View source for Opening the Case SOP Step Two (500822)

'''Date:''' 22 August 1950

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

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Actually it’s not possible to say too much about Standard Procedure. What I’m going over here are your tools in trade. Standard Procedure, what I have to say about Standard Procedure, what your professional auditors have to say about it, what your—all your demonstrations are about—it’s all Standard Procedure.

That’s what you’re here to learn. This is the stuff, the reason you’re here.

Now, it doesn’t matter whether you are running somebody on Guk or in an airplane. The password is Standard Procedure. Guk sometimes lets one get away with some things that he would not ordinarily be able to get away with, but one had better be much on the qui vive about Standard Procedure because sometimes Guk doesn’t let him get away with it. So if any of you have the idea that all of a sudden all is going to be made so easy that we can do almost anything including using repeater technique on holders just to open the case, I’d abandon it, I’d drop it on the floor and grind it underfoot.

Because a pro auditor who doesn’t know his Standard Procedure is in a very sad way. The main difference between a pro auditor and someone who has merely read the book—not that you can’t do tricks reading the book—the main difference is the facility with which the pro auditor can address Standard Procedure to the problem. You have had lots of people to observe. You have had, and will have, coaching on your own auditing. The end product of this is being able to use Standard Procedure expertly, so well, that you don’t sit there wondering what to do next. It’s just automatic. The case runs such-and-so, you do so-and-so.

Now, perhaps you could learn all about this, perhaps, by just reading it and applying it. But there are such things as golf pros. Did you ever try to read how to play a game of golf? I did one time, by the way. I’d been playing a pretty good game, I’d only been shooting four times par. I was breaking three hundred. And I got ahold of a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and decided to learn how to play golf a little bit better. It almost finished me. I couldn’t even get the ball off the tee after that. And when I managed to do so it usually went in the wrong direction, by a hundred and eighty degrees. I don’t know how I did these things, it was fantastic to me: boomerang shots, and every ball I had finally got so tired of being abused in this fashion that each one got itself lost.

The end of this time I kept wondering what this was all about, why my game had gone off so badly. And I went down and I picked up a pro, an old Scotchman with a rather bitter, dour sort of a humor. 1 wouldn’t attempt to translate any of it. And he said, well, I had just eaten more golf than I had digested.

Now, it’s very possible for you people to eat more Dianetics than you’ve digested. And I think a lot of you right now are probably in the state of gorge. But the data has not been, well, smoothly coordinated.

This pro took my golf game and he got me down to a point where I was breaking two hundred. And this great triumph leads me to pass along the good word to you. What we’re trying to do is give you coaching which doesn’t cause you to have indigestion. I want you to digest what you’ve got there.

Now, this Standard Procedure Chart worked out pretty smooth. After a person has worked cases for a little while he doesn’t use this anymore on a one-two-three step basis. Furthermore he skips around on it, does what’s supposed to be done at the various moments.

He knows if he can get a grief engram off the case, that’s fine. He starts to work this preclear a little while, he notices the signs, the preclear is going, (deep sigh) “Yes, well, I don’t know whether I can get back to that or not. (deep sigh) I don’t know whether that’s true or not either.” And you know enough at this moment that, “Who’s dead?” (snap) Well, that’s awfully simple, isn’t it? But it says right here, in opening the case, right there in the beginning it says A-3 is to try for painful emotion discharges. It says that right there. And it isn’t just a set of words. It’s a fact that you look at the case, try to run the case, these things happen. Now, all of a sudden you realize that you’ve got painful emotion on this case and you can’t go very far unless you get it off. Guk or no Guk.

This would be the circumstances. So you don’t have to—certainly I want to bring you up above the point here of opening Standard Procedure Chart—”Let me see, what do I do now?” We don’t want to put you in the position—we don’t want any of you to get into the situation of the airplane pilot who was sitting there reading a book on how to fly a plane. A preclear actually isn’t safe in your hands until you are so well acquainted with this and you have this data so well organized in your own mind that it’s actually a learned training pattern. That’s what we’re trying to put into you, a learned training pattern. I would read in the Encyclopeadia Britannica that one addressed this foot forty-five degrees off and he teed off and then you took the brassie. See? I could think all of that out, but if you have to stand around and think about what you are going to do before you do it, you’re not going to do it sometimes quick enough, (snap) We want a stimulus-response pattern here.

Now, as I go along here, I’m going to try to make very clear to you what is done, why it’s done, and after this particular two-and-a-half hour session, I’m supposed to give you a demonstration so you’ll get some more.

Well, let’s start in then with Step Two and we see that it says here on the Standard Procedure Chart, “Opening the case and running engrams. If case won’t open or bogs down, go on to Step Three.” Step Three is Straightwire. That’s Straightwire inventory and actually processing. You can process a person quite a bit with Straightwire if this Step Two doesn’t take place.

Now, because Straightwire is very important, we have already gone over it somewhat, and at the end of this week we will go over it considerably. Then, of course, we have a couple of more weeks to brush up on this stuff. But at the end of this week, we will go into that again.

Right now we’re going to talk about the heart, body and soul of Dianetics—running engrams.

An engram is a moment of pain or unconsciousness which contains perceptics. It happens at a certain age in the preclear’s life. Engrams have been found in the early prenatal area, I have been told, they continue on through the birth engram, childhood illnesses and on forward.

Now, the engram has a characteristic which may not have been stressed with you too well. That characteristic is that the later it occurs on a time track, the more solidly held it is. That which holds it down is the engram earlier, which is held down by the engram earlier than that, which is held down by the engram earlier than that. So that any late-life engram (such as one happening in adulthood), the condition obtains that literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these moments of pain and unconsciousness exist prior to it. And I’m only talking about the serious ones. Actually there are thousands of moments of pain and just (pop) that much unconsciousness. A little thing, a fellow burns his finger. That still causes a flick of attenuation of the analytical mind.

So, the thousands of engrams prior to the adult engram of which we speak have this adult engram firmly fixed in place. Firmly. It’s riveted down. It has—anything it contains, usually, anything it contains appears not just once or twice but ordinarily hundreds of times before it. Every perceptic in it is earlier. And it has achieved the final result of a long chain of unconsciousnesses. The engram has one common denominator, above all else, one common denominator, unconsciousness. Of course it has the common denominator of pain. But it can be a pain in the foot or the leg. It could be a pain in a tooth or a shoulder or a pressure somatic. These could be the pain. So we can’t say that one single pain is the common denominator. Pain in general is. But unconsciousness is common to every single engram because unconsciousness does just one thing, it’s the close-down of the analytical mind. At the moment of impact of pain the analyzer seems to unfuse itself to a greater or lesser degree from the computive circuits of the mind. A very obvious contribution of Dianetics was the discovery that there was a recording, an available recording going on at this time by a portion of the nervous system or the cells.

Now, the attenuation of the analyzer could be great or little but it was always the same thing, a little more or a little less of the same thing. And the first time it happened was the first time anything shocked the nervous system into this unfusing process. That first time is very, very early. It may be before conception. We can trace this back. The objective reality of this data, of course, has not been checked but the zygote has been checked. Sixty hours after conception engrams have been validated with objective reality. They’re that late.

Now, trying to find a conception engram is a rather embarrassing thing on a person anyway. That is to say we take Papa and Mama, we’re trying to find the specific moment when, and they don’t give up the data very easily.

As a result, this validation has not taken place, but there is an equation at work here which makes it unnecessary really to do any validation of it, and that is a mechanical process which brings about the time track.

Here’s your late-life one. (drawing on blackboard) Part of this one is in this one. This one, you see, contains this one and this one—this one contains this one and this one. This one contains this one and this one, but this one contains this and this one and this one and this one. And the thing that they all contain together is unconsciousness. So we get all the way down the track these hundreds and hundreds of engrams and when we get number one or when we get in the vicinity of number one, we start to get off of the case some of this unconsciousness. It’s actually a sort of biochemical thing. It’s apparently a byproduct of a nervous impulse; it seems to register itself very clearly, much as pain does, by some biochemical-electrical process and leaves on deposit in the reactive bank an actual entity, an entity called unconsciousness.

Now, in Dianetics, John Campbell decided he didn’t like this word “unconsciousness” because the conscious mind was the only mind which was unconscious and the unconscious mind was the only mind which was never unconscious. And he thought this was confusing. So he sat around one night and finally came up with the word “anaten.” You won’t find it in the book because we didn’t like to put too many neologisms in it. But you’ll find that a lot of your PAs are using this word anaten. It’s a very common word, and one which I use. It is a neologism, it’s a compound word, one of those words that the engineers like to make up like radar. And the word is anaten—analytical attenuation. Of course attenuation means shutting down or closing down. It’s what you would do with a radio set when you have lowered the volume. Well, analytical attenuation.

Now, analytical attenuation, contracted, would be into this word anaten—analytical attenuation, just briefed down.

Now, this then becomes many things. It becomes, one, the biochemical-electrical deposit of actual unconsciousness. It becomes a verb, a noun; very nice when you make up a word. You don’t have to follow any grammatical rule with it particularly, you just say, “This is it.” “That’s-all right. Well, what’s the verb?” “That’s it.” “What’s the adjective?” “That’s it.” And it simplifies matters a great deal. So you can actually say, “He’s pretty anaten.” Or you could say—oh jeez, this thing gets complicated as I look the thing over, (laughter) There is no such thing as “anatenned.” It would just be anaten. An anaten subject who had been anaten. Anaten in that case would mean knocked out. And when we put him through the engram he releases anaten which means that whatever happens—oxygenation or whatever it is—when the anaten comes off of the engram. So you see, it’s very simple. So it ceases to be complicated. We understand this as one of the things contained in an engram. Pain and unconsciousness and perceptics. Of course the manifestations of the engram contain additionally demon circuits and valences. But those are manifestations. Well, right down here at rock bottom we’re dealing with pain, unconsciousness and perceptics. All right.

Anaten is the glue which holds down the whole engram bank. That’s glue. It sort of compounds its own interest, particularly on a chain. But all of the material in a whole case is glued in the same way.

First time a person was ever anaten he got anaten. And when he got it, he stored it. And when he got it the next time it had a slight tendency to hook on to the last time because they have something in common, if they have nothing else in common, and that is anaten. And it keeps on going and interest keeps compounding and anaten, anaten, more and more and more and more and more.

The first time I ever told a person about this, after I’d thought it up, happened to get very, very upset. So I hope you don’t get upset when I say this. He could hardly drive the car over to have me do something about it. I practically knocked him cold just by telling him. So, therefore, I put you alert on this.

The one common denominator of engrams is anaten. Right? What is always restimulated when an engram is restimulated? Anaten. And anaten is what causes the dwindling spiral. Because when one engram gets activated, of course, it activates the anaten of another engram which activates the anaten of other engrams which activate more anaten and more anaten and more anaten, until finally we can say with some assurance that the normal person goes around with about fifty out of a thousand attention units available. It’s lots of shutdown. That means simply that we have the common denominator there of anaten and that every engram in the case is a blood brother to every other engram in the case through this one thing.

This compounding finally adds up—now here the glue isn’t so bad, right in here. No glue at all down in this first—and you start running the thing through and the first thing you know, yawn. Anaten will come off with Guk, but it has to be yawned off.

You get this first one down here, run it through and then yawn, yawn, yawn. The thing will erase, the first one is gone and you’ve taken the whole bank to that degree and lightened the whole bank. And you hit the next one and a little more yawning and you’ve lightened the whole bank just that much more. The important anaten on the case is here, not here, although this may be four days on a battlefield shot in five places, with surgery taking place afterwards, and two weeks of lying around unconscious, so on. Oh, this thing—you’d say, “Well, obviously that’s what aberrates this case.” No.

If the case was not possessed of the factors before, it wouldn’t do it. So it’s down here someplace where Mama happily walks along, bumps into the table, something of the sort and says, “Oh, I’m always doing that. I just can’t seem to keep from hurting myself.” Aha! That’s right down here. That’s very important. There’s another reason why that’s important which I will tell you about in a moment. But the main reason it’s important is because it’s the basic level on all of this. On that structure of injury, then, becomes built all the rest of the anaten in the whole bank right on up to present time. Now, the engram was buried due to the fact that pain registry is not in the standard bank, due to the fact there are various dodges and mechanisms the organism has built to avoid pain. And language, its statements about it and so on—and anaten. Now, the reason why the engram went into a hidden state and stayed there is because you can’t penetrate this much anaten. Look at the compounding of anaten. Unless you really get down and work hard—you have to work hard to get up something like that. Unless it happens to be one of these strange ones. Every once in a while there is an engram which is sitting over here on the side. (tapping blackboard) It has decided to abdicate or disassociate itself and here it is over there. And its anaten isn’t penned down, down here. I don’t know why, unless it would be that there’s some painful emotion has sort of separated it off. But here—sometimes birth will sit out like that, sometimes an exodontistry will sit out like that. It’s interesting. As though the person had another little reactive mind sitting there. It’s very disappointing to run into a case and all of a sudden you get birth out.

Birth comes out of the case, you get yawns, oh boy, are you off to the races. Birth is out of this case, terrific. Obviously he was aberrated by birth, terrific situation there, and he was stuck in it besides, then you start working the case and you find out that was just an added attraction. Of course there’s no birth left on the case but you get in there and the case is not open. You have to go down into the basic area now and you’ll find you have to get your basic anaten off the case. So I point out this exception of an occasional engram that stays over there in lonely majesty.

So, people trying to go into one of these things, particularly when they were using drugs—of course a drug induces more anaten and the second you’ve induced more anaten then to try to tackle anaten—you get the idea? You make the person anaten and then he can’t of course tackle more anaten without becoming completely anaten.

Here we have twenty-five units of attention and we move in on an engram and it promptly extinguishes twenty-two of them and the auditor somehow or other pushes the preclear on through with these two and gets them up so he’s got six and then eight and then ten. First thing you know he’s running the thing and he’s gained a few. So now he’s running it with thirty.

We give the person drugs which cuts him immediately down to one attention unit and we start running him into the anaten and of course that one little fellow is gone, boom!

That’s the end of that attention unit. It just gets lost in the shuffle. So this now could remain masked and unknown. Actually it’s a very simple thing, you start looking over why. Why didn’t people know about this? It seems incredible to us when we go up and down the time track and slide around and look at these things and pick up perceptics when one was supposed to be knocked flat on his face. And it seems incredible that people shouldn’t have known about this. Well, people come up now and tell me, “Oh, yes, it’s been practiced for years,” but I’ve never read about it before. (laughter) And “So Freud was doing all this, you know.” No, Freud never would have claimed anything like that. As a matter of fact, Freud would have been one of the boys of all the guys that would have been on the bandwagon with this stuff. And like old man Korzybski, nobody has thought about general semantics and Dianetics yet. As a matter of fact, they seem to have just come together in a merger. Beautiful cooperation from the general semantics society and so on. But if there had been, why, it still would remain that Korzybski would have thought, “Hm, that’s pretty good.” When they tried to go into this stuff, bang! out would go the attention units, bang! the person was obviously unconscious, bang! Obviously the analytical mind when attenuated did not record. Obviously nothing recorded and therefore the unconscious mind was the product of the delusions of childhood.

That’s all sequitur. I hope you follow that. The delusions of childhood produced the delusions of childhood. And this in turn produces the delusions of adulthood. You follow that, don’t you? How the childhood world comes from adulthood. Well, I guess I’d better go back to Dianetics again.

Anyway, we start in on one of these things—and well, we wouldn’t get anyplace. You start in on this thing with drugs or hypnosis, something, you start running into it. Mind you, you can penetrate these things if you know it’s really there. You can go into one of these one way or another at the risk of activating it—you could actually slug into one of these things and start picking it up at the beginning, picking it up at the end and just sort of blow the thing apart with main strength and, Dianetically speaking, stupidity. Because it would be very dull to take one of these late ones and blow it apart because it would restimulate the thing and it wouldn’t lift. It’s going to be stuck there. Or you could get all the perceptics out of it, just by hitting the line hard, picking up a little bit at the beginning and then a little bit more at the beginning and then maybe chipping off a little at the end of it and picking up something in the center. We’ll take an operation, a moment when he slightly regained consciousness and they had to slap the ether cone on him again quick. You know, because an unconsciousness period is high and low, so on, it’s not very even. A person’s consciousness varies from time to time during any one period. Now we could go through and pick up all the perceptics, even so, now that we know they’re there.

That’s important because it’s such a hard piece of work. It is quite a labor to enter in upon this, that one would very early have become discouraged from prosecuting it if he hadn’t known there was some good reason for him to do it. As a consequence, the ordinary practice in striking one of these things in narcosynthesis was to start—you recount the person right up to the moment when he went unconscious. And then you go rapidly, lightly across the moment of unconsciousness until he regains consciousness and pick it up at the other side, having sometimes restimulated everything in between.

This should be understood with you very much because you’re working with this anaten, you’d better have a pretty good idea what it is, functionally. Someday we’ll know, certainly, biochemically what it is. We don’t know now. We know that it comes off in a boil-off or in yawns, that it comes off the case. Once it’s off, it doesn’t come back again. There is a reversal there of some chemical process which accumulates, holds in some fashion, and we reverse it in the yawn and oxygenation. You see? The impact created a certain binful of stuff. The pain, the analytical attenuation created this binful of stuff, and then in Diane tics there is just an automatic reversal of this stuff and the bin empties.

It’s an actual entity you’re handling though. It’s not something that is indefinite. It’s anaten. It’s just as much there as water is in a cup of water, and pours out in the same way, and empty that cup. All right. Therefore you have to know a lot about it. Now, in researching Dianetics and in discovering this part of the track—calling this birth, this conception (drawing on blackboard) —discovering this part of the track was the consequence of following out something that was mathematically indicated.

I didn’t know any part of this lower track existed. I thought that it was probably on some sort of a level and I was not willing to buy myelin sheathing. If I had thought about it I wouldn’t have bought it. But, same time I wasn’t interested in it. Obviously when a person learns to talk he started to learn the first things he knew. Obviously, his observations of the society and so on. I was going along in that line until one day I noticed something very, very peculiar. (This is very early in the researches in the science.) I noticed that for instance when we go into one thing like this, they start through and start to look it over, that there were flicks of recall over such a period. I was working with amnesia-trance hypnosis on a subject, and, poor guy—I say poor guy because here I was. I tromped all over his bank before I found out what I was doing to him.

I couldn’t understand where he was getting all these headaches. So I found out that this one—there were actual moments there. And one lady, when I was talking about it and wondering about it and so on, she said, “Maybe it’s recorded someplace else.” Simple statement. Led quite a long ways. “Maybe it isn’t recorded the same way something else is recorded.” And it was enough of a tip-off that I went back to this poor luckless fellow that I was working with at the time, and I went back through one of these and looked it over very carefully. And I’d just gotten through looking it over and so I found that there was more there than there had been before. Now we knew something about deintensification already through hypnosis, so I started running this moment of unconsciousness, like they used to do with a lock.

They’d take a painful moment in a person’s life, you know, and they’d go over it a few times and it would somewhat deintensify. And this was good valid therapy; it seldom cured anybody very completely, but it was quite valid and—so I went over this thing and over it and over it. I found out that it would go down to a certain point. I was getting a recession. That’s the first thing I saw was a recession. That is to say, it just went down to a certain point and then sort of hung there. Well, about three days would go by with this chap, and it would come back and had strengthened almost up to full strength again. And it was a peculiarity to me there was full recall through this period. And it was actual recall. And so I said, “I wonder if there’s another one in the case.” I might just as well have gone later, because I didn’t know how it worked yet.

I came down fairly early and I found one in childhood, an operation, and I went through that thing like sawing through butter, wooof! Boy, that was easy, mmmm. But there was a portion—well, taking this one—there was a portion of it that didn’t budge. Well, that was a curiosity. Why did this little scrap of this incident refuse to pull up?

Ah, a lot of thought on the thing. Well, we knew that in hypnosis the matter of filing was on this basis, that what is put into the mind first has priority. So there might be a priority on this so let’s look for the thing elsewhere. And I went down, clear down here somewhere. And I found this chunk here again and I ran through another moment of unconsciousness when obviously the person couldn’t have been recording. And it really went through that time, it went poof! Aha, there’s something working here. Observe the fact that up here it was heavy—glued down. And as we got earlier and earlier and earlier and earlier it got lighter. Well, I checked this observation several times and found out that it seemed to be invariable. Although some of these things were tougher than others. They weren’t quite in rotation but as a general law the earlier you went, the thinner one of these unconscious periods became.

Ah! How early can you get? Right there I started to dive. I got down to little babies falling out of highchairs at six months and finally got it down to a baby being stepped on, on the floor, where the nurse had put it. And head severely kicked at about a month.

I said, “Wait a minute. Now where the hell am I going?” Well, next case I worked on presented me with contractions. They were obvious contractions, the guy was crunched into himself and so on. These poor people, by the way, they really deserve some gold stars if any of them are left alive. Because you know and I know now what happens when you just go into birth cold, like that. You just go into birth. We just elect that there’s birth, so let’s go into it. Huh, wouldn’t be very good.

I found myself running birth in this person and I said, “Well now, that’s very interesting. Evidently birth is a moment of pain and unconsciousness so powerful that it records in the whole organism and this is the start of life and it’s this shock which starts a person thinking. And this is probably . . .” Oh boy, did I have theories, just bucket loads of theories to account for all this. And started to find out how many people have this birth recorded—might not be everybody. So I started to look around and find it in this person and that person and some other person. I noticed some of them came down with colds, but it was damp weather. And all of a sudden ran into a fellow who had no birth recording. “Now,” I said, “it doesn’t record every time.

Therefore the next moment of pain or unconsciousness after birth will of course immediately deintensify very rapidly.” So I went swiftly up to the next moment we could contact which was where he was being struck by his brothers coaster wagon or some such thing. And boy, was that stuck in the mud. “Oh, what do we do now? There’s no birth and the first incident that we discover, he’s lying here in a swing and his brother’s coaster wagon comes down and hits him. And this is two months of age. And we have a moment of pain and unconsciousness which just plain stuck, as solidly as though it had appeared way up there.

Well, if we follow this thing through conclusively there must be an earlier experience. All right, let’s go find one.

I was perfectly game. I thought, “Well, you know right before birth, why, Mother might have been bumped by something or something. You know, the mind might have been recording there just a moment before birth.” I’d allow myself that wild postulate. So I went back to find this moment and I said, “Well, lets go back to the first time you’ve been bumped.” That’s about all I said to the guy. He was in very light hypnosis. He was quite conscious of everything. And there he was.

He said, “My God, where am I? Oh, this—sure, sure. Hmm, wet. I can hear the gurgle-gurgle. Sounds like a flock of factory whistles,” and thought this guys probably crazy. And we found a moment there right adjacent to the point he’d landed and we ran through the thing and, by golly, it deintensified.

Oh, it had a lot of explanation to it. So I said to myself, “Now well have to”—working on scientific methodology—“have to refine the whole theory in order to fit the observation and maybe predict new data. So obviously, a person occasionally had a very early cellular recording of some sort, at least one.” Well, this chap was not available the next time I was working on this, the next day, so I went back on somebody else and I went back and I said, “We’ll find this, one or two of these recordings, if they’re there.” So we found one here. What happens when you contact an engram at about six months after conception? It sticks in the mud, but solidly. It will restimulate, it can only be beaten down into recession.

Well, I worked on this thing, and worked. I guess he had recalls. Obviously it wasn’t very thick, this experience, was pretty thin, actively. But it wouldn’t reduce in any way, wouldn’t deintensify, which left me no recourse but to go early. So I went early and I found another one. And that wouldn’t. And I went earlier and found another one and that wouldn’t and earlier and found another one and that wouldn’t and I went on down the bank, walking down the bank about twelve engrams, and all of sudden found one that would reduce. Ha! Just like this. “There’s some sort of a delusion going on,” I said, “and maybe these people have all read Freud about longing to return to the womb or something. So what do we do now?” Well, I had a mother and a daughter and I went to work on them. And without telling them what I was doing, taped their own early experiences. And I had been very cautious about birth up to that moment and I got about a seven-hour labor verbatim out of each case and Mama’s story to the child was completely wrong. It was founded on Papa’s story to Mama. And Papa had been walking up and down outside and in such a distressed state that he was evidently unable to record clearly. And he had told Mama what had happened at the child’s birth, you see. And Mama had then repeated to the child, since she was completely unconscious during the period. So the child had no idea whatsoever of the actuality. But the child’s birth deintensified in this case, fortunately, and her delivery of the child deintensified and we had two tapes.

So, I started going back in the child’s bank very, very early, into the prenatal area and started to pick up validating material. These prenatals were true then. There was an actual recording going on and the earlier one got in the case the thinner these things were. Very well. Let’s see if it works out with how many people. Maybe this is just a freak. And I took a whole string of people and found these experiences one after the other, occasionally finding another mother-daughter, father-child relationship and checking their tapes together. It would be one thing, you see, to have the conception of an incident handed down, that is to say, the concept of saying, “Yes, when you were five years of age we had a nurse by the name of Bridget” or “Bridget, where the hell did you put the washing?” Now you see it’s two different kinds of material that is being relayed there. Same way in the prenatal bank much to the embarrassment of many a parent up to this time—maids, dogs, family quarrels, in-law troubles, all sorts of things suddenly come to light in the person’s prenatal bank and the parents, “How did he find out about that?” You could imagine some of the things a person will find out in a bank. Like one young lady, I sent her down the track, the first time she got down into the prenatal area and she lay there for a moment and she says, “What’s that sound?” and she says, “Is somebody playing music?” And I said, “No.” Gave her an age flash. “What’s happening where you are there?” “Well, music, music, music. The wedding march!” Well, she had always celebrated her parents’ wedding and she got very curious about this and she sent back to the registrar of weddings and so forth and sure enough it was the right date. So, we had all the data in that bank, by the way, it was full sonic and the bank was not too cluttered up with much punishment. And we had the license clerk and the names and so forth and the argument between the husband and her father. So there was a great deal of material in this case and in other cases, on and on. It’s gone on like that quite consistently. As a matter of fact, as a matter of fact, Kinsey, by the way, Kinsey reportedly is very interested in Dianetics. Well, he was interested in it from a therapeutic standpoint and he was in conference with the chap who was founding the new policy for mental hygiene and they were in conference with US Public Health Service. And Kinsey was in there just giving them the consultation advice. The three of them were together, the Public Health Service man was telling them about it. And he gave me back the report on Kinsey’s interest in the whole subject and that Kinsey was going to go into it to find out what it could do therapeutically. And I don’t think the guy suspected, (snap) that long, what he was going to do in the way of data; the data that you could get on America. And now he’s got data. And, boy, it makes the data he’s already gotten look awfully pale and golly look at the data he’s gotten! So here’s the process of running back these experiences. Earlier and earlier and earlier and earlier, they get thinner and thinner and thinner. For some peculiar reason, between—let’s call this two months and about eight months—the period in there is usually fairly tough. The material is very hard to lift in it. But the material back here on the zygote level is very easy to lift, very easy to lift and very aberrative.

There’s a reason for this aberration. You have a few cells there, and certainly the central cell which will be the nervous system doing the full recording. So therefore the whole organism is permeated with this one recording. And as the cells go, you know every time a cell divides, it is its own identity again. A equals A equals A equals A. That is to say, if you have the recording “Boo” in cell A and then it subdivides, the new cell has the recording “Boo” in it. And then it subdivides and we have the third cell which is now A prime prime, it has the recording “Boo” in it again. And so on and so on and so on and so on. You see? So you get down into the basic area and it means that every single part of the nervous system that could record this—on subdividing evidently indicates this—is subdivided and the whole nervous system now knows that, “We don’t get along, I might as well leave,” or something like that. It knows this intimately and this is fundamental data.

It’s getting down toward as being as fundamental as survive itself. Survive is underlying the command on the line. It’s just as though these commands early—they come down the bank, they take more and more priority the more and more cells that they seem to influence.

Of course there’s an emotional charge which influences these engrams and can stiffen them up and make them intense.

Well, when you go over a case, you will find out that this basic area of material is pretty aberrative, very thoroughly so, even when it’s fairly light. I mean no great punishment involved or anything else. So, that’s— must be our first goal in running engrams.

Now, I am taking you to this maybe the long way around, but I hope by doing that to fasten it rather securely in your mind.

Now, the problem here of basic-basic will have to be much more extensively covered. I can just state in passing that basic-basic would be the first engram in the case, the basic engram on the basic chain. It will be number one. That’s why it is your target. Of course every chain of engrams has its own basic.

Actually you can start a chain way after birth and give it its own basic. That’s no reason to suppose that basic on that chain is going to lift, but it’s just the first engram on that chain. Basic-basic will inevitably and always lift. That’s why it’s your target. And you get the first unconsciousness off the case, and when you get that off the case you’ve lightened the whole bank. By the time you have fifteen or twenty of these engrams lifted in the basic area, you have taken enough unconsciousness off the case that you can safely then go into practically any part of the case and in so doing produce a deintensifìcation and not restimulate the case, which is very interesting, that a case can be considered to be relatively dangerous up to the moment when you get basic-basic and a few other basic engrams out of it, and after that progressively becomes less and less dangerous. That is to say you can do less and less harm to this case. The potential of harm that can be done on a case is always highest at the opening.

Here we have now the whole parade of the engram bank. They are not filed in a nice orderly state. This diagram would better speak of the filing system of the analytical mind, that is the standard bank. Much more likely that the standard banks look like this. But you will do very well to envision the reactive mind and the time track as having this kind of schematic appearance and actually, as your preclear returns down that track to envision him going down such a ledger. Or if you want to, you can lay it out flat like this. But, have a scheme in your mind at least so when you are looking at him, you are checking against what he is doing, and you know about where he is on the track. And in this way, you begin to build up a picture which positions for you as you work on the case, those things which you have touched, those things which you haven’t touched, and you are actually making a sort of record as you go, an image as you go. You’re building up a scheme of engrams, what you have touched, what’s there, what’s erased, until you actually don’t need a written record. If you do it this way—particularly after you’re released or cleared, you won’t need any written records anyway.

All right. Now, your number one goal is here as far as physical pain engrams are concerned, but there is something else that occurs which sometimes makes it hard to get here. Two things may occur, actually. One of them is the person gets stuck on the track somewhere, and the other one is that he may have a grief charge in here someplace.

This grief charge proposition is very interesting. Let’s say that here we have a track. We’ll just draw you a different picture of the track with engrams lying along the thing. And here we have—this would be conception up to here, just drawing a different scheme here—here would be conception, birth, and let’s say that we have a grief charge in here. Actually, the grief charge on chronological order, (what I was telling you about before) would seem to appear here.

The standard banks are filed by time and topic, you see. They have a lot of cross-filing systems; very intricate, very neat, very orderly and perfect. Now, that data is beautifully filed in the standard bank and if engrams were listed on the standard bank time track they would look very orderly. As a matter of fact they would be trimmed up. They wouldn’t even be sloughed off a little bit—actual scheme of filing which looked like this. But the orderliness of the reactive mind makes the time track probably in the reactive mind apparently look like this with the engrams fixed up like this, (drawing on blackboard) And this one, of course, this would be your time track continuing.

That’s actually the way they get filed. You could call it filed or fouled.

A very intricate system there of confusion. Now, it gets into that state of confusion in various ways; main ones is locks—I was showing you the other day—they get down on top of the engram and so on. Fortunately there is a standard bank time track on which you can travel and you sort of reach off of that standard bank time track and pluck stuff out of the reactive bank—the file clerk is pulling it in off the reactive bank— you’re never traveling on a reactive bank track. So the file clerk is reaching into this hodgepodge over here and it’s pulling it back on the track for you to run.

Now, there may be a lot—sometimes one appears not to have a track at all. One is off the track. He can return somewhat but everything is awfully thin to him. Not good, he can’t quite reach these things and they come through as vague impressions and so on. Of course, a lot of things could be wrong, one of the things may be that he’s out of valence. But, there is something else that is wrong there, potentially wrong, and that’s a grief discharge.

Grief actually seems to be a conversion of anaten into something else. It’s a sort of a chemical conversion, it’s the relationship, it’s in relationship to anaten and pain—anaten is in relationship to pain. Grief isn’t something itself, but a conversion of, evidently. It’s a sort of a reverse process on pain and it can spill back off the case as lachrymose— tears. Tears actually complete a reconversion of this material. It blows out with grief; expression of grief, so on, blows it out.

Now, there’s something very interesting about grief. We don’t know all there is to know about grief by a long way because it seems to be affinity in reversal. Affinity with a reverse charge on it would be a functional expression of grief. The biochemical expression of grief—it works in a machinelike fashion which is a chemical fashion, would be a reconversion of whatever anaten and unconsciousness are. So grief can’t exist without preexisting pain. Sadness can exist, tears can exist, emotions can exist, but not one of these grief engrams, A grief engram is called a grief engram actually because in that way its nomenclature reminds you to run it as an engram, to treat it as an engram and to handle it in that fashion. And we found out before it was so labeled that people were very well in the habit of saying, “Well, tell me about the time your mother died,” The fellow says, “So and so on, Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo, uh, yup,” And we’d say, “Well, guess we got rid of that one,” go on to something else, with this thing only about a tenth discharged.

Well, peculiar thing, it isn’t often that you can’t really restimulate a grief engram by running it very much. I mean you can run through a grief engram once or twice and it doesn’t practically kill your preclear to bring him out of it to present time. He can be sad and so forth, which may throw up some aberrated material, but it isn’t like running a physical pain engram. That is mechanically dynamite. You run one of those things once or twice, get it restimulated and then go off and leave it without getting the basic of its chain or anything else — that’s trouble! But you don’t have to be too careful handling these things but they’re very important; they convert pain and unconsciousness chemically over into something else. And on the filing system in the reactive mind these charges seal down, just like supercharged anaten—part of the track. So a person may be trying to go down his standard bank track and he’s actually running down a grief-encysted track over certain areas. See what I mean? So he has an occlusion produced by grief. And it will actually act as a filter, and other things make it hard to pick up perceptics. That’s why the first thing we try to contact in a case is grief. If we’re going down the track, that’s the first thing we try to contact.

We are contacting it as a necessary step to the attainment of this goal. You understand that. Getting the grief off of a case, however, is a goal of its own. If we take a psychotic and we go down the track and find an emotional upset, death, something like that and discharge it, the chances are we bring him back up to present time sane. That is one of the most fascinating operations of which I know! Sometimes you have to discharge an awful lot of grief off this fellow. Sometimes it won’t come off, being out of valence and a lot of other things. But at the same time, if you can possibly get it off of the case you have really taken the tension off of this case. And nothing in the case will produce as marked an alteration as the release of grief engrams. If you can find and release a grief engram, or several of them, you will produce a marked alteration in the case. The psychotic ceases to be psychotic and becomes merely neurotic. The neurotic becomes normal. When you take the grief off of the normal person, and so on, why, he becomes to some degree, rational. So this grief sort of gets over to the side of the bank, like you’d see a sort of a haze sitting over this area here, and the preclear comes along this track and here’s this haze here (drawing on blackboard) and he’s trying to achieve engrams in here; he seems to have done a detour. So grief puts a casing on a large part of the prenatal bank. Because it’s converted an early physical pain engram, we are now contacting apparently this grief charge here on the track, postpartum. We’re actually knocking it out early and what we’re knocking out is the converted portion of a physical pain engram. In other words, we’re knocking out converted—let’s simplify it even further and say we’re knocking out converted anaten off of a physical pain engram. Just as soon as you get one of these things, look for the physical pain engram on which it was sitting. That’s very important.

Male voice: What about other emotions like rage and fear?

You can discharge rage, fear the same way Grief is the thing which produces a very marked alteration. Actually you have endocrine upset. Rage, fear and so forth are more likely to be caused by command somatics, that is to say, engramic commands. They come about through fear of, grief and so on.

What I am talking about right now is the functional aspect of this as you go along. We go back and apparently, let’s say, the grief discharge was at the age of twenty-one; we run the person back through the age of twenty-one. He starts to recount this thing and—he is recounting something that may even have appeared to him to have been on the surface and in sight, but it wasn’t—and we start recounting it and actually he’s running in this area someplace. And we recount the grief off for a short time, we discharge the grief thoroughly, and we ask the file clerk for the engram on which this grief was sitting. And the file clerk will very often give us the engram immediately unless that engram is too late in the bank to erase at that stage. You work with the file clerk, don’t try to force him in any more than you have to. So here we have a grief discharge here, having converted one of these engrams down here. And when it converted it might have converted actually several of them, or a little chain of them—and when we try to get into this area we are apparently bucking something in this part of the track. And you see, this is the actual state of confusion into which one is running.

It appears, as he runs down the track that his experiences are laid out and orderly. That is because the experiences which he had when he was fully awake—analytical about the whole thing—are laid out in that fashion.

The second we start to run into an engram, it’s too much to assume immediately that we’re on the exact point on this thing. He’s actually taken a dive and the thing was filed down here someplace and he’s gone off the track to that degree.

Male voice: In the reduction of grief engrams, does this follow the same basic principle as pain engrams, that the earlier you go the easier it is to reduce? In other words, is it easier to get into extreme childhood emotion than it is late life?

There is a very loose postulate on this in the book—very loose. It isn’t to be considered as something that is absolutely the last word on the thing. It just seems to work out better that late grief charges have to come off first.

Male voice: Mr. Hubbard, should you start at the bottom and try to work up and then, if you don’t get anyplace, head for the grief?

You haven’t got a Standard Procedure there, have you?

Male voice: No, I haven’t.

Well, they will be in from Elizabeth here shortly. I am going to take this up just in the last few minutes. I will give you the exact proceeding.

I’m trying to show you here the functional anatomy of these engrams.

The function of it is very precise, then. The functional position is quite precise. Wherever you find a grief engram, you’re actually operating a physical pain engram which has been converted. But the grief experience is there as a very highly specialized kind of lock lying right with it, and that highly specialized kind of lock actually prevents one from attaining the physical pain engram. So number one as you go down the track is grief. That’s the first thing you try to get off a case.

In the first place, it is a safeguard for you. If you can get grief off this case, you have deintensified the case to such a degree that the likelihood of precipitating a break, as a psychotic break—that likelihood is never large, but it is always there—it is always there to the extent that very, very poor auditing on the case may be the one little tiny straw that was necessary to throw this person across the line. This person was already across the line and might have walked out and seen a purple taxicab and gone across the line too. But remember, you’re dealing with the very stuff of which insanity is made. So take your precautions. The precautions are, then, reduce the grief engram if you possibly can as a primary step immediately after placing the person in reverie.

This is—mind you now, we were talking about Step Two and to give you a very definite idea of what Step Two is, it says: “Opening the case: Put preclear in reverie, check perceptics and see if moving on track.” That’s the first thing one does. And we’re talking now about an effort to attain material off this case. The second step is to “Run pleasure incidents to tune up perceptics, strengthen sense of reality, and get preclear in own valence.” This will sometimes work. And the next one is “Try for painful emotion discharges.” Which is to say, we’ve changed painful emotion pretty well; we call it normally now, grief.

Male voice: Does a person notice that he has this grief someplace, or could he think that it—there was no grief connected with that?

Normally, he will tell you, perhaps, no grief is connected with that. And the odd part of it is that he may have been so far out of valence and so shut off at the moment Papa died that at the time Papa died, he felt no grief. But for years he hasn’t supposed Papa to be the ally, and when we run him back in his own valence, we get a terrific spill of emotion.

Now this, then, is a primary target. We do two things with that immediately. We take a lot of the danger of restimulation off the case. The case will run easier, his tone will come up, his analyzer will turn on a bit more, he’s easier to run. You get the most positive relief there, a sudden quick relief, which you can get on a case when you run off one, two, three of these heavy grief engrams. And we make it easier to reach the basic area, much easier to reach the basic area. He’ll work better, because this grief is probably lying right there in the basic area. So you try for grief. It’s a good rule. And you can set it up as a rule because you may, by tacit consent, avoid grief engrams in your preclears. And many of you have done so. I have, just the other day, run into a case that was being worked very heavily, on some late physical pain engram, just why, God only knows. But there was grief sitting on this case very heavy. The case was not moving well on the track, rather out of contact, sense of reality was at that time poor, and we hit this grief engram. So just to avoid practicing an unwitting and unknowing tacit consent, take particular care that when you open a case into reverie the first time look for grief. Otherwise you’re liable to avoid it. And then when you’ve contacted it make a good strong effort to run it out. When you are thoroughly released or cleared—certainly when you’re cleared—you wouldn’t do this. But there is a possibility of doing this without even knowing that one is doing it and having the most beautifully justified answers in the world of why we didn’t go into the grief engrams in this case. So make it a solid rule that when you put this person in reverie and you’re going right on through a one-two-three Standard Procedure, hit for grief.

Yes?

Male voice: What are the problems involved in restimulation of grief engrams in the auditor in a case like this?

Tough!

Male voice: That would be the main reason for tacit consent because he suspected there might . . .

Sure. Sure. I’ve got no patience with an auditor though who restimulates. I have no sympathy for him at all. And I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve sat sweating over “hot brains” for a long time with engrams galore jumping, pounding, leaping, pains shooting through me from various quarters and angles, not yet knowing what the devil Dianetics was all about, trying to formulate the thing, trying to think, knowing something was wrong, knowing something of the principle of restimulation and not being audited myself And so I’ve developed a tough attitude toward the whole thing. I said, “If I can knock myself to pieces and damn near kill myself in the process, you can too!” Male voice: Period.

It’s true that every once in a while some auditor is auditing somebody and actually it’s a good thing to have lots of auditors in an area, for instance, here in the Los Angeles area, you’ll all be in contact, you’ll know pro auditors around and your people will be able to get in contact with pro auditors—the people you’re auditing. And you start up a co-auditing team, one of them has got lots of grief in the bank and he runs some grief out of the other person, he gets into a state of restimulation and he’ll bound back off of the case and leave the case hung up on the track and the case can’t get back up to present time and aw—yak-yak-yak-yak!

You know the lowest order of our—let me interject this because I might not remember to say it. There are three things which a physician does with regard to a patient. There are three orders of action. The first order is to cure the illness. Do what you have to do to cure the illness. The next order is to make the patient comfortable. If he can’t cure it, make him comfortable. Do something, you know, like give him an aspirin or some phenobarbital or prop him up in bed on a couple of pillows and make a long prescription on how the hot water bottles are supposed to come in every three quarters of an hour or something like that—make him comfortable. And the third order and the least useful of them all is if you can’t do anything about it and you can’t make him comfortable, give him some sympathy. Those are the three orders of action in treating people. The third order of action down here is a very, very poor one. But don’t let that throw you off track in getting grief engrams because you have to sound very sympathetic when you’re getting your grief engram. You can’t get grief engrams in the same mechanical way that you get physical pain engrams. You can’t say, “The file clerk will now give us a time of grief.” (said mechanically) “When I count from one to five, snap my fingers, the first words of the grief engram will come into your mind. One-two-three-four-five. Go over it again please, go over it again please, go over it again please. What’s the coffin look like? Yes, yes, go on.” I’ve seen it done.

Male voice: If you have a person who has been unable to weep all through his life or anytime through his life, how can you get him to start discharging?

Well now, you are in the position of working on a person who is out of valence, who has an analytical demon, who is probably all stopped up with grief, who has “You can’t cry. I am ashamed to cry.” Analytical circuitry; shame circuitry. You go to Step Three. You go to Step Three, take him with Straightwire.

All right, here we have then, the grief engram. We want this fellow, this grief engram, we want him out of this case as fast as we can get him out.

Sometimes, just in line with that, without going into Step Three you can just tell the person, “Let’s shift into your own valence now.” He’s evidently seeing everybody in the room, including himself, when he starts into this grief engram. That is common in grief engrams. You run him back to this point and he’s standing off there someplace watching himself stand over by the coffin, “Yeah, there he is.” “What sort of a suit are you wearing?” “Oh, I don’t know, blue suit.” “How do you feel about this?” “Nuthin’. Never cared for her anyway.” We’re sitting on top of a grief engram that would run a steam engine for a half an hour!

By running it two or three times in this fashion, by the way, going over it and over it two or three times, all of a sudden the person sometimes just automatically moves into himself. There he’s in his own valence and he’s in the scene. He isn’t likely to cry until he gets into the scene. So you tell him to get inside himself after a while if he doesn’t and then maybe he can make it and then you run it again. But you have to run all this sympathetically apparently and you have to run it quietly. And here is a little rule of thumb for you: When you are attacking an engram, in a loose, rough sort of a way try to match to some degree the tone of voice and mood of your preclear. In other words, in the old days, when Mary Pickford and so on were supposed—was going through the snow and all that sort of thing, we had Hearts and Flowers. And the audience—or, not Hearts and Flowers, we probably had something else—but the audience was put into mood by music. Let’s put the preclear into mood with voice. You can do it, it requires a minor amount of acting, Male voice: How about crying with him?

No, you start crying with him, he’d say, “Hell, this guys lost control of the situation too. Now we’re all in it.” But, you might—you can corn it up to a point where it’s not workable. But, usually if you approach a grief engram very quietly on the order of you know, you say, well, he’s in present time, you see. You put him in reverie, more or less. “Who’s dead?” And he says, “Well, it’s my grandmother.” And you say, “Well . . .” Not, let’s go anyplace, you see, but “Where did you hear about this news?” And he says, “Well, I don’t remember.” “Well, just try, it’s all right if you can’t . . .” (said sympathetically) And then he goes into the little act. “Well, I think it was—I think it was a telephone call.” And you say, “Yes?” “Now, who was calling?” “It’s my father.” “Well, where was this phone sitting there as you picked it up?” “Right there.” You see? You have pulled him back down the time track and he is finally sitting in the grief engram and you haven’t told him to go there. This louses him up something horrible!

Now, you creep up on these things, in other words.

Now, if that doesn’t work, the next little thing that you can do is, you know Grandma’s dead and so on and he appears to be doing one of these beautiful “dives,” so forth around it and he “can’t tell you” and he “doesn’t know” and so on, try and get him back to the time when she baked him cookies. “Well, let’s go back to the time you were a little kid and your grandma was baking you some cookies.” “She never baked me any cookies.” “Well, what did she do?” “Well, she used to sing to me once in a while.” “What did she used to sing?” “Oh, songs like ‘The Little Toy Soldier’ and so on. Nice songs, you know” “Well, let’s pick up one of those times. Let’s pick up one of those times, now” And oh, he goes back and maybe he’s very blunt and unemotional about this whole thing and we get—he’s running through the thing and he finally picks up a few words and maybe there’s a little charge on that, you know.

By the way, you can take almost any part of Eugene Fields and read it back to somebody who was emotionally upset. And Eugene Fields was the poisoner of men’s minds. So we stir up this moment, you know, of pleasure with this ally, and we get him to having a good time and we work at it. Sometimes you can work at it two or three sessions if you really want to do a good job of this thing and really get that grief off. It takes the expert touch. You go back there and you get him nicely wrapped up in having a good time. “Go to the moment she died!” (pop) Got him! Bow! Because you’ve come in at the back door on the thing.

Now, sometimes he’s terribly occluded about the whole thing, so we try to knock the occlusion out by Straightwire. We try to get some of these moments in sight, we work on that, then finally we go back to a pleasure moment. Then finally we turn on this early pleasure moment with the ally and then, again, we slam him into the grief engram, bang! And if you can do that, why, the grief will spill.

There are lots of tricks at this, but take note of this: we have to indulge in some of this trickery at this time.

Sometime in the future we will be able to open his mouth and drop a pill down it, and he will cry for three and one-quarter minutes and at that moment, probably, all the grief will be gone off the case. I hope, maybe. Until that time you’d better learn how to be very adroit. Don’t sit there with a pencil saying. (said mechanically) “When did your grandmother die?” “Mm-hm,” “What’d they say?” “Uh-huh, continue,” You’re not going to get anywhere like that.

Now, its almost impossible, in a case which is supercharged, its almost impossible to keep grief from blasting out of the case, in some of these cases. They just go boom! You take a psychotic, occasionally, run him down the track someplace and—odd how many psychotics, by the way, are very wide open, A lot of them are: sonic, visio, everything.

The amount of aberration has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of perception. That’s something for you to note. They are not constants. In other words, this person may be “full on,” sonic, visio and all the rest of it and be completely insane. That is to say, the aberration and the perceptics are different things. And he may be very well shut off and be very sane. Your constant there is not the perceptics. I mean there’s not a constant relationship between these two things.

There’s a reason for this—very definite—is that with bouncers, denyers, valence shifters and all the rest of it and with definite shut-off commands, we can knock out the perceptics, you see? We can knock down to that degree a sense of reality and all the rest of it. But when we are dealing with aberration we’re of course dealing with aberrative command level. There’s where the aberrative commands show up and in addition to this, we can break affinity on a case, in several places, and still have him frozen in his own valence. See, then this guy can’t get out of it and he can’t squirm off into some other place and there’s just no escape, there’s just no escape for him.

In other words, he’s frozen on his own time track and the natural things that—here, grief tends to knock a person, more or less, out of valence and out of his time track. It also has a buffer effect on the grief, you see? It’s a mechanical proviso that was sort of a built-in mechanism of “Let’s save this guy in spite of . . .” We’ve made this many mistakes in construction, now let’s make these things work for us too. So he can get knocked out of valence, therefore he’ll be shut off. There can be grief on the case but we’ll take this fellow who’s frozen in his own valence, who can’t get out of his own valence, who is commanded to be right where he is, who doesn’t happen to have command shut-off and now we have a fellow who is wide open and terrifically aberrated. Usually such a case is also heavily charged emotionally. They also have very heavy circuitry. You can have heavy circuitry and still have most of the perceptics wide open. So we start back on this psychotic and—we’re just innocent bystanders, and all we wanted to do with this psychotic was just to, you know, run him back to last nights dinner. Well, BP has been sitting there for a long time just waiting to go and you go back to last night’s dinner and that’s enough for BP. He starts handing up everything in the case, “Here you are! It’s all yours!” Wow! This guy’ll go off the couch and so forth. We knock out these grief engrams wholesale. Real screamers, some of these things come off, oh! It’s about the most deafening thing you’ll run into.

It’s supposed to be the horse on the field of battle, wounded, makes the most dreadful sound that can be heard by man. Now it’s the psychotic in the full rush of a Dianetic run. Because they can get loud. Doesn’t mean that because the person is loud on the run that they are psychotic, but it does mean that when you have a psychotic he is quite often very loud, I have seen an auditor come off of a psychotic case, which has been very loud, a shaken man. Actually he’s rattled, he doesn’t know what he is saying to you and so on. And then someone has to take him off to the side and run out the high points of this run on the psychotic. Because the pain impact of sound is an actual physical pain and it causes attenuation.

You can actually hypnotize a person with sound alone. And you can make a pain impact of sound so great that it will knock the analyzer straight out. As a matter of fact, supersonic frequencies of sound can kill a man. But that’s a different order of thing, I haven’t heard of anybody being killed by a noise yet, Male voice: Is it possible, during your auditing if you are slugging and talking rather loud yourself is it possible to have the anaten there?

What do you mean?

Male voice: Suppose you are auditing and you may feel that this calls for a lot of slugging and loud voice and everything. Is it possible to cause the anaten in the preclear?

He wants to know if you’re talking to the preclear if you’ll cause anaten with him? Yeah, you could cause anaten with him, you could shout numbers at him or shout one syllable at him over and over and over—one syllable, very loud, a monotonous pitch, monotonous volume—and you could eventually knock his analyzer out. But you can do that with a person wide-awake anyhow. But you would never build up to the volume that this volume—I see that you have no idea of the order of magnitude. You can’t yell that loud! That’s the truth! There isn’t a person sitting here right this minute that can yell that loud, just by trying to yell We can make quite a bit of noise when we’re yelling, but I have had a psychotic overheard three blocks away, all in high C! Just practically rip your eardrums out! Shake the window panes!

Male voice: Literally?

Actually! Literally, where you grab ahold of cotton and stuff it in your ears.

Now, when a grief engram comes off sometimes, particularly, you may get at the beginning of it a lot of this volume. Now, I’m just calling that to your attention that—I’ve digressed a little bit, but I wanted to specifically call to your attention—that sometimes this is what seems to be trying to come off naturally when you start a preclear down the track. That seems to want to be the first thing that comes off the case. He can be out of valence and everything so that it’s sort of badly shut off and all that sort of thing. But if you recognize that grief can be taken off of a case even when he is occluded and out of valence and everything else and with control circuitry and so on, you will try for it. And I’m trying to persuade you to make that try. Because case after case after case here is being run in the basic area that is completely top-heavy with emotional charge which is lying right there ready to blow.

You’ll find out, by the way, in blowing emotional charge—it was remarked back East a short time ago—that shame circuitry, that is, “You should be ashamed of yourself and “You should be ashamed to cry” and all that—shame circuitry seems to have a definite suppressive effect upon the grief engram.

It’s worth knowing the other trick which I have commented on before—running him back to a pleasure moment with the ally when you want to get the charge off. That’s a trick, I will just read you the rest of this: “Try for painful emotion discharges.” Now, we have gotten that far and I am supposed to give a demonstration here. But what I would like to do is just give you a demonstration of this data I have been going over here in class. And, of course, I know the PAs are all anxious to have you in class right immediately after, I don’t know whether that demonstration was supposed to be for the extended course or for the whole course or what audience.

Now, there is such a thing as a pathological liar, but—you know, chronic liar and so on—but almost anybody has a slight tendency to fib about a grief engram. And that is the one thing which is a constant in all lying as far as I’ve been able to figure out. Almost anybody will lie about a grief engram. Say, “Well now, the file clerk tells whether or not this has been exhausted,” Whether he gets no, yes, maybe or Timbuktu, he’ll say, “Yes! Yes, this is all gone.” Because they don’t want to face it.

Female voice: How much of the grief can you get off by straight line?

None. Straight line kicks off locks and we’re talking about an engram. Clarify it? Nobody ever knocked an engram out yet by Straightwire. (Recording ends abruptly)

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[[Category:Lectures 1950]]