything is. He’s sealed the whole thing off He said, “These things aren’t real. Nothing’s real in the world. I’m not real, nothing’s real. It’s all dangerous, I don’t want to have anything to do with these things anymore.” And you’re saying, “Let’s go right to the center and heart of this whole trouble now, and run out the damnedest, toughest engram that’s going to kick your teeth in.” You think he’s going to do it? No, it’s absolutely impossible to him.
That’s why when you pick up these cases that are very poorly in contact, you very often have to fight around like the devil before you get there.
Now, it so happens that this person may be, by various computations and by the mechanics of Standard Procedure—you might be able to throw him right square into the engram that has him latched up on the track, merely by asking the file clerk to put him there, boom. And he’ll run this thing out. And it is so confoundedly painful. It is so shocking to him. It so alters all the reality which he’s had before that he has to agree with it. Boom, he agrees with it, it’s real, he’s got something there, he can do something about it. And he hooks his reality onto Dianetics. He hooks his existence onto Dianetics. The world doesn’t become more real to him. But here’s this subject with which he can be in agreement. So he’ll go on and work in this field, and he’ll go on up the line and at a certain point up that line he will suddenly start to find the real world coming in, too. But his point of entrance into the real world is Dianetics. First, the point is, you as a human being though, have to reach him. And then you have to reach him with your subject. And then when you’ve reached him with your subject, you have to reach him with your skill. And then you have to put him in contact with your skill, in contact with the actuality of what he has within him. And now you put him in contact with that, he’ll run from there on out. But sometimes you have to, when you get one of these cases of “I don’t know, I can’t tell, it doesn’t seem real, I can’t believe it anyway. It doesn’t sound—he doesn’t believe me anyway.” He doesn’t believe in anything—life is pretty horrible. And you start questioning this guy a little bit and you find life is pretty horrible.
Ran into a chap who was terrifically projected. Everything was unreal. He was sick all the time anyway, and he was just out of affinity with everything. He was out of communication with everything, but he was trying to communicate in some line down toward things and toward people.
Nobody ever shut off his communication lines completely except a guy when he is either catatonic or dead. Complete communication shut-off is of course dead. So you try to pick this person up from death one way or the other. You get him a little bit up here. You get him a little bit up there. Straightwire. Running out locks. Running out a little bit of this and a little bit of that out of the case. Gradually, more and more and more and more, and all of a sudden he starts to accept what you’ve got to give him.
Of course, you give him as much stress as he can take at this time. You don’t have to adjudicate it because his body is going to tell you how much stress it can take. Then you figure it out this way and it’ll work out—you give him all he can take in the way of an engram. Which means all you can give him. Because he won’t take more than he can take. If you follow that. He’s doing his own modulating on the subject. This guy might only be able to take the time he got spanked when he was five years of age.
Now, mechanically, you can bypass a lot of this stuff with Standard Procedure. But I’m telling you how to try to enter some of these cases. And I’m only talking about difficult cases when I’m talking to certified auditors and people who will be certified auditors.
How you lift him. Person comes up, keeps coming on up the scale on these little subjects, objects, people, past life and that sort of thing. Gradually you pick enough of those up and the overall average of having picked up enough of these things will cause his own Tone Scale to start up, the whole Tone Scale. In other words, the whole Tone Scale might be said to be the aggregate of all of the Tone Scales on little subjects in life.
If you took the average readings on anything in his whole existence and averaged it out, you took the reading on each one and then you got an average on the thing, then you’d have the person’s whole Tone Scale. So the best thing to do is to go back and try to lift some of these major points that you can reach in his life and lift them individually, and then you lift up the whole individual and in such a way you will finally get him into processing. But you won’t get him into processing by saying, “All right, repeat, ‘I don’t know.’ Repeat, ‘It doesn’t seem real.’ Repeat, ‘I don’t believe it.’ Repeat, I’m skeptical.’” No, you’re not going to do that. The guy starts pulling that line on you and he’s pretty fogged up, you say, “Well, let’s see now. Now, when was the last time that you dropped something on your toe?” That’s too tough for him, dropping something on his toe. So you go at it a little bit lighter and you say, “Well, let’s see. Do you like your wife?” “Yes.” You say, “Well, when was the last time she told you—did she ever tell you to be quiet or anything like that?” “Well, when was the last time she said something like this?” “Oh, yeah. Yeah. Last Tuesday.” Right away you’re working on one object in his life, and you’re picking up his tone on the subject of that, do you see? And you pick that one up and you go into other things in his life. And you straightwire him on trying to find wherever he broke off affinity, communication or agreement with anything under the sun, moon or stars, and you’ll eventually bring him up to a point where his own Tone Scale is such that he can just run the hell out of engrams. And you don’t have to worry about him being in his own valence. You don’t. Because he’ll go into his own valence as soon as he finds out he’s there.
I’m serious about that. Most people walk around and don’t know they’re there. They know they’re there as Aunt Agnes and they know they’re there as Uncle Bill, but not as themselves.
Okay? I hope now that you have some understanding of how lightly you can go about this and approach results. I hope I have helped you to enter some of these highly resistive cases.
It takes patience. It takes a lot of endurance. It takes a lot of skill. But the things which I have told you this morning are actually the backbone of all the tools you are using in Dianetics.
Thank you.