View source for Medical Dianetics (500831)

'''Date:''' 31 August 1950

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

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The field of Medical Dianetics covers to a large extent Preventive Dianetics. All a doctor has to do, to work Medical Dianetics, is to keep silence around unconscious people, and emergency cases when they come in should have immediate attention with Dianetics.

First Aid Dianetics should be applied so that shock won’t register. This field is tremendously large and well integrated, but Medical Dianetics also includes, of course, the field of embryology and so on. What you most need to know at this moment is something about embryology.

I hoped to have a medical doctor to teach you this one, but we haven’t, so here we go. So I am not going to give you any terminology, I am going to say this is a “Umph.” Here we have over here—this is the sperm sequence, and this is the ovum.

This is a germ cell in the male. This cell divides several times. It divides several times and each time is an entity.

There’s eight of these. Only the last one becomes a sperm. These are the generations which create a sperm from the central plasm that goes through a central germ cell. These things go through these stages and this is the sperm evolving through eight generations before it becomes a sperm. The sperm differs from other cells to this respect: it has no cytoplasm and cannot simply by dividing, create itself again. This cell just before the sperm—that one could. That one could divide and create something, but it created a sperm. Now the sperm can’t divide. In order for that sperm to go on with the life cycle, it has to contact an ovum.

The ovum is ejected from an ovary and the ovum itself rolls down the fallopian tube. And here it comes, an ovum—right or left side, comes down here. And there are little hairs, or you might say, whatever they are, that pick it up and boost it along—the ovum. The sperm can contact this ovum, and usually does, fairly well up here. And then the hair, these little feelers here, roll it down. It’s already fertilized (it’s been fertilized in the process of rolling down usually), comes down here finally and plants itself somewhere in the womb. Usually the child will sooner or later occupy a position up in that center, but however this may be, that’s only important to you to make you realize that the child, as he hangs in there in the first stages, has his back toward the mouth of the womb, toward the cervix.

Here’s the cervix; the child has his back toward the cervix. So the preponderance of sharp instruments and so forth thrown into the cervix generally enter the child’s back. Now, this is a very rapid review of telling you about all you need to know. Now, with the information I’m giving you, if you want to know more, you can go look up in a medical text or a text on embryology, and you can find many fascinating and wonderful things such as the fact that the sixth week the embryo is one-sixth of an inch long. That just might be of interest, that something one-sixth of an inch could record an engram. But these things are microscopic.

Male voice: How long does it take for the sperm sequence to culminate?

Maybe a week, ten days.

Male voice: We have been told that once conception takes place, the cervix is so completely sealed that nothing can hurt it unless it’s punctured. Therefore I don’t understand . . .

Did you ever hear of a blowout-proof inner tube?

Male voice: Yes.

All right. It happens that the sac has this strange characteristic of being able to puncture and reseal. Now, the evidence is on record as to that, and actually the medical opinion holds that it can be penetrated.

Male voice: It can be penetrated by an instrument but how do hot douches get past the cervix?

Probably, there can be a rupture—it’s not a seal; it’s just a mucus plug. It’s fascinating, the amount of penetration which gets through that sac. It’s full of amniotic fluid and so on but you don’t get much leakage. It’s pretty good. I mean, nature has evidently had this thing poked at so long that it’s invented the blowout-proof inner tube—practically everything it can, in order to safeguard it.

Well anyway, we get this sequence, however many days it is, and a cell has this strange characteristic: cell A has a datum. That is to say, cell A is hurt or something and it knows something. Now it divides and it becomes cell A prime. Cell A prime has the same personal identity as cell A. It knows about that hurt, and can register on that basis. Now, cell A prime divides and cell A prime prime now has the same personal identity as cell A prime and cell A, and it knows all about this injury and will react to it and contains it. And so it goes, all the way along the line. Every cell, in subdividing, translates what this previous cell has known. A cell then, by procreation, by division, can retain its personal identity down an unlimited number of generations. The memory in that cell is interrupted, evidently, by death only. Death of the chain only All right.

Therefore, we have the phenomena, and this is wonderful, the biological experiments which can be made along in this line, confirming these things. As a matter of fact, Korzybski has quite a bit of data on this and so on. It’s very interesting material—also, the sentience of a cell and its apparent rationality. Actually, all a cell knows is that it must avoid pain and gain pleasure.

It knows these two things and out of that, with the cell as a basic building block, human beings and wildcats and sequoia trees get made.

All right. We have these eight generations here. This one generation over here, the ovum—this means that oddly enough, this ovum may be there some days before it is fertilized.

This is what you most need to know: that an injury belonging to any one of these things will be recorded finally in the sperm. What is recorded in the sperm will be recorded in the sperm/ovum, which becomes the zygote. What’s recorded in the zygote is recorded in the embryo. What’s recorded in the embryo is recorded in the fetus. What’s recorded in the fetus is recorded in the infant, is recorded in the man.

Here you have a chain of information which is coming straight forward and it goes forward on the A = A = A basis. That is, the cell A, what it knows, becomes the knowledge of its immediate descendant and so on along the whole scale until it pervades the whole organism.

This is not standard bank material. This is not gained through the perceptics and so forth. This is recorded right by the cells. They have their own central nervous system, and then furthermore, the zygote itself has a central nervous system, you might say, and the embryo has a central nervous system, and the work of Hooker—I love to throw these “hookers” at people—you announce suddenly that the work of Hooker in morphogenesis, volume 4, page 9 states that an embryo five weeks of age, when stroked on the back by a hair, straightened and genuflected into the original position in one half of one second. The whole action. Straightened up and went back. That’s five weeks embryo. In other words there is reaction, stimulus-response, not only in the cells that can be tested, but it can also be found in the embryo. In order to have such a stimulus-response coordinating all the muscles, there certainly must be muscular latch-up and nervous latch-up.

The evidence which exists along this line is absolutely overpowering. I drummed this up back in 1935, 36. I’m a terribly, terribly bad biologist. Biology has never interested me very much. And the bungling nature of my experiments was probably sub-frosh year, in any biology major. However, I made them as best I could, and I arrived at the conclusions which seemed to me inevitable that a cell recorded. All right. I did not know at that time that a cell recorded. I had to synthesize the information; that’s been true of a lot of things in Dianetics. Then I’d look around for evidence. I’d find that if I had examined the field of evidence, it was so enormously broad, that I would have had to have lived eight or nine hundred years to have covered it. So the best way to cover the whole thing was just dream up what was right, and then test it out to find if it was right and then look around to see if anybody had checked it.

This is a rapid method of study. That’s right. You depend on the body of knowledge to check you, rather than depending on the body of knowledge to tell you what to think. A very vast difference. It’s an inductive approach, in other words, rather than deductive. By the way, my scientific friends to the contrary—probably the sloppiest method of thinking in the world is deduction.

Scientific deduction has been responsible for a great deal of halt in the field of science. The proposition of finding cause, examining effect, and then looking around rapidly into the world to find out if that effect is confirmed will get you more information, tested and accurate, in less time than all the deductions down through the years. You could take fifty million monkeys and put them over fifty million test tubes, and have them get fifty million data, and by the time you finished up, you would have fifty million data. But a data is only as valid as it has been evaluated. And a data is only valuable as it is related to other data. A datum is only valuable when it is related to other data. So you see, there is your inductive versus your deductive approach. In the field of biology I have been particularly, you might say, fortunate in the splendid work which has gone on over the last twenty-five years; particularly an enormous amount of work has been done, and as soon as the book was published, this alerted practically every biologist in the country that had contacted the book.

The first announcement of Dianetics, of course, was in a medium which lands in every university in the country, bang! Astounding Science Fiction. It’s the only one I know of. They don’t read their technical journals but they sure read Astounding Science Fiction. You can, by the way, go outside of Harvard or Cornell or MIT or Cal Tech and you will find yourself a stack of Astounding Science Fictions on the first day it comes out. And then the class is let out, and this Astounding Science Fiction stack goes whewww-pop! And then they have to call the distributor to get another stack.

It almost shocked Johnny Campbell for that was the worst cover we ever had. These people, reading that and alerted to Dianetics—people at Cornell, for instance, in the biology department at Cornell—they did a spark on this, and I kept getting an avalanche of data started. “Did you know that blah-blah in the year such and such, when he microscopically disintegrated the second ray hormone on the left-hand side, proved conclusively that you are right.” “Now you must have taken this work from the papers of Lovativo which were published in 1919, after a very strenuous course of exercises at the gymnasium.” It’s fascinating. It’s fascinating. One could never possibly have gone out and in a single lifetime have accumulated the references that have come in confirming this. None of these people have said this though. That also fascinated me. It had never been stated. It had just been confirmed. And it requires a certain knack to confirm things that have never been stated, but they managed it.

Male voice: Mr. Hubbard, is the ovum sequence the same as the sperm, the recording?

The ovum evidently springs forth full-armed from the brain of Jove, so to speak. But I’m afraid my biology is more poetic than accurate. But here is the ovary, and the ovum pops out of the ovary and comes into the tube, and the sperm comes up, and it’s guided—everybody says, “You know, a sperm is always dumb. It is not sentient. Because . . .” “Why is it not sentient?” “Because it’s alkalinity that guides it into the cervix.” And you say, “Huh?” And they say, “Well, you see, it doesn’t have to know anything. It’s just alkalinity that does it.” You know, it takes a pretty darn good navigator to be able to ride a radar beam. I mean, he has to know something. And the alkalinity concentrations in the area of the cervix, of course, is very important, but it’s like a salmon, I suppose, going upstream. He can measure the currents and temperatures, and that’s how he knows it’s his own stream evidently. And in such a way a sperm seems to pilot itself along this course, and it’s a terribly long distance for a sperm. After all, it’s microscopic. He goes an awful long way from the testes down the urethra into the vagina, up through the cervix, clear up here, and up into one of these tubes. Of course it’s all on a gunshot principle. It’s been said that to guarantee fertility in a man, there would have to be—what is it, 380, 381 million . . .

Male voice: Hundred and eighty million per cc. . . . per what? Per cc—is that it? Well, that’s a lot of it. Anyway, all of these sperms come in here and just by a gunshot principle, some of them get through, and it’s a sort of a natural selection process. Very interesting thing. But a fellow who says, “A sperm’s dumb because it’s alkalinity . . .” Male voice: I am sorry. I still don’t think you understood me. The sperm has eight generations of pain carried over. How about the ovum? It doesn’t carry over at all?

Sure, but it doesn’t—you see, this one evidently has a break-off mechanism or something of the sort. This doesn’t pick up the pain before the point—there’s something rigged here so that this says, “We’re now going to go West and begin life anew,” so it doesn’t have the consecutive pain picked up. Now, there’s undoubtedly a very good reason for that.

Male voice: The ovum goes through a number of divisions too, but it’s got much more cytoplasm; maybe that’s the reason?

Yes, there’s some reason there. I wouldn’t know. So here we go. These are the ones that receive engrams. Maybe about fifteen days’ worth or something like that. These receive the engrams, and the ovary, of course, up to a certain moment there—it doesn’t relay its cellular back history. It gives a fresh start to this ovum. Well, this ovum’s first moment of pain is—sometimes you find this is an engram. When it moves out of the ovary, it pops, and that may be a moment of pain. And these tentacles grabbing it down the line and so forth are sometimes painful to it. So that sometimes you can run that out as an engram. It’s leaving the ovary. It’s been found in a few people. Now, it’s quite interesting that their sperm sequence then can actually go back for about fifteen days before conception. I picked up some interesting data on that not too long ago. It seemed like Papa wasn’t faithful. But that’s a fact. We got a recording and somebody got very angry with him and he became injured and there was a lot of conversation—and it was not Mama.

Male voice: That was the question I wanted to ask. Was that before or after ejaculation?

Before or after ejaculation? This is ejaculation here. All this is prior to ejaculation. That makes a big difference.

I wouldn’t—give you some idea of the percentage, I would say maybe— this is not a correct percentage, but just to give you an order of magnitude—probably 20 percent of the cases you run will have something occurring before the sperm.

Now, here is your generative sequence. Let’s divide this now down to nomenclature. You call this the generative sequence; call this the sperm sequence, call this the ovum sequence, and call this conception. Now, when they finally get together and merge there, you have, occasionally, another engram at the moment they merge. In other words, for a normal erasure and so on, you normally take the ovum or the sperm sequence and try to find out just from the moment of ejaculation forward. It starts to hang up; you will find material back here. And then you take the ovum sequence—see if you can find the moment it broke forth from the ovary. You don’t have to suggest it, say, “Is there an earlier moment of pain?” work the person back to it and you get the ovum sequence. It will have a tentacle on the end of it sometimes that’s registered. Then you get the fertilization; that’s occasionally an engram. Well, over 50 percent of the time, these things don’t have any pain on them at all. They have maybe a yawn. On this one, by the way— ejaculation—sometimes the sperm gets tired. And you have tiredness as one of the characteristics of the engram. And chronic weariness can be caused by either this sequence or birth. Of course, later on, Mama can say a lot about being tired, but there is actual weariness present in this and birth.

Now, we have these sequences then, and then we have mitosis as the zygote separates. Sixty hours after fertilization—it was found by a recent series of experiments—it was found that the zygote consisted of just two cells sixty hours after fertilization. This tells you how long this period is. And that is mitosis. And that is an engram, occasionally. Yeah, but splitting is sometimes painful and sometimes you even get a case where the splitting—every time it splits it’s painful. Well, it’s only necessary to pick up the first few divisions there in order to make these things—to pick them up. Then they’re all—the rest of them come off as chains. Now, for a short time there (I don’t know what the division is, but it’s a couple of weeks), we have got the zygote. The zygote. It’s round, and pressure on it is perforce an overall somatic. So you see, it specializes in overall somatics. There are no selective somatics at this point.

Don’t ever be fooled into somebody telling you that he’s running a basic area engram which makes his arm hurt. He hasn’t got an arm in the basic area. He won’t have an arm up here until after the first missed period. There are overall somatics until after the first missed period. However, I have found a sperm running his nose into something and getting a pain which registers with the human being as something on the top of the head. That’s interesting data. And also, a sperm, when he bangs, (snap) into the wall of the ovum and so forth sometimes hits head on, and you get a localized somatic like this, but that’s the only one.

So, yeah, you get some other interesting things. There is terrific hallucination sometimes takes place during the sperm and ovum sequences. This is unmistakable, it’s something on the order of “Here I am and ten thousand angels are coming down and here’s a fellow sitting over here playing a harp,” and so on. Hallucinatory. That is a sperm dream. Now, you shouldn’t run that sperm dream as an hallucination. There’s an actual engram there. So we try to reduce it down so we get the actual engram. That’s the important thing, the actual engram of conception. Now the sperm always seems to have a—it could be cat-eyed. So you’re liable to find a little bit of visio in this. That’s interesting. That is not to be classified in the level of hallucination, because it may be that following the course of alkalinity gives the illusion to the sperm that it sees or something of the sort. There seems to be a recording of sight perception in the sperm but no light or anything else—it can’t really see, but when your preclear says that, don’t accuse him of dub-in, never invalidate a preclear’s data. Always reduce every engram you contact; just to add that in there, and he’ll occasionally think he is looking at something, so that’s fine because that’s standard for the sperm and ovum sequence.

Right in here, sometime after the first missed period, I think it is, we go into the embryo stage. If you want to look up pictures of embryos you will find some very interesting things. You will find, for instance—and this goes right into the early fetus—the mouth formation is such that if it was struck in some fashion, it would get a peculiar type of injury. That is to say, the roof of the mouth is on the outside of the face. So there would be a blow, and it would actually be against the outside of the face of the early fetus, but afterwards, by evolution, these cells go inside the mouth. So it’s as though the person had been hit on the roof of his mouth. That’s the somatic he’ll get.

Furthermore, he may be hit on the side of his head and get two eye somatics, because the eyes, at one stage, are over here on the sides of the head. I have even found a hatpin going in the vicinity of these two eyes. You see. But how could one hatpin on one thrust go through two eyes simultaneously? This caused me a little bit of worry until all of a sudden I conjured up a picture of an embryo. And nothing easier, because it would go through like this. It missed the optic nerves, but like a little fish . . .

Male voice: After the embryo is formed and mitosis takes place, you get these reactions, blinking of eyes. Could that be valid as being the preclear’s . . .

Oh, I have never tracked it down. I wouldn’t put a label on it.

Well, the next step we are interested in here is the fact that, upside down, hanging here with his back out, for a short time, usually, the child is very much exposed to anything that comes into that cervix. But he is at least posing his back to it. That’s why we get these peculiar back somatics in very early AAs.  This goes on over into the time when Mama has discovered that she is pregnant. And the doctor’s already said it. “I can’t tell. It’s too early to tell. You’ll have to come back and see me again,” Uh, “I don’t know whether it is or not.” “I don’t think that I am. I really don’t believe that I am.” Where we get that engram, of course, is after the first missed period when Mama has suddenly found out that she has missed a beat. At this moment, she generally says, “I am caught.” And she sometimes says, “I have got to be sick,” which is a lovely engram, because it’s behind basic on a hypochondriac: “I have got to be sick; if I could only be sick I would be all right.” “Have you got the curse yet?” “No, I haven’t got the curse yet.” “Well you’d better get the curse.” Then we run into the next phrase there, where Mama says—there’s very often a vaginal discharge when a woman is pregnant and Mama very often, through a guilty conscience or reading something has mistaken this for venereal disease. Then she goes around saying, “Oh, I will never be able to face anybody again. I have just sunken lower and lower and lower. I’m shabby. I’m old and I will never be any good again.” Something like that. And she feels terrible about it and she has a big fight with Papa and she accuses him of going around with loose women, and we get this whole mass of engrams just out of this single misunderstanding. I imagine a little survey conducted in the society would disclose the rate—you wouldn’t do this—but it’s a pathetic thing, actually, because we get syphiliphobia and so forth, that type of engram and that type of psychosis from this incident which women don’t understand.

Now, very often Papa doesn’t understand it. He makes accusations, because the discharge is very often quite heavy. So this is demarked by conception, a period of nondiscovery, but don’t think that that period of nondiscovery is not sometimes very tough on the child, because the child is very fragile. And the intrauterine pressure in the zygote is very fragile; intrauterine pressure and so forth cause considerable pain to it at this stage; so you get engrams very easily in this basic area, and they are very, very tough engrams, because they are overall somatics. These cells, each one of them, multiplied out to become all the cells of the being. So these early engrams are laid down in every cell of the human being, and they’re very aberrated. They may only say, “I have caught a cold again,” and the person can have chronic colds. Then he gets up here to the first missed period. The first missed period, up to the point of Mama’s discovery or the doctor’s examination of her or something of the sort—you can count on finding a discovery here. You can count on finding a conception here, the discovery of pregnancy here.

Mama telling Papa that she is and so on. Sometimes she doesn’t tell him until up here. She has to tell him by that time. So this is the first missed period. And then the next stage which you occasionally find is the first AA. The first AA may be a douche, may be quinine, may be a sharp instrument, anything like that if there’s going to be an AA chain in this case. So the first AA demarks sometime after the first missed period, so these are sharp moments—there probably is an AA—this is added in. So we won’t make it major, but there is always conception and discovery. And if there are AAs in the case, there’s always the first AA and it follows shortly after the first missed period. Here is one of the points of economic worry. You will find somebody dully worried about economics.

One could say a conclusion could almost be drawn there that this person had parents who couldn’t afford to have a child. It’s probably an AA with parents who can’t afford to have the child. A lot talk about “Can’t afford to bring it up; couldn’t feed it. You know how money is these days. I will probably never get ahead.” Here you are pregnant—“I don’t want a house full of squealing kids.” Yak, yak, yak. There’s actually the basic, probably, seat of the “poor man orientation.” A terrible piece of contagion. Now, these are standard things I am giving you about this track. If you have Mama’s lover appearing in the case, at all, he probably appears early in the case. That is to say, you shouldn’t assume that the whole drama happened after conception, because it probably didn’t.

There are other chains in here. There are a list of chains in the book, just representative of the serious case, the number of things that came out of this case. Now, you know that list there in the book. There’s no reason for me to go over it here, because you have got a complete list of it.

There are other types of chains in there. One type of chain in there which is not noted is the non-coitus chain, and is the bouncer chain which normally keeps people out of the prenatal area. If either Papa or Mama were frigid sexually, then you get this. Now, a coitus chain—unless Papa is away from home or something of the sort, or unless there is a lover in the case—there’s no lover in a case if she’s faithful. We get up to about here. And then ordinarily, coitus slows down, it practically stops, and we get, “I don’t want it now. I don’t feel like it. And I hate sex anyway.” She’s usually a perfectly normal person about sex, but at this time perhaps she chooses, because she’s pregnant, to abhor sex. And we get our major blockages on the second dynamic in that area, then well up into the third month usually, when she becomes acutely and uncomfortably aware of her pregnancy.

Overall somatics stop and you start to get selective somatics not long after the first missed period. In fact you get very selective ones. But if you get highly selective ones, such as a fellow feels like a pin has gone through him—through here or something of the sort, you can count on that probably having occurred around the second or third month. There has to be that much of the child, usually, the third month, to have anything like that happen. Early AAs are sometimes just a smash. You see, a needle to a child would be about that big. Everything goes in proportions. A knitting needle’s about that big. That’s a real smasher. And it’s a smashing somatic more than anything else. Of course, you will find occasionally, AAs being performed right up into the sixth month. The amount of repair of which the embryo and fetus are capable is very good. It’s excellent, unless something like a limb bud or something like that is snipped off.

The blueprint is right there, the organism is swimming in proteins in the amniotic fluid. There’s all the repair material in the world. Amniotic fluid, very strong on protein, so on. So the organism can put itself together without much injury. This has evidently been a fooler to people. They figured because the organism could put itself together it was obvious the organism wasn’t injured, so therefore the organism hadn’t been touched, which is as sloppy a piece of logic as one could want. But anyway, we come on forward up the line. Sometimes Mama will wait till the third or fourth month before she tells Papa. So that can sometimes blow up. Then we get up to birth as an inevitable engram.

Everybody gets born! Someone tries to tell you how that he had a Caesarean, so therefore he doesn’t have a birth engram, you just go right on and run birth. Because a Caesarean is quite often much more severe than a normal birth. A Caesarean is always under a general anesthetic where Mama is all the way “out”; it affects the child and it is generally performed only after natural delivery has been attempted and failed. So the child, in one case—I saw this case you might say, not in an engram but lying in the maternity ward—the child had had his head stuck in too narrow a pelvis opening for thirty-six hours at the moment that they decided to perform the Caesarean. So the child was pulled out. For about four days, it was very cyanotic. The doctor said that he was actually the color of litmus paper. He was in bad shape; he was just knocked completely out. So we have birth, and up above birth, for three or four days subsequent to birth, we have an injured person. There is pain present, there is headaches and so forth. Usually it’s noisy. Usually nurses come around and say, “Cuchi, cuchi, coo. Damn little dirty brats!” And it depends on the general temperament and the aberration of the nurse, what the engrams are in that period. And you find almost anything there. But there’s three or four days after birth that should be inspected very closely.

All right. That’s all I want to say about this particular sequence. You see how it is? You know where to look.

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