View source for Demon Circuits (500626)

'''Date:''' 26 June 1950

'''Speaker:''' L. Ron Hubbard

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Psychosomatic illness is caused by actual injury. There is no psychosomatic illness without an actual injury. If you wish to demonstrate this fact, all you need do is ask people to imagine a pain here, imagine a pain there. When you have asked them for a pain where they have had a pain, they will experience a real pain. But when you ask them to imagine a pain, they do not experience a real pain but are merely content to say, “Yes, I can imagine a pain.” The command somatic is confirmatory. It acts as a holder. It acts as the aberration and it will lie with or over an actual pain. We have a command somatic, it says, “My stomach hurts, my stomach hurts very much. I can’t stand it.” At the moment that this command is uttered there is no pain in the person’s stomach. Now we come forward and at a later moment in an attempted abortion, a thrust is received through the abdomen. Now, some more complaint may follow it on “My stomach hurts so,” and “I’ve got to lie here until it gets better.” The combination of the commands will sum up to a potential psychosomatic illness. If there were no commands in that psychosomatic illness, the only restimulators present would be the noises and the smells around the person’s environment. They would be relatively light. However, an actual injury which is confirmed by an engramic command will be cause of severe trouble.

Here we have an example of a lady, in the basic area had a command, “I am all cramped up. My muscles are all cramped. I can’t stand.” And “Go away from me. Leave me alone.” “No, honey. Lie down. Lie down, honey, and let me help you. Now, you stay there a moment and I will get you a glass of water. Now . . .” And so on. The moment of the engram, the age tab on it is two days postconception. All right, two days postconception one does not have muscles to be cramped. The only injury there is overall pressure. But this doesn’t match up with that command. This particular patient went on through—had an AA, both of the lower vertebrae were hit. And there a calcium deposit could begin because this engram had a holder in it at birth, which was very severe, very deep muscular—with more holders. And then, postnatally, there were some more accidents, more holders and some emotional upsets which gave painful emotion engrams which led toward the same conclusion that “my back hurts and my muscles are all cramped” and so on. The person suffered for approximately eight years from a muscular and bone arthritis. That is, the spine had calcified areas and the muscles were so cramped up that the patient was held in a hunched-over position approximating one of the forms she had on an engram that was on this muscle cramp chain. You could safely say that the engramic command could have been there without ever giving the person arthritis if there had not been actual tissue damage and bone damage. In other words, all the engram command does is confirm. The injury itself is what is important.

Now, you take the poor fellow who walks around with the continuous statement “I have—I have aches and pains all over,” who can demonstrate no aches and pains to anyone’s satisfaction. Now, he has been unfortunate enough in this current society to receive a series of engramic commands without at the same time receiving enough traumatic damage to justify them. We call this gentleman a hypochondriac. There’s no real pain there in order to justify the engramic command.

Now, the engramic command all by itself, however, can influence fluid flow, can influence it to the point of “I have to throw up.” Now, you can get a good mechanical command reaction there, “I have to throw up.” Postpartum, there are enough nauseating illnesses in the life of a child to confirm this, and this will all hang together on morning sickness. But it is really a fluid flow command, so that the person can throw up. And it can state “I feel terrible,” but “I feel terrible, I feel very sick” would sometime in the bank coincide with the fact when the child was feeling very sick. If the fellow isn’t fortunate enough to have such a coincidence, he is labeled as being a fake, it’s all in his mind. And that’s the truth, it’s in his mind; it unfortunately is not in his body. As a result, society frowns upon him. There seems to be a great deal of feeling about this in our present social world, that a person, to be ill, must be able to exhibit damage; just as in an army dispensary it is absolutely necessary to have a fever in order to lay off from duty. One walks in, temperature is taken—temperature normal, restored to duty. I imagine there have been occasions when a fellow had a broken leg who was still restored to duty because he didn’t run a temperature. An arbitrary adjudication.

That will give you some sort of an idea of the nature of a psychosomatic illness. Don’t just look for a command, look for the damage. You can find a lot of commands that would seem to justify that illness. But if that illness is demonstrating itself in the form of calcification, chronically cramped-up muscles, bad headaches or something of the sort, why, you’d better find the actual injury too. And when you find the actual injury, that psychosomatic will key out, but not until Male voice: In other words, it’s very important to get the actual engram that caused it—the injury Well, it’s important to get all of them. But if you get the actual engram which made the injury, which can now manifest itself, then the rest of it is relatively pale.

Male voice: Ron, I was just wondering about the hypochondriac case. [gap] Hypochondria can be fairly well knocked out rapidly, very rapidly Male voice: The greatest psychosomatics are going to have personnel, in other words, Grandma . . .

Well, we can go the rest of the way on that. Yes. Let me answer that. A child is in an unfortunate state who has had antagonism from one or the other parents, since this tends to thrust him into the hands of an ally. And although his reactive mind may compute this to being wonderful, it will very often result in the confirmation. This is the second confirmation. This establishes the chronic nature of the psychosomatic illness, so that a psychosomatic illness which is truly chronic has with it a sympathy factor run in by an ally.

Male voice: One question, what about difference brought about by who’s talking in a command—difference in person, in the command, one which says, “I feel so-and-so, I am so-and-so” and the other which says, “It cant feel anything’ or “it does so-and-so”?

Are you talking about the personal pronoun?

Male voice: Yes.

Application of the personal pronoun?

The fetus applies every personal pronoun to itself or to somebody else—I say the “fetus,” I mean the human being who has received the command as a fetus—applies the personal pronoun rather rationally. That “rationally” is very much in quotes. He will mostly favor “it,” prenatal, or “I.” However, “you” is also received. The human being doesn’t receive plural, doesn’t consider one a “they” that I know of. But here’s something interesting about that—goes off into demon circuits.

The demon circuit works out on a “you,” basically. So the person says, “You’re going to listen to me talk. You’re going to listen to me all the way through. You don’t know what you’re doing, I have to tell you everything that you do. You’re going to follow my orders from here on out. Now, goddamn you, sit there and listen. Right there.” There’s a demon circuit in its inception. It sets up a circuit which is outside the immediate valence the person is occupying, and this causes such things as stream of consciousness. It causes actual voices to impinge themselves upon “I”. But here is “you” being set up as a separate “I.” And what you’ve done in that person is to set up an “I” which then dictates to the person. “I” is applied to self, “you” can get in there as a demon circuit applying to “I,” “it” is applied to the self, “you” will sometimes apply to self But mostly we will get a situation whereby “You are no good” — this sets up a little demon circuit all by itself—“You are no good. I hate you.” Now we’re into the bracket of use. How is this used by the aberree? “You are no good”—the demon circuit says this to the aberree. So he believes inside himself— “believes” is in quotes—that he is no good. But as long as he can thrust this out and rechannel it and redirect it so that it applies to other people than himself, he does not have to feel it himself. [gap] . . . he has this selected target. It goes toward himself unless he can give it to somebody else. This thing is sort of floating there and it has to be given to somebody. And the dramatization will lead you to “You are no good. I hate you.” So, if the person goes around saying to other people what’s been said to him and if he is forced to stop believing that other people are no good and that he hates them, if a great deal of force, not persuasion but just plain force, is exerted against him by somebody—he says, “You are no good.” “Well, to hell with you! I’m going to break your neck! You can’t talk to me like that!” The person’s, you know, his abreaction is broken and then it’s pushed back into the category of “You are no good” as a demon circuit. And that means “I.” So now this person is broken down to the point where he has to believe that he is no good. And you can break back all of these abreactions to a point where a person is starting to believe everything himself. In other words, the exterior world has blunted back everything that he could do as an “I” so that now he is the exterior world and the interior world and they’re all interior. So that what’s going on in his demon circuits is a rather terrific row. “You are no good.” “No, I’m not—I’m all right. I do get along with people.” “Oh, the hell you do.” And various go-rounds, carrying conversations on inside the head and arguing with each other.

One gentleman I knew had a demon circuit which said, “Now, this is what you’re supposed to say. Now, you say this,” and the demon circuit was set right up and it had cut out a piece of the analyzer. So it was a thinking circuit and it said, “Now, the best thing to say to this fellow is, ‘Oh, you nincompoop, shut up.’” Well, that’s not an engram, that’s just a thought-up attitude which is said by the demon circuit to “I” “I” listens to the demon circuit and then retranslates, so that nearly everything this person is saying is dictated to him by this part of the analyzer So he says “Shut up,” so the demon comes up here and says, “Now tell him to scram, get the hell out of here.” Modern slang. All right, so the fellow says, “Scram, get the hell out of here.” And the demon circuit says, “You know, I don’t like guys that wear pink neckties. You know, I don’t like guys that wear pink neckties.” Well, this is thought. When he thinks something over carefully—the demon circuit which says, “You’ve got to think these things over carefully. You’re really pretty stupid, and you’re going to listen to me.” So he gets this stream of consciousness. “I wonder what I’m going to do today.” And this stream of consciousness will cut in and say, “Well, things aren’t running too well. We don’t quite know about this. It might be a good idea, however, to go down to the garage and get the tires changed on the car.” Mind you, these computations are going through in milliseconds and the demon circuit has to impede the answers on the thing and carry it forth into a vocalization. So he says, “I don’t quite know, now, but I think it would be a good idea to . . .” See, you have to be careful, you know? You want to be sure of what you’re doing. And people go around—this is so common that the whole society has it in its head that it must vocalize and that is stream of consciousness and that is accurate thinking, whereas that is actually the most inaccurate thinking a person could do.

This one case of which I’m speaking had a second circuit which was vocal. It spoke in a real voice. He heard these voices completely. A lot of people merely get the impression. In this case he was getting the sonic on it. The whole circuit had set up a sonic. So this other person—the other valence there would sit on the other side of “I” and it’d say, “Well, I don’t know, going down to the garage and getting the car’s tires changed—it’s awfully hot today and Christ, you know, you’re liable to make so many mistakes. You can’t really be sure whether they’d put the right tires on your car or not. They might give you some old second-rate tires, you know, just junk. I don’t know whether you ought to do that or not. I don’t think you’re up to it.” And this other voice says, “Well, the best thing to do is to really get the tires changed because they’re going to wear through.” And this voice on the other side says, “All right.” Now, this person had a third circuit, also sonic. And these voices had pitches. This third circuit was a “Nyeah-nyeah” circuit. So the fellow would finally, between these two other conversations, make up his mind that he was going down to the garage and have the car’s tires changed. “Nyeah, I know you’re going to make a mistake anyhow. Nyeah! Sure, sure, you’re going down there. You’re probably going to get charged all over the place. Nyeah.” So he would then—this had another function, this circuit did. So he would say to somebody, “How do you know what the cost of these things is?” And this little subcircuit would say, “Nyeah. How do you know what the cost of. . . ?” And everything he said when he was conversing with somebody on the subject of commerce, to any degree, would get “Nyeah!” And every word he uttered would get echoed by this. And this fellow said—I was talking to him about demon circuits—he was looking at me rather intently and he said, “Why, don’t these things exist in everybody?” I said, “No, normally it’s a single circuit that’s at work, nonsonic, whereby one is thinking. Vocal think.” Now, the knocking out of a demon circuit is very necessary to our business. We speak of these commands. The command confirms the psychosomatic illness, it confirms many things. But it will create, all by its lonesome, a demon circuit. That is a part of the analytical mind which has been absorbed into a valence. Then the valence becomes, you might say, a speaking entity within the person. The speech may be just impressions. But they are computed impressions.

There’s—by running a circuit which would be about as efficient as to run a telephone between myself and you, run the line to San Francisco, then send it down to Mexico City, then radio it over to Paris, and then get a teletype sitting right there and have the teletype come out with what I’m saying to you. And then put a censor in San Francisco who edits all the copy and takes out everything there that is antipathetic to the engram, and put another one in Mexico City who puts in a lot of stuff that wasn’t in the original communication. Then the fellow over in Paris translates it all into French so that a German can read it and then retranslates it back into English again with a lot of loss of phrases, words, everything. Then it comes back over here and the teletype sitting in front of you is broken, so that it only gets out every third word. It will give you some idea of the accuracy of communication and computation of one of these demon circuits.

Computations are made in terms of milliseconds. They’re so swift that words can’t track with them. It’s impossible to sum up one conclusion. The mind quite commonly handles a hundred variables, and actually posits for each one a value, does a computation. Computation on. “Is it going to rain next Wednesday?”—and you’ll start to look at the problem “Is it going to rain next Wednesday?” and you will find that there are all sorts of variables entered into the problem and the fellow thinking it over will get some kind of an answer. We are fortunately not running on an arithmetical computer which can only give an answer when there is a precision answer available. But it gives lots of unprecise answers, which are still usable answers. And that the answers are unprecise means that the question which is being asked is unprecise.

All this, by the way, comes under the heading of Dianometry, which is how you most efficiently feed and receive data from the computer. One doesn’t much interfere with the action of the computer itself, Male voice: Are the computer and the analyzer . . . ?

Yeah, I’m speaking now of the analyzer as the whole computer. You could postulate that “I” was a series of monitor units which are aware of being aware, and that these have the task of feeding the computer and taking the data back from the computer—in the meantime operating a similar computation to keep tally on the data being computed. It’s not arithmetical mathematics one needs here, in order to feed this computer. Now, if we were to take the computer and impinge—well, throw into it vocalizations, throw into it stream of consciousness, all kinds of things, this computer is so able that it can still function despite all the accessories that are hung upon it.

Here’s the computer running off a problem. You’ve fed it the problem “I’d like to go to Maine and hunt a moose,” You don’t intend to go to Maine and hunt a moose at all. But “I’d like to,” Nothing much happening, a fellow has seen a picture about something about Maine and he—”Gee, that would be fine,” We could actually sit back and without thinking about it, go enjoy moose hunting. But no, we have to interfere with that. No, that has to be rigged up because a fellow shouldn’t daydream, and imagination is pretty bad and engrams, engrams, engrams. And instead of being able to sit back and smell the north woods—he merely imagines the smell of the north woods, perhaps—he’s never been there, but he can dub in some sort of a good odor for it. And see a moose and listen to a moose call. Now, he may dub in for the moose call a duck quack because he’s never heard a moose, but it’s a satisfactory moose call as far as he’s concerned. And he doesn’t push effort at the computer to force it to do something.

The second you start pushing effort toward thought, anyway, the computation becomes deranged. The thought process is a pretty automatic proposition. “I” stimulates the computer; it gets out the computation; that’s the smooth way of running this computer. But if one did that and went to Maine to hunt the moose and so on, he could actually sit back and he would get an automatic, three-dimensional color video with smell and tactile of hunting moose. He wouldn’t have to figure how, the way we think of figuring it out.

Male voice: That’s optimum?

Yeah, that’s optimum.

He wouldn’t have to figure out, “Well, let’s see, mooses are pretty big animals.” No! The moose would be a big animal. And if the fellow had never seen a picture of a moose he might put an elephant in its place and call it a moose, or he might dream up something that was a God-knows-what, but it would be a satisfactory moose to him and he would have a good time hunting it. But it would all go into the computer and it would come back out and he would have the picture. So that the “I” attention units are not distracted by observing the computation.

It so happens that the monitors of “I” by an analogue here could be postulated as able to inspect circuits. They could inspect any circuit. Let’s say we have a thousand units of “I,” and we have a lot of engrams influencing the analytical mind, and we have a large number of circuits which have compartmented off pieces of the analytical mind and are using them just as though a monitor unit has flown in from somebody else’s mind and is busy at work there. Actually that isn’t what’s happened but it is a good analogy. These are parasitic circuits. [gap] A guy could be said to go in and look at the loop of the computation. This detracts from “I” one unit of awareness. Now, we have another computation going on over here that has to do with whether or not we are going to get paid next Saturday. Well, we watch that computation with another unit of “I.” And in view of the fact that we may have several problems going on simultaneously, we have to keep taking away from “I” attention units and putting them in there to inspect the circuits. And we inspect more circuits and more circuits and more circuits. It’s like asking the centipede how he walks. The centipede starts to worry about how he walks and he starts inspecting these circuits. And the more circuits he inspects, the less attention he has. When the computer is running smoothly, all of his attention units are directed toward his present reality or his past reality or the future reality which he is busy mastering.

Male voice: The problem at hand.

Yes. He can go on thinking up some wonderful scheme to make a million dollars but he’s thought of this three or four days before and he thought, “Gee, that’s a nice idea” and he’s played with it for a while. That is to say, it’s pleasant to think about this thing. Now he’s got a lot of attention units of “I” working on this problem. He is working it, you might say, up here on the front board. He’s adding it up one way or the other and he’s getting data from other boards and so on. Now all of a sudden he says, “Ah well, that will work itself out, I’ll get an answer to that somehow or other,” and it goes knck, back into a closed loop circuit. That circuit is not now inspected. This answer, an answer to this effect, that it can be done, that it can’t be done, how it should be done, the good idea that lies at the base of it, that answer will come out in due time at the moment he needs it. Or he could compute it right now if he wanted to or there was a big hurry on it. He can give time priority over these things. He does all of this without thinking about it. So it goes back to this closed loop, uninspected. And there is where the computation is done in the mind. That’s the only computation that’s worth a damn. The rest of it with the demon circuits is all gingerbread and rococo. A person will sit around and laboriously think. Well, when a person has to laboriously think about anything it means they’ve got so much analytical shutdown that there’s no automatic computation going on.

They have this beautiful computer which works automatically. Now you start to subdivide it, shut parts of it down and start to do everything on a supervised basis. The attention units go away from “I,” one becomes less and less attentive to reality, less and less watching or enjoying. [gap] You can set up a prediction circuit in this computer. I set up one—I’m just completing a series on this, which has cost the Foundation to date $440 and a little change. And I had to call a halt on it because it was getting expensive. That’s a very interesting thing—to set up a prediction and then to do a conscious computation. Let me be very precise about this. It was set up on the basis of a black and white square. Just two little tabs were put on it. If the answer was right after a swift glance over the situation, the white square would flash. If the answer was wrong after a very cursory glance (obviously with practically no data), the thing would flash black.

Now, one did a conscious computation looking at all the factors involved. That is, did a computation on the front board, saying what the thing was going to do, what it wasn’t going to do, and noted whether or not the prediction circuit said it was right or wrong, but didn’t permit that to influence the conscious computation of it. The conscious computation on this thing has the interesting characteristic of being almost 80 percent wrong. And the others have the rather—I wouldn’t call it glory or anything—but the strange faculty there is that those computations were right. Now, they’ll predict almost anything within reason. They’re predicting futures. So I set this thing up and in bucking it—doing a conscious computation on it, and saying, well, it better go out this way and it better go out that way—and the board would flash. I’d better give some attention to this? And it would say yes. I wouldn’t give any attention to it because the conscious computation on it said that was being perfectly legally done. I had no way— (quote) “no way” of knowing whether or not the future was going to work out as this flash system predicted. But the future has a habit of working out in a very high percentage what this flash circuit says. It’s a closed loop circuit with its only telltale—we’re just speaking in analogy—its only telltale is just this black and white. Black and white. I could set it up in red and green too, it would be even prettier.

The way it is working, evidently, is it takes a sample of a problem. It doesn’t take a typical problem to solve but it takes a sample of the problem. “Is Gracie Legs going to win at Pimlico today?” Well, not being at Pimlico, this puts it into the realm of metaphysics whether or not that black-white flash is going to pretty much do it. But let’s go down and stand in the grandstand and listen to people and look at the horses led out before one begins to make such a thing and the prediction starts to go up. One is observing a hell of a lot of data (quote) unconsciously (unquote). In other words, he isn’t inspecting the observations as they come in; they’re going straight into the computer and by past data, conditions of track, the thisa, the thata and so on, all this stuff is absorbed. And it’s apparently just a clean, clear prediction and that’s all. Out of the blue. This is pretty good. It works itself out pretty well [gap] There is a rather complex mathematics of prediction. Actuarial mathematics. The brain, whether it’s running by Boolean algebra or not, I’m not—I certainly wouldn’t be didactic on the subject. But it can evidently handle prediction rather well. Quite in addition to this there is the faint possibility of clairvoyance and clairaudience. These are all uninvestigated. Parapsychology is wide open as a field. There may enter into this thing a radiolike telepathy as an actual perception. A lot of things can add into it that we needn’t say exist, but we have no good evidence to say they don’t exist.

In short, the brain, untended as a computer, will roll out all manner of problems. And by going in and saying, “Now, let me see, we have four cogwheels here, and this little gimmick is supposed to light up a brilliant purple. Now, let me see. I wonder if this tape is all right here. I wonder what this tape is for, anyhow. Never found out—well, just tear it off. Couldn’t mean anything particularly.” In other words, we can stir inside the computer and worry about the computing mechanism, worry about whether or not it’s going to do the job it is supposed to do, get all snarled up with what somebody else has said it should do or should not do, and in short wind up inspecting circuits that won’t work when they’re inspected. In such a wise, if you set up “I” on an uninspected circuit basis, you get along further.

Well, something very interesting happens when you tell a person that he’s wrong. The monitor units of “I” (the inspection units, you might say) have the datum that this whole thing is liable to be wrong. So it sets up . . . Being wrong is being dead. The ultimate in being wrong is being stiff and stark, so we don’t want to be wrong. So let’s start inspecting circuits. And we start inspecting circuits and we inspect more circuits and more circuits and we send off unit after unit to inspect more and more circuits and then inspection units that go off and inspect the inspection units. And the reason for this, of course, is the existence of demon circuits. The computer is getting all compartmented by engrams taking over parasitic circuits. And the person is being convinced continually, let us say, that he is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. His attention units are being thrown inside his head into a turmoil. They finally stop inspecting entirely. They won’t inspect anymore. They are just idle, all out of alignment, they don’t know what to look at. They have run the computation through 5,622 times and they still get the first answer, but that answer, according to everyone, was wrong. So of course the answer itself, as far as the computer is concerned, was completely right But in view of the fact that the computer could be influenced by engrams, the engram as a stet datum in the computation could throw out the whole answer. But as far as the brain’s computation is concerned, the monitor not being aware of the engram, the computation is right; yet it’s wrong, but it’s right. And in such a way most normal minds are doing an awful lot of inspection of inspection, of “It can be right but it’s wrong, now let’s set up an auxiliary circuit over here on the side, let’s set up a whole demon circuit of our own over here and see whether or not we can’t check and counterbalance the solution. Now let’s test it all by something or other. Oh hell, Grandpa was always right. Let’s use the way he looked at things. Sure. Then Grandpa dies, so he couldn’t have been right! Because that’s as wrong as you can get! So let’s close off that valence.” Oh, boy.

It’s a tangled picture. None of this, however, is the part of the mind which is doing the real thinking, the real business. That’s how it’s done.

Male voice: Psychoanalysts set up—they try to get the patient to look at life the way they see it. That is exactly the mechanism of the psychoanalyst . . .

Oh, yeah, you could set up demon circuits . . .

Male voice: . . . totally designed the demon circuit to look at life the way he looks at it [gap] . . .the engram bank of an ally who is no longer in contact?

Who has left?

Male voice: Who has left.

Well, his leaving has got a charge on it. This means he’s no longer in proximity and if there was a good—you see, all this has to have painful, physically painful engrams under it. So you’ve got a tied-up circuit anyway; his departure from the area, where he serves as a good thing to mimic and a protector, contains charge.

It’s an interesting thing that the computer is so vast and so complex that it can be subdivided, be impinged upon by engrams, and new circuits laid down by itself to counter other circuits which it’s laid down— that one still has any room with which to think. But one does, and that room gets bigger and bigger and more and more circuits become available and it gets up to a point finally where you’re running on closed loop circuits without any of this. But what you do, you ask for results and you get them, so that there’s no stress or strain. But it’s a lot of fun asking for the results, and it’s a lot of fun trying to figure out the proper question to ask to get the proper result. That is conscious level thinking. It’s feeding the computer, not solving the problem. [gap] Well, if one just went ahead and got rid of his painful emotion, he would evidently take some of the charge. But the demon circuits seem to be confirmed whenever a lot of painful emotion comes into being. They almost, you might say, grab pieces of life off the individual. That’s a rather esoteric thing, but they seem to do that. Grandpa is dead but Grandpa is still alive because here is this circuit, and this circuit is Grandpa. And that circuit doesn’t come into highly active and aberrative being unless Grandpa’s departure or death throws enough painful emotion in there to set up a circuit. [gap] I was thinking of engineers. Here’s an engineer who does so-and-so and he thinks up things that are not immediately restimulative, that are not part of his engramic background and he has what is left of the computer running full out.

Male voice: Now, an engineer who has been trained in the mathematics of calculating a number of these things, were he cleared, how far could he use his own computing machine instead of paper and pencil mathematics?

Well, I haven’t made enough investigation of that to give any precise answer. I can tell you this, that in the field of navigation, which is an allied mathematical field, the computer will run using the data of—you know, on an educational basis—arithmetic and so on. These things are learned. The computer will evidently turn on its own mathematical stream and once the person has done the problem by rote, and by the books, so on, the computer will then check it and tell him how right he is. And a navigator, by the way, who can’t do this is a very bad navigator.

Male voice: I’ve had some dealings in that I have on two occasions computed problems that I didn’t know the math of to work it out on paper—I didn’t—I’m not that good a mathematician. Then having someone else check it on paper later, over two or three hours of work, has checked out almost exactly what I had computed in a few seconds.

Second male voice: Yeah, well, I’ve gone into math problems myself where I do the thing on paper and I get an answer and I take one look at it, no, that’s not right I mean, just in a flash like that I know it’s not right, so I go back and do it again and, okay, it comes out roughly what I thought it was the first time.

Mm-hm.

Male voice: To give you some illustration of just how good even a fairly aberrated person can be. You have some people that actually rent their services out as computing machines. They will do flash mechanical integrat—, numerical integration, well, maybe they take notes with a paper and pencil but they’re just jotting down. I mean, they don’t work the problem out that way, they just essentially solve the problem in their heads. And they can do it One guy I remember in particular, he finally lost his entire mathematical ability and wasn’t even able to add two and two together. But he was pretty well . . .

Somebody asked him how to walk.

Male voice: Yeah, well, something like that happened.

You could put it back together again for him.

Male voice: He was probably pretty well aberrated.

Yeah.

Male voice: He was able to do an awful lot, so you can imagine how he would be if he then really keyed out and straightened out.

Well, what I’m trying to bring up here is that we are not constructing from raw materials a computer, in Dianetics. We are trying to take the gadgets away from the computer, or off it, which have inhibited its operation. So when one is dealing with demon circuits, the wrong approach is to tell a person that it is a demon circuit and the right approach is just simply to knock the demon circuit out.

Now, a demon circuit which is thinking, which has part of the analyzer absorbed, is a difficult thing to locate. This is a real lie factory, let us say. Or let’s consider that we have a real lie factory going. A lie factory which will manufacture engrams, which will do all sorts of things. It won’t manufacture somatics, but it will sometimes manufacture muscular jumps on a basis of mimicry. But you could tell pretty rapidly whether or not you were getting material out of this case. The best test is, is the person changing his aspect in existence. That’s the final test. That is to say, if he has before this time had a certain aberrated attitude toward something or other and so-and-so and that diminishes or disappears, we have an exterior check there. Another one, is he becoming more self-determined as we run these things out? That’s a good one. That, by the way, I use to determine whether or not a man is released—no manifestation of transference either way. [gap] Any time if part of the circuit is—part of the brain or mind is absorbed by a parasitic circuit, it’s not going to do as good a job as the auditor can do.

Male voice: What about when a person is running an engram and he has one set of words one time and then he changes them slightly?

A person running an engram normally will change them, but a person who is running a lie factory engram won’t change them. Furthermore he is getting no diminishment of the somatic unless it’s—he is, in short, very easy to detect. You actually would have to run one of these people (they are very rare) to appreciate what this amounts to. It’s easy to detect. I’m just showing you some of the ways that it is detected.

Now, one of the things that a person will do on this lie factory proposition—we’ll just speak of a lie factory—is to run an engram in the fashion that—let’s say the engram runs, “I am willing to go with you but I’m not going to take any more of it. Stop it now, go away.” All right, we’re running this engram and the fellow runs it through and he doesn’t bounce on “go away.” We know the thing should have been aberrative, but there is no slightest bounce on “go away.” And he’ll run it through just like that, word for word.

An engram, running, normally has phrases drop out of it and new phrases appear in it. So in the first run of the thing, that might have been the engram there as I stated it. Now the words “You’re no good anyway” might suddenly appear right in the middle of it. That was the deepest point of unconsciousness, the words were deeply buried. Now the thing will get up to a point where the tail of it may start to drop off, and finally “You’re no good anyway” stands there as all the engram that’s left, and then we knock that out. And that is rather normal behavior for an engram.

Male voice: That is in an erasure rather than in a reduction?

No, you’ll find that even in a reduction, new words, new phrases will appear and old phrases will become so uninteresting to the person that he won’t say them.

He may keep right on saying them, but if you don’t find new material in an engram on the third, fourth run, something like that, somebody is doing it by rote. If it doesn’t change any, or if he can’t quote it as he did before, those are all symptoms of a lie factory.

Male voice: Well, in this bouncer—if the patient is pretty far advanced in therapy, the bouncers don’t have as much effect on him as they did in the early part of therapy That’s right. You can get well along in therapy and a person will hit bouncers and won’t bounce. But you couldn’t have gotten that far in therapy had you had a lie factory around.

Second male voice: I was going to ask a question on the same level as that, that some people interpret their engrams commands more literally than others do.

Mm-hm. The material was more aberrative upon them.

Second male voice: Some people can hit a bouncer and they really bounce. And other people don’t bounce anywhere near as far.

That’s right. This depends on who is speaking the command and what valence the patient is normally in. Other factors enter into this. You can get an example of Papa says, “Now, keep your mouth shut. Shut up.” And Mama says, “I can’t say anything around you.” So “Keep your mouth shut. Shut up.” The person will just run this, moving his mouth, and then all of a sudden is unable to open his mouth and he suddenly starts talking without opening his mouth! Errrh! Errrh! [gap] Mamas words are aberrative. Papa’s words aren’t. In working lots of cases, the aberrative person won’t show up again. Oh, they’re perfectly willing to run Papa. Oh, they’ll run Papa all over the place. Or, vice versa, they’ll run Mama all over the place. If Papa appears on the scene, you get chopped up dialogue. “Hello, honey, I’ve been very busy today.” “Oh, that’s too bad.” And they’ll run this as an engram. It’s got Papa’s dialogue missing. In such a way the auditor should develop dialogue sense.

If someone says, “How are you feeling?” it would be—if there’s no reply to “How are you feeling?” then somebody either didn’t hear the statement, at which moment it would be repeated, probably, or the other would be in a sullen mood with no answer, which would be followed by, “Well, why don’t you talk to me?” something of the sort. Or “How are you feeling?” “I’m feeling pretty sick.” “Oh, that’s too bad, honey, I’ll get dinner for you.” “Oh, would you? That’s so good.” That would be the engram. But if Papa is practically nonaberrative you will find him just in patches of conversation. The person is definitely out of valence when that happens, by the way.

Male voice: Is he in the valence of the person who is missing or the person he’s getting?

He would be in the valence of the person he is getting. You can reconcile this any way you wish. He hears the person he is, so to speak, but he isn’t going to get any sonic on the person he is, that I know about. If he does, he’s going to run a circuit in there so he can get it “dubified.” But you’ll find in case after case that you start clearing up, let us say, cough chains. You can find coughs, coughs, coughs, coughs, coughs, because what Mama says is not very aberrative. And so there will be a cough and then “Excuse me” and there will be a cough, “I don’t feel good,” there’ll be another cough. And you can just keep running out these coughs and running out these coughs until you get a notion after a while that there is probably somebody else present sometime. And you go back to the first cough. That’s flattened, but immediately succeeding “Excuse me” was “I hope you feel a lot better, honey”— Grandma. But she has been missing out of this thing, all the way up and down. Well, she is the strongest ally, let us say, in the whole bank. Or Grandpa may be present in the prenatal area, and he’s missing. So big holes are being left in it and the most aberrative material is the most occluded In consequence the person runs coughs, coughs, coughs, he runs all sorts of attempted abortions, he runs all kinds of things and he is still not changing his manifestation toward life at all He’s still using the same clichés and so on. You can count on the fact that you have missed the ally in the prenatal bank.

Male voice: If he’s in his own valence he’s more likely to pick up the whole thing Yes, hell pick up the whole thing if he’s in his own valence.

Second male voice: Can you rely on a flash answer there, Ron, or . . .

Flash answers are quite mysterious in a number of ways. The flash answer can come through in a number of ways. And if you have a good, solid demon circuit running and you know you’re bucking a demon circuit, the flash answer can be pretty distorted, but the flash answer is still usable. Don’t give full credence to any flash answer. It probably wouldn’t be right more than 60, 70 percent of the time. That is, when you ask for age, don’t count on it absolutely. Use it as an indicator. It is better than no answer. Always better than no answer.

By the way, when you get an absolute blank, when you get a person who consistently and continually says, “It’s blank, there’s nothing there,” oh man, that’s a real indicator. You’re bucking against a case which has an awful lot of material in it which is extremely aberrative. If you ask a person to dream—and by the way, you can use dreams in two ways. If you ask this person to dream and you get no dream, that’s better than a dream. Although it doesn’t have any specific information in it, it says this subject is absolutely verboten. Now, how do we find what makes it verboten? We just go ahead and punch around and we’ll eventually, by questioning, cross-questioning, by getting more material, by getting flash phrases, sooner or later crack the incidents.

What I’m trying to cover here is the aspect of demon circuits. The flash answer comes forward on a circuit of its own, or it comes via a demon circuit. And you can get three flash answers on some specific question which will be three different answers in some cases. There you are working through three demon circuits, or maybe two demon circuits and the right circuit. But you’re going to get material and you shouldn’t place absolute reliance on this material by a long ways, but it is useful material. You use the flash answer for age and the age is sometimes wrong. You use the flash answer on a person, “How many times does this engram appear before in the bank?” And he said, “This is the first time,” you take the preclear’s answer, and then you watch the behavior of the engram. If that engram doesn’t flatten in any of its phrases and so on, you can be pretty sure that this is much later than the first time. After you’ve done it for a little while, you may send him back earlier and all of a sudden he runs another engram and you say, “How many times is this in the bank before this?” And he says, “Twelve.” Or he may keep saying “two” to everything. There are situations where somebody’s saying—in the engram bank— saying, “Say ‘two.’” All right, so he says, “Two.” You ask him, “How old are you?” “Two.” “How many engrams before this?” “Two.” “How far is it to the moon?” “Two-uh-what?” You see? In other words you’re just getting an engram response.

Yes?

Male voice: In the “I don’t know’ case, the case that’s salted down with “I don’t know’ it sometimes seems to be the computation—if they are asked any question they have to say “I don’t know” first Sometimes if you ask them the flash answer twice, you can get it with the second asking Another thing just in passing the “I don’t know” case will sometimes give you an answer when you make a positive statement If they are asked a question they have to say, “I don’t know’ but if they are told to do something then they can do it. You say, “Give me the next phrase,” they will give it to you. You say, “What is the next phrase?” “I don’t know.” Second male voice: How do you go about getting the engram that will resolve the case, if it’s tied up in . . . ?

Well, you just tell the file clerk “Let’s have the engram which is holding up the case” or “Let’s have the engram which is making things difficult around here” or “What’s the engram that it requires in order to enter this chain?” and you’ll get it. But let me take up demon circuits more specifically here rather than just skittering around on the ground. A demon circuit is laid in by a command that has to do with speech and answers. It is laid in forcefully and with pain. You can locate the source of all demon circuits very simply. You—by direct memory, if possible—you find out which parent wanted to be the boss or wanted to be this and that. And you’ll find out that Mama also wanted to be the boss as far as the kid was concerned. Now we have Papa and Mama. Or we may find out that a grandparent—not an ally, but he was the boss. And we will find all manner of demon circuits.

Demon circuits are normally antipathetic, oddly enough. They are seldom sympathy circuits. They are accusative circuits and didactic circuits. Now, you get these by scouting down the person who is most likely to have put in the circuit, get the most likely moment for it to have been put in, find some sort of an injury which might associate itself with such answers and you may find yourself slamming the patient right into the middle of the demon circuit. This is one place where he very normally does not want to go because it’s talking back at him and you are really trying to address part of the computer which is sort of off the track.

You could actually get a person very upset in trying to take away a demon circuit. Because a writer, for instance, may have been writing for some time on a demon circuit. He’s perfectly able to set up his own demon circuit and write like mad. But no point.

Now, you can install demon circuits in a person in this fashion: Hypnotize them and say, “Now, your life is going to be run now for the next ten days by the great god Yahwah. And the great god Yahwah is going to stand alongside of you and give you word for word everything you’re supposed to say, everything you’re supposed to think, everything you’re supposed to do. Now, all you have to do is just call on the great god Yahwah for anything you want to know and he will tell you.” And you leave poor old “I” sitting there with about two and a half grasshopper-power units. You have moved the whole computer sidewise. The whole computer. So the great god Yahwah then stands there and says, “You had better be a good boy.” And so he is a good boy. But if you make the great god Yahwah merely a friendly character, if there is nothing else earlier in the bank which postulates another demon circuit this one could use—you just lay it on top of the other demon circuit—a very friendly circuit, the person isn’t going to pay much attention to it. But let’s make the great god Yahwah tougher than hell. He’s the god of vengeance; if you don’t do what he says, why, oh man, he’ll kill you! And now the person, in consulting him, is acting with a fear reaction. That demon circuit now has altitude. That circuit now has more altitude than the person has himself, but that circuit is his computer.

The circuit will now turn out perfect replies. It will plan, for instance, the exact way to put in fifteen trunks or suitcases into a station wagon so that every one of them will go in and fit very snugly and the whole job will be done with a minimum of effort. In other words, there’s a block puzzle. And all you have to do when you have the great god Yahwah working is: “Now you pick up the tan suitcase, now lay it on its side; no, turn it a little further on its side; now shove it all the way back in. Okay.” The person just works as an automaton under the behest of the command. So he packs the whole thing up and he doesn’t think a thought during the whole packing. And then it’s all packed. And it will be packed perfectly. Or if it can’t be all packed that way, the great god Yahwah will say to him now, “You go get yourself a trailer, hook on the back of this,” “Okay, where do I go to get the trailer?” “Well, you go down to Ninth and Park,” And the guy will drive down to Ninth and Park and there is the trailer place. And he didn’t realize that that trailer place was at Ninth and Park before but, “By God, the great god Yahwah was right!” Of course, he noticed this place time and time again. He never stopped there, it wasn’t in his immediate sphere of observation. But he’s got this gimmick working very gorgeously. It will run his whole life for him. Then it will take over his whole life and then from two and a half grasshopper-power of attention units, now he’s got one and a half grasshopper-power units. And now he’s got a half a grasshopper-power. [gap] I ran into the “I am the big I Am,” That’s Don’s favorite demon circuit, “I am the big I Am, that’s who I am, I’m going to tell you what to do. Yes, I am going to tell you what to do, I am,” Well, that is to be.That is existence itself, and he could very easily skid over into this circuit and be in this circuit.

The proposition of going from one valence to another in a psychotic becomes a very marked, sharp affair, A person can have fifty valences. We talk of ambivalence, I never knew an ambivalent person, I never even knew a quintivalent person. Everyone has lots of compartments in an aberrated state. In a relatively unaberrated state, the compartments are cut down so it’s wide open, unannounced, uninspected circuits, Male voice: From the few words available with the demon circuit, you should have the engram which has the command which set up the demon circuit?

Okay, I agree with your impatience on that. You scout for the most likely planter of the demon circuit, who would be the most aberrative person who was still more or less antagonistic on the thing, and you’ll find the demon circuit. But for heaven’s sakes, knock those things out very early in the case. They could really get in your hair, [gap] I never found a positive suggestion capable of doing more than reinforcing an engram. I never found an engram doing anything more than aberrating. But I have set up in people who were Releases, circuits which would run out other circuits and not found this workable. In other words, we set up circuit A to run the engrams out of the engram bank, and the person goes to sleep at night and you’ll find this poor guy is doing nothing but going around all the time running engrams. They’re going through a stream of consciousness continually. But in view of the fact that you’ve now fixed it up so that everything gets stirred up and nothing gets deintensified, we soon have a mess, very definitely.

Male voice: A question referring to an earlier discussion. Can you actually erase, wash out, basic material before getting basic-basic?

Mm-hm. Oh, sure. The first few engrams—on their own chains—are erasable. But I want you to be very cognizant of this demon circuit setup, and as it relates to the flash answer and as it may louse a person up, and about all I can do is to ask you to be on the qui vive for them, you’ll see some of them working—you may be able to inspect some of them in your own heads, as far as that’s concerned right now—and you speculate on the source of that circuit and you can deintensify it that way.

Male voice: Now, we ran into one the other day here—Saturday night, somebody mentioned here his own demon circuit He had complete recall, verbatim recall of his conversations but it was in a monotone voice when he got it back.

You’ll find that that verbatim recall has probably had the hell edited out of it, by the way. This is what—its not necessarily true, it’s a possibility—this is what Freud ran into when he had to postulate that wild one about a censor. There are censors all through the mind, because parents are rather censorious and I expect his were particularly.

I imagine he had a couple of demon circuits running and one of them was talking about sex. We can read the product of that demon circuit in any book on the subject. It was a demon circuit. And he figured out the censor was something you couldn’t get by, you couldn’t get past, and whatever that lay behind the censor, that was something, the censor was something that translated . . . Wild. I can just hear his mother saying, “Now, if it weren’t for myself and my training of you, you would be a wild little savage and so forth and therefore you have to listen to me. You listen to me. Now I’m going to tell you what to do, you little bastard. (Bap bap bap!) I’m going to tell you what to do. That’s what I’m going to do, yes sir! Now, you try to get past me with that stuff and you’re really going to get in trouble. Now, I’m going to tell you what to do because you’re actually a nasty, dirty, primitive little savage. But I’m going to make you into a civilized human being and I’m perfectly nice now, goddamn you!” The stuff reads like it’s on a sudden pounce-rage basis. Mr. Demon Circuit was sitting there and he couldn’t get past it. You couldn’t get behind it. You weren’t going to get by because of this. And it was a censor, but in such a wise all of us have censors. All the censor manages to do is bring up all the savage and barbaric behavior, keep it in the engrams and then repress it off into some other corner, so to speak. And then tell the person continually he’s liable to do this unless this happens, and it’s suppressed back there and it’s a continual state of foment and unrest. That, unfortunately for the tenets of Mr. Freud, had nothing whatsoever to do with the civilizing process which has been going on in our race for the last fifty thousand years.

The person who is in that state is in a state of anxiety. He is afraid he is going to do these things. But he has something there which represses these things from happening. He believes that something or other is his basic nature, that he is no good, that he has to put on some sort of a front, or he believes he is liable to break out with sudden irrational acts and that he is just being barely restrained from doing these things. And you can see Mama training him or Papa training him or some relative or even a sergeant in the army. And a person’s whole pattern, then, is devoted to the engram trying to move out into action, the demon circuit sitting there telling him that it is repressing the engram. It isn’t, by the way—the engram is repressing itself. And you get this very confused, crazy picture. People will object to having some of these demon circuits taken away from them on the grounds that if they lost this voice of conscience, they would lose, then, their most rational behavior.

None of this has been terribly specific here that I’ve been talking about, but I wanted to apprise you of the condition, one, of the normal person and his stream of consciousness. And make you aware of the fact that such a stream of consciousness connotes a dictatorial attitude by somebody in the engram bank. And two, that when you have succeeded in clearing an individual, that you won’t have any of these demon circuits left in the mind. His mind runs quietly. There isn’t a lot of chatter. For instance, I’m not setting myself up as any example, but I can sit here and by putting up a demon circuit over here—I’ll set up a censorious demon circuit over here. “All right. You shouldn’t talk to these boys that way, because they have rather tender minds. Some of them are extremely apt to have like conditions operating in their own brains. It will unsettle them about flash replies.” Okay Now just break the circuit down. That’s an audio circuit. Now, that is a little bit garbagy and so forth, but it’s just a critical circuit you set up.

All right, we set up another demon circuit over here and . . . Yeah, we’ll set up a—hm. Gee, there’s tons of those to be set up. The self-critical argumentation about taking a wrong course. “You should be doing something else.” You set up the “I am” here that is going to tell you what proper course to take, and where to go and what to do about it. You just lift this stuff, set it up, and float. You set it up so as—not to be right or anything but just to be a critical “I am.” Says, “You shouldn’t be fooling around with that stuff about mind. After all, you’re a great artist. There are things which you should do which you should pay more attention to than this. There’s reams and reams of papers been written on the subject of the mind, and of course you don’t know anything about it.” “Time after time I have told you that you are wasting your time. Being a great writer is enormously advantageous over doing what you are doing at the present time because then you go down to posterity, particularly in the field of poetry.” You set up a vocalizing circuit. You can set up a vocalizing circuit on almost anything. You don’t have to set it up so you’re doing a relay. The second you set it up so that it does a relay to you, you lose some of it. Because after all you’re only setting up maybe one little loop, which is not doing very much observation.

Now, to do a political speech on the subject of Dianetics, and we could set up a demon circuit which will then begin to do a political speech on the subject of Dianetics and which would then . . . You just set up a microphone speaker system so that “I” merely has to repeat what is said with no effort. “You people who are sitting here little realize that tomorrow will be a strangely changed existence” and so forth. “In our great land the honesty of the politician has long been in question.” Ahem. You can say that again. We’ll knock that one out. Well, the only thing I’m trying to get across here is that these things are all part of the analytical mind and all part of its function. Whether they’re good or bad doesn’t matter. You can set them up just on a jackleg basis of this thing is going to do this now or this thing is going to do that. Self-control, for instance, as an engram is very bad because it inhibits a person’s ability to control himself “You’ve got to control yourself” imposes some sort of a circuit as an engram. And the person then doesn’t control himself, he merely makes the effort.

None of these engramic things are really successful efforts. You can set up demon circuits, critical circuits, analytical circuits, you can set up—it requires a little more care and a little less levity if you want to set up something like a mathematical circuit. So that you sit there and you’re going to add up a set of books or something of the sort. You set the mathematical circuit up and it just goes on and adds and subtracts and puts the proper columns in the proper ledger and so on, and you can just sit there. But there’s no reason why the damn thing has to be short-circuited through “I.” You can throw it right down into the somatic mind and get the computation by hand. And you can sit there and think about the races at Pimlico and add up a set of books. [gap] You have to know when you’re clearing somebody’s mind more or less what you can expect to find. So in a lot of minds you could expect to find apparently rational conversation which is a straight demon circuit talking, the content of which is not an engram. If a person’s speech appears to be rational, a rather specious logic and so on, and it runs on and you can’t quite put a finger on it, the man seems to be talking sense but there’s holes in it here and there, don’t look for what he’s saying to be engram content. He can sweep on and on and on without uttering a single line out of an engram. But he can be talking 100 percent out of an engram. You’ll see this in some psychotics. And they are the tougher psychotics because they aren’t giving themselves away all the time. Therefore when you see this manifestation you must suspect a demon circuit, and you must realize that it is a specific engram. It is an engram which dictates specifically that the person must do or say what he is told to do or say. And that the deliverer of the engram is somebody in the person’s past, of course. And by an inspection of the person’s past we learn who was most likely to have uttered such a line. And then we can try to trace one of that person s dramatizations which will not be a demon circuit. There we’re getting the thing in its native, raw state. It didn’t set up a demon circuit in this person.

Male voice: And once you reduce one of these commands forming the demon circuit, the demon circuit is more or less knocked out.

It’s not only more or less knocked out, if you have succeeded in contacting the engram which contains that demon circuit,   it collapses and this is a highly valuable gain in therapy because you’ve made more analyzer available. Okay Male voice: I didn’t quite get that, Ron, about the source of the demon circuit. As I understand it, it’s probably a rage command engram originally, and nothing to do with the ally or sympathy, just a command engram with shouting in it, a very angry tone of voice. “You do this! And if you don’t do it then I’m liable to . . .” Is that correct?

Yes. Now, we find another condition here of the man merely reacting to a command, a sympathy command. That is not a demon circuit, but he is obeying. That is just a plain engram. “I’ll tell you what to say. Now, you say only what you’re told to say and you’ll be all right. Because anything you say will only make it worse, therefore I’ll tell you what to say.” But “I will tell you what to say” is from a source alongside of him and it sets in a separate valence to him. So he’s not going around telling people what to say, he’s rather pushed down and he is quite obedient. And you tell this fellow, “Now, when the cop comes up here, why, you tell him that there’s just us chickens.” And he’ll say, “There’s just us chickens.” He doesn’t criticize the remark at all. He will deliver it.

Now, you’ll find that in people when you feed them repeater technique. And when you have a person who will merely repeat ad infinitum anything you give them—you give them “ducks have feathers,” “chewing tobacco produces brown juice when the tobacco is masticated,” and you ask them to repeat these things as parts of engrams and they’re very likely to go on and repeat them and repeat them very faithfully and endlessly. You’re running on one of these things, “Now, I’ll tell you what to say.” Normally a fairly sympathetic circuit. This is not the dictatorial circuit. See what I mean? It’s producing a manifestation that anybody who comes along can tell this person what to say, particularly the pseudoally, if the person made the original remark.

Okay. That’s all I want to say about demon circuits. [gap] Flash answer can be carried to an extreme and a flash answer should never be admitted as evidence when the actual engram itself is in sight and what is happening is contrary to the flash answer. A flash answer is valuable. The somatic strip will move with great rapidity from this to that. And it’s quite possible that one can solve a case rather more rapidly by flash answer than by simply plowing away, telling the somatic strip to go here and then to run.

Male voice: Ron, if you keep using the flash answer does it reduce its effectiveness level?

Not particularly. As a matter of fact, its effectiveness should go up, if you are pulling engrams.

Male voice: Well, I mean, if you re not pulling engrams, though.

Oh, you can do this to a person. You can get his flash answer circuit so depended upon that he will start depending upon his flash answers rather than his own thoughts. And in view of the fact that he may be using a demon circuit, you have removed him a step from reality. Nevertheless the flash answer is very usable, within those limitations.

Now, when you have to work a case—I’d like to show you an example of this in a moment—when you have to work at an engram which is very reluctant to come up, in which the person seems to be very securely nailed down, you can go on hammering at this engram. You don’t seem to be getting very much in the way of results, he’s jumping into it and jumping out of it and the somatic is on, and the somatic is off, you should tentatively conclude that this engram is not the thing which is holding up the case. Getting very difficult stuff. But that there is another engram which is more or less a partner to this engram, which is more accessible.

A person should be started at the beginning of an engram and should then be able to proceed to the end of the engram, not jumped all over the engram and jumped to other engrams and back to this engram again and through it. What you want and what will produce the best results in the long run is a steady run through an engram.

Now, the engram which is most available in the case we can postulate to be runnable in a fairly orderly fashion and that it can be deintensified. Now, where that engram rests in a case is a matter for the auditor’s discovery. He can find what that engram is. But he should find it.

Male voice: It could be anywhere from basic-basic to last week.

That’s right. That’s right. And if that engram is deintensified the case will start to resolve. Now, you can get that with the file clerk, you can get it with a flash answer and you can test engrams with flash answers and so on. The best method of showing you about this is just to show you what I mean by it. I’m going to take a patient here and I’m going to run a test on this, to attempt to get the case resolved. The case has been very reluctant in the hands of several people. Material is coming off of the case but the engram which is the apparent holdup in the case is not really the engram which is, otherwise it would have triggered out before.

We can remember always this: that the mind as a whole does not wish to be aberrated. It can apparently desire to be aberrated on a pro-survival sympathy engram basis carrying along in psychosomatic illness and all that sort of thing. It can appear to be. But it’s not willing, really. As a result, it will give you forth, with constant address to the problem, the engrams which are most aberrative. [gap] You must be able to discover what engram it is which you must relieve in order to resolve the case. I have seen a lot of this, and I’m bringing this up for your very close attention, because I have seen, working around here, that many of those auditors present will hammer away at some part of a case which is inaccessible. And I have not seen cases progressing with the speed with which they should progress. Cases should not progress slowly. Go fast. That’s right.

There are people of course who are so wicked, so mean, so recalcitrant, so utterly devoid of all human feeling, principles, conscience and integrity that they will go hundreds and hundreds of hours still protecting and nursing to their bosom some engram which they will not deliver up. (Recording ends abruptly)

[[Category:Lectures]]
[[Category:Lectures 1950]]