View source for Review of Standard Procedure (500712)

'''Date:''' 12 July 1950

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

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Here we have this morning a further review on this Standard Procedure. Several things have come to my attention. One of them I want to mention specifically is that the idea of sending the somatic strip to the moment of highest intensity seems to be misinterpretable in the book The way one gets the somatic strip to the moment of highest intensity is merely telling it to go. That is an effort to pick up a somatic rather than a word content. It is not a technique which one uses while running an engram. One uses this technique only when he is trying to trace back a specific somatic.

Now, in the case of Andy the other day, Leo got some good material out of this case, cracked the case strictly on the basis of following a somatic. Isn’t that right, Leo? So there is profit in following a somatic down. It is definitely one of the lesser techniques but it nevertheless will produce results.

Now, in the book, when one was talking about somatic strip and the moment of highest intensity, we were talking about running a whole ladder of engrams, a whole bundle of engrams. It is apparent, of course, that if there is a chronic somatic that there are probably quite a few engrams bundled up creating it. Therefore, you just track that pain, the somatic, around until you finally land someplace where it can be run and where the bundles separate and where you get someplace. That is what that means in the book.

Don’t at any time or ever take a moment of highest intensity on this order: [marking on blackboard] “Go to the moment of highest intensity.” If a person’s somatic strip is working well, it’ll go over there. Now, that’s no way to reduce an engram. Send it to the beginning; then you always recall that the beginning of it is developable.

Now, in handling the somatic strip, it is of importance to know that the moment of impact on a blow is usually the moment of the most concealed information. There is a direct relationship in an incident between the perceptics and the depth of unconsciousness and the presence of pain—a direct relationship.

Now, this means that when you send the somatic strip back to the beginning of an engram and start sweeping it through, you have deintensified something somewhat on this order, on the first run: a little bit right here, [marking on blackboard] probably something a little bit here, probably in here someplace. That’s not erased, that’s just deintensified. That’s your first run through.

Now, your next run through you may get, if you get over the beginning of the thing, you may get something out of here. You know, just a little bit of something off the front of it. Now you probably get something like this, now you get a little bit here, you get a little bit here. That’s what your unconscious would look like. This is a blow; a double blow, bang-bang.

The next time you go through the thing, this will fog maybe just a trifle. So that, you see, is developing, up front of things. Well now, this is probably going to remain at its lowest depth, possibly will remain out of sight until you get this, and then at this time—now we go through the thing and we’ve got the engram.

Now, when we start developing up the beginning of a somatic it’s very important for you to know—got to know what you’re looking at when you go through these things—let’s say there is the first moment of impact, building up to a high pressure, then the blow is off. Now unconsciousness is getting lighter, lighter, lighter and just a little pain left.

This is a blow, let us say; Mama runs into the side of a table—let’s take it from prenatal area—bang. And we pick up her saying, “I have to go down to the grocery store,” clear down here. Now, the chances of “I’ll have to go down to the grocery store” lifting—very, very remote unless we get something out of here. So we recount it again; the somatic strip has been very, very obedient.

Now, on the first run through, the patient, let us say, has a pain across his face—you send the somatic strip to the beginning of this engram and we get the sensation of the pain without any of the impact or what caused it or any of the content of what caused it. So you could pick up an engram clear out here and have all this on the beginning of it. And the fellow says, “I don’t have any somatic.” Well, close attention will show that he has some little, slight tension on the face, something like that. Just because he only picks up that much is no reason to condemn the somatic strip. You can be assured that that somatic strip has gotten early, as early as it could get. But this was as early as it could get on the first run.

The beginning that you can reach is here. When you tell the somatic strip to go to the beginning of the engram, it’s going to go as close to the beginning as it can get, and no closer. It’s not going to be able to plow through and you’re not going to be able to pick up dead center or first end, a lot of cases. But it will go where it can get words. Their cooperation is to that degree. So we may find ourselves in here, “I have to go to the store.” Now, when we go earlier, it is not much use at first in urging the somatic strip to go earlier than it was before. Just tell it to go to the beginning again. And a good, working somatic strip will step back here a bit. If it does not, however, you say, “Let’s go a phrase or two earlier.” Always good sense to send it back just a little bit earlier than you were before.

All right. Now we pick up here, we run that. We pick up here, we’ll run that, pick up here, we’ll run that. You could actually deintensify this thing on this order. That’s a hell of a looking engram because there’s the headache if you didn’t keep backing it up. So we understand all of a sudden we’re running a blow. It seems like Mama’s walked into something. Now, the completely wrong thing to do is to say, “What did your mama walk into? Where was she standing in the room when she walked into it? What was on the table?” Yeah, we’re going to be cagey now, “What was on the table?” Maybe he’ll up and admit it was a table.

We’re going on the line of computation. It isn’t necessary to know this material. All it’s necessary to do is get to the first moment of it. So it’s only necessary to get there’s a blow here. Now, obviously if we’ve run a little context off of it, it’s not a kind of a blow that is going to—it wasn’t a fight. Fights seldom end in, “I have to go to the grocery store.” And so as we come over the thing, said, “Well, something hurt him. What? Let’s go to the first moment of impact.” The somatic strip will drop here. Only you won’t get all of this; you may get bang, then skip, and then on up. First moment of impact.

Now, if you’re not getting that satisfactorily as far as we’re concerned, you can do a time shift on this. Somatic strip’s very good that way. You go back, “Let’s go thirty seconds before the moment of impact.” And you’ll see the tension go out of the person. “All right. It’s now twenty seconds before the moment of impact. Ten seconds before the moment of impact. Five seconds before the moment of impact.” And then you just say to yourself, “Boom.” Boom, you’ll see him jump on the thing. “All right, now let’s pick it up from there.” Now you’ve gotten the splat or whatever it is, you’ve gotten an area here of deep unconsciousness and she says, “Ouch. Drat that table.” All right. We run it again. “Ouch. I hurt myself. Drat that table.” Other voice coming in all of a sudden, “Where are you going?” “I’m going to the store to get some groceries.” Engram. And you can proceed to deintensify the thing and reduce it.

It’s a funny thing in working these things, but you will get the most distorted idea of the length of an incident sometimes. You’re starting at the beginning of an incident, you know it’s the beginning, you do a time shift into it and you say, “Well, let’s see, let’s see what we can find here.” We get this kind of a condition, [marking on blackboard] This is a forceps being applied to baby’s face in an effort to help nature. Obstetrician had another engagement that morning, he had to get the thing over with in a hurry. Besides, hell, he doesn’t make enough money, he’s only getting a couple of hundred dollars for this delivery anyway. [gap] Hard-hearted crew, these doctors. All right. Engram.

Here’s a long engram. Let’s plot this against an hour’s time. Let’s just say for the sake of illustration here that this is the word “pull him out,” and that these words here are “don’t let him go.” This is an earlier engram. You run this thing, you start in at the front of it, forceps go down, “Well, he’s not coming.” You get it right at the beginning because we’re sweeping through birth and it’s fairly light there. “Well, he’s not coming. That’s better.” That’ll look like the engram to you. You say, “All right, the somatic strip will go to the beginning of this engram. Now let’s go on through it.” Now, “He’s not coming. That’s better. He’s not coming. That’s better.” The guy’s getting a somatic. “He’s not coming.” Now we start to get a little something in here. “Don’t stand around with your mouth open, pull. Go on, grab a hold of it—go on, grab a hold of it and pull.” We’re still reducing this thing on this basis. So we’ll run those phrases, the last series of phrases, and then all of a sudden we cross over this area. Now actually, this engram can be reduced on this basis and we can go off and leave it. These two phrases have not even activated. We don’t know they’re there. We haven’t touched them. But they can be there. They are hung up on this engram. These two phrases compare exactly with some lower engram.

We can run this thing. Apparently it’s birth, let’s say, run early in a case, it deintensifies. All right. It deintensifies and the fellow is perfectly happy about it. Then one fine day we’re walking up the bank on deintensification of other things and we hit this one down here. And gee, we hit this at the earliest moment of it and all of a sudden it skips over to here, missing these deep moments. And then we run it again because remember, phrases will appear. In a real rough engram phrases will appear and disappear. Some phrases will drop out. New phrases will come in. This is not always the case but if you are running a patient who uniformly gives you all the phrases that are present, there’s something wrong with this case. Sooner or later, something new is going to come into this engram. It’s not an absolute must, but it is the usual run of things. It’s one of the ways you detect dub-in, by the way. The fellow will run off sometimes the nicest engram and you go over it a few times, go over it a few times and it doesn’t selectively start to deintensify and no new material comes into the thing. And at that moment it’s not enough then to get eager-beaverish and say, “Oh well, hell, this is no good, we’ll pull him out of here.” Let him run it, but keep your eye on this patient. You’re going to find there’s control mechanisms in this case you haven’t touched. He is selecting out the phrases he’s willing to give you. Perhaps 50 percent of them are actually out of the engram. The rest is all dubbed in on the sound stage. All right. We run this one. Now we get this one all the way up, variously, and then the next thing we know we’re sailing along forward very nicely. We go clear up here. Now we’ve got to go and get this incident that had to do with being scalded at two years of age. You say, “That was the next tough one in the case; didn’t quite erase the way it ought to.” We’re on an erasure now. We go up there and we start into the scald and it goes whuf, choonk. And there’s something wrong with this thing even yet. You say, “That’s a funny damn thing. We’ve got the whole bank erased as far as I can discern and here’s this thing holding up.” We’ll ask the file clerk for it. Sometimes at that stage of the game the file clerk may or may not be on the ball. He sometimes may have selected it out. To pick up usual phrases, you’ve got to use your head on the thing. All right. It’s a good thing to go back and take a run through incidents which you’ve coasted through once before. Keep a sort of an eye on the case; you know that he’s hit this and that.

Because every birth that’s been run and apparently deintensified in this class still contains about 25—variable, very variable—but at least 25 percent of its content is still there. But it is out of sight. It’s completely covered by lower engrams. The chains didn’t permit those phrases to come into view. Now, on the erasure, someone’s going to be very astonished to find out that there’s a hell of a lot of birth left, a lot of it.

So, I want to give you an idea how these things look. Now actually as you’re sitting there running a patient you haven’t got x-ray eyes. This fellow is going to start in and he’s perfectly cheerful to start in and run this engram for you. And he’ll go over it and the engram says, I’m dead, I’m dead, I don’t know how I’ll ever be anything else but dead.” And you say, “Well, that’s a fine engram, a nice engram. Well, let’s run it.” Now, if you keep insisting that the patient go back to “I’m dead,” the first “I’m dead,” you’re going to produce something that looks like this. [marking on blackboard] Would that be good auditing?

That’s a fact. I’ve put my hands on quite a few cases around where we start to run an engram—there’s the engram, it’s completely slid out from under. His unconsciousness was heavy, it was dwindling off, the material was not available, so the person ran the lock off. And it said, “I’m dead, I’m dead.” This engram started at the beginning and it said, “Bow! Goddamn you, I’m going to kill you. No woman’s going to talk to me that way! I hate women!” And then Mama said, “I’m dead, I’m dead.” Well, that’s fine. You got an aberration up that says the guy’s dead. But the trouble with it is he hates women. All right. And maybe you’re a woman auditor and you’re trying to audit this character. That’s awfully interesting sometimes. And so you come back to the front of it here again and you’ll get the blow and everything else that tracks along on the thing and you deintensify it. And there’s the way it ought to look when you finish it up. Because you’re not going to get much off “I’m dead, I’m dead.” And sometimes some of the engrams which you are tackling, some of them which appear to be irreducible are that simply because you have neglected to get out the impact or the deep moments of unconsciousness in the engram.

You say, “Go earlier.” It’s an ambiguous statement and it should be. You say, “Let’s go earlier.” All right, there’s an engram and here’s another one. You tell the somatic strip to go earlier, you might wind up there, [marking on blackboard] and you might wind up there—similar engram. But that’s all right because this one won’t deintensify because that one does; so be purposely ambiguous about it.

Now let’s go earlier and get the source of this. “Let’s return a little earlier in this—earlier in this,” that would mean go back earlier in the same engram. But if you say, “Let’s go earlier”—a dub, by the way, is quite interesting sometimes. You say, “Let’s go earlier,” the dub-in will say, “It’s so early I can’t get up.” And you say, “Well now, I didn’t mean that; meant something else.” And he will say, “Oh. The earlier it is, the worse I feel.’ Yeah, there’s one in here. Yeah, that’s Mama. The earlier it is, the worse I feel.’” He’s probably running real information. But you say, “Now the somatic strip will go early” “The early bird gets the worm,” The poor guy is not being recalcitrant, he’s running a demon circuit which says, “Words have a literal meaning,” and “Words are important,” or something of the sort.

Male voice: Oh well, the question I’m trying—to get to the end of the engram, patient runs the—he reduces the first part with this last phrase “I’ve got to go to the grocery store,” for example in there, then do you have to walk back down the engram or can you just say} well, “The somatic strip and the file clerk will go to the beginning of this engram and give me the first phrase . . .”?

When you say to go to the beginning of the engram—let’s say this was it—it’ll go there . . .

Male voice: Oh, I see. And now you say, “Let’s go to the beginning of the engram,” if you have very little dub in this case, no terrific control mechanism, you’ll get there. “Let’s go to the beginning of it,” you’ll probably get there this time. It’ll work out. I just want you to be alert for the behavior of these things.

Now, once upon a time down in the city of Washington, a fellow by the name of Clark was running an engram, a very interesting engram. Another chap was auditing him busily and enthusiastically. They said, “Well, we’ve erased basic-basic.” All right. So just as a matter of check I went back a little while later and I put Clark back down the track to find out about basic-basic. I found out basic-basic now looked somewhat like this. [marking on blackboard] The fellow knew there was a call-back in basic-basic so he came down and he shot basic-basic what he considered full of holes. He took “Come here” out of it. And that was every last thing he had done to basic-basic. And he had run it about twenty-five times, he said. “Get out” was right on the front of it. This immediately put Clark up here. But he couldn’t leave and go up here because it said “Come here” there. So he was pushed off here and pulled in here. But here he got a somatic. So he came down and knocked this out, ran the rest of it without any somatic.

Now, honest, it isn’t difficult. This is awfully easy once you appreciate the fact that this sort of stuff will dive out of sight on you and that it might be lying. Now, this in the basic area was doing this to Clark. He came in and he said, “You know, all day long, all day long I have just been going up the time track and down the time track and up the time track and down the time track, somatics turning off and somatics turning on. I’m going nuts.” Actually, this isn’t all there was in that engram. It’s “Get away from that, Margaret.” [gap] Mama had evidently hurt herself, burned herself at the stove, and this was an ally, Grandpa, talking to her. So, “Get away from that, Margaret. Get out.” And there’s all sorts of stuff in this engram. And the person running it had gotten out “Come here.” Now, I think you will agree that that would not be classified as erasure of basic-basic.

The fellow even left it with the words all in place. I mean the fellow could still run—Clark could still run context. And he said, “Well, that’s a peculiarity of this particular case.” Now, I went back and right away it was apparent that we’d come down on the beginning of it. It said, “Get out.” He even had the bouncer. He was saying, “Get out, yakity-yakity-yakity-yakity-yaky come here,” and so on. This started in at the beginning of the engram and actually on this “get out” here, it went clear up here.

This was zzt-clang. Mama had her hand on a hot pan, jerked her hand away from the stove and in some way or other clipped herself in the abdomen with her elbow. And the beginning of the engram was not “get out” but zzt-clang.

Now, that’s interesting to note that you could get auditors who are so fixated on the idea that it’s the spoken language which makes the engram that they’ll overlook the sounds in the engrams as being important. And they are important. Of course, you can run a nonsonic case or just a vague sonic impression case for quite a ways till you get sonic on it.

You go back though and you’re going to find all the sounds there. It sounds very funny. You go back on the case and it goes zing, cling shh, toilet flushing, water spigots turning on and off, footsteps all over the place. It’s weird. The words are all shot up. And then you get the sounds of sneezes and you’ll get dogs running across hardwood floors, all sorts of things—claw clatter. And the bank will just be full of sound. But the patient is no longer leaping here and diving there and so on, because the aberrative content of the words is out. You have to, to some degree, run out the sounds.

It’s interesting that a couple of samples of each at the beginning of the case is sufficient to deintensify the whole thing.

Now, let’s take up this engram of Clark’s which was an interesting case in point. Sending him back to it, it is merely the matter of knowing a little bit more about the business than the auditor had. It’s not that it was terribly difficult. You know that on the phrase “get out” a person may have a tendency to ease off of the engram. So, “get out.” Let’s punch it full of holes on this “get out.” Mind you, his file clerk was working, his somatic strip was working, he was strictly pianola and this fellow could still mess it up, this auditor. That’s remarkable. That’s an ability which I don’t envy. Now, here goes the engram, zzt-clang, so I knew there was probably something like that there because the injury had to have a source. Here he’s running a very painful engram and no source for pain. All of a sudden, he’s got an awful pain all over him. Well, it’s a pressure pain. When did it arrive? You take him back to it, it turns on, but we have no real explanation for the source.

We could say, “Well, this is Papa hitting Mama” and add in a lot of script. But there’s no reason to do that. What’s there is there and what isn’t there isn’t there. It’s just some lines of dialogue and some sounds and some various suggestions, anyway. It’s not a whole play. But there has to be some moment of source. So, “get out.” Aha, a bouncer. Now let’s just ride this bouncer down and see what happens.Go over “Get out.” So he goes, “Get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out. (pause) Get out. (pause) Get out.” “All right. Now let’s run the engram.” Well, down the line we get the whole engram, the thing comes up. But not completely, nor as easily as it should. “Let’s go back to the very earliest moment of this engram.” And we get zzt-clang. You see? Now the engram is erased and basic-basic is out of the case. But I think you will agree that it was not before.

In trying to run a series of such engrams, by the way, in this particular case, you could pick up kinesthesia, you could pick up almost everything you wanted, but there was enough self-control left in the thing about midway up the bank, enough demon circuit to start throwing you a curve. You really wanted to get one of these engrams; he’d hand you something else. And as you got up the bank it got tough so that the case actually had to be shot full of holes on the subject of circuitry before you could get on with it.

Before I go on with this, let me show you here—I can’t show you this too many times—let’s plot these things as, there’s the level of analytical awareness here [marking on blackboard] and this is descents from it in terms of unconsciousness. You’ll get engrams that go down like this. Anesthetics, poisons, anything where unconsciousness comes on slowly, you’ll find it—you’ll go right to the beginning of that one.

The beginning of that one is very easy to find. You get down to the center of it, the first thing you’re going to run is something that looks like that. You’re going to run about this line. So you’re going to run from here to here, [tapping on blackboard] and from here to here. But not from here to here. You won’t get that. But as you run it, this line reduces down along here, and finally you can run the whole thing out, you see? By just running through the thing it develops here and will develop there. It’s not necessary to go over to that end of it and develop it, however. Develop it from this end. Keep recounting yourself into it, recounting into it a little bit further, recounting into it a little bit further. Each time you can pick up a new phrase, something like that, until all of a sudden you’ve gone all the way through the thing and it’s gone.

That’s the proper way to erase or deintensify a tonsillectomy, is don’t try to run it from one end to the other end right consecutively right on through. Because you’re going to at some stage start missing. This point is going to come up. And maybe even without being aware of it, you’re going to jump to that point. So make it a practice not to run too far into a tonsillectomy until you’ve got it developed up well enough to find out after which phrase are new phrases appearing. “All right. Breathe deeply, breathe deeply. All right. Let’s breathe deeply. That’s a good boy. Scalpel, scissors. Yak Yak. You seen Clark Gable lately?” “Yeah.” “Well, I love Clark Gable.” “Personally, I hate Clark Gable. What the hell can you see in that guy? You know, I got to have some lunch.” “Have you seen Ernie this morning?” “Yeah, he was in here complaining about his wife. Boy, his wife is really a bitch.” At this moment Ernie appears, “You said it! Well, I can’t remember a time when I was really happy.” Aw, yeah, you know, I mean standard . . .   (laughter) The damnedest one I ever ran across, by the way, was in an operation on Mama and somebody had been very angry with some patient on the floor. Mama’s being operated on. This fellow stands there and he says, “Goddamn it, if I had that bitch here right this minute I’d just love to put her up on that table and cut her to pieces. She’s crazy, that’s what she is. That’s the only thing you could do to a crazy woman. Just put her up on the table and I’d show her, you bet I would!” And the fellow says, “Now, come on, come on. Don’t get your domestic affairs . . .” I haven’t figured this one out; it’s just the engram. “Don’t get your domestic affairs all wrapped up in this. Just keep your private life out of work.” As a matter of fact, this happened to be a woman patient the engram was in, and she had fought a delaying action or a punitive action every time her husband, poor guy, tried to mention something he was interested in in relationship to work. They would have a fight right there, bang.

Of course, this engram had lots of holders, lots of call-backs, lots of this, lots of that. It had loused up her endocrine system; it was a mess.

All right. But to go on with this, here, from this point somewhere here, phrases are going to start adding. If you watch it—it’s not too necessary that you be too careful about this, but it’s just something you will see. You’ll start seeing phrases adding here, but this phrase will stay intact. Now, there’ll be this phrase and then instead of skipping to this phrase we’re starting at this phrase. All of a sudden, the second that you see the first one or two of these things, you know which end of the engram you’ve got.

Drop this one. [marks blackboard] Drop that phrase and just keep running in like this, we start to get to that phrase or we just get it and we drop it, because it’s no use to worry about it. And you just keep driving into the engram and all of a sudden your whole thing has moved up.

Now, the impact goes like this: Bang, zzzt.

Male voice: Just a second, on that first one do you ever start getting it from the end of it to the beginning?

What do you mean, backwards? Yeah. Matter of fact, I’ve chewed up an engram from the rear, just completely.

As a matter of fact, there’s one patient present who is a very good auditor that used to back up through engrams. By God, to this day I don’t know the mechanism that caused him to do it. He doesn’t do it anymore. Somewhere along the line somebody hit the mechanism. But he had to back up through every engram backwards, isn’t that right, Johnny?

Male voice: Probably the whole engram bank.

Yeah. And he had to back down the whole prenatal bank. Nothing would reduce. We practically went down that bank phrase by phrase, down to the bottom. Then when I got down to the bottom, why, somebody dropped burning oil onto his head and the erasure was interrupted. (laughter) Well anyway, here we have an impact. These moments right here at the front. Those are actually the two major classes of engrams. The impact and the toxic. Well, when we look over most work, we find flaws generally along this order of somebody starting into the engram and letting the person play it off, not understanding that a bouncer will keep a man off of an engram a little bit; when he’s got a call-back to get onto the engram that he’ll sort of be twisted back and forth on the engram this way, that his actions may be very strange and peculiar. And that as long as they are, you’re not going to get very far. So if you do something like that, get the bouncers out of it. “Is there a bouncer in this engram?” (snap) “Yes.” “The somatic strip will now go to the bouncer in this engram. Give me a phrase.” (snap) “Get out.” “All right. Go over ‘get out.’” “Get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out . . .” You’ll notice the somatic toughen up and then the tension go out of it; after that he can run it. It’s a handy mechanism. [gap] . . . operation engram looking a little bit different than that. And it’s not a steady curve because in addition to the impact, down here we have the anesthetic. So we’ve got impact and anesthetic running in the same engram. In other words, there are sudden surges of pain. And each time you get one of these surges of pain, the stuff will go down deeper. Then furthermore, an anesthetist has no good clue as to the depth of unconsciousness present and is liable to let the fellow drift up. So instead of that beautifully smooth curve which is merely the ideal curve, an operation engram will generally look like this, and then something like this, [marking on blackboard] and then maybe more anesthetic. About this point they generally say, “Oh, don’t let him wake up. The pain would kill him. He’s really wild with pain down underneath, if he ever heard about it. So don’t let him come to.” “He’s out now.” “Yeah, well keep him out.” It’ll start to run like this and he’ll come to and you’ll get a little visio in the middle of the thing and then off she goes again. “Give it to him, feed it to him.” Now it’s more impact, so on. Then this one is the dentist’s knee upon the fellow’s chest. “Oh well, Christ, he’s out. He doesn’t know what’s happening. It won’t hurt him any. You can’t hurt a fellow like this anyway; has no sense of pain once he’s got this stuff in him.” Female voice: “Keep him down’ I think is the phrase I’ve heard most Oh sure. Well, “Keep him down, keep him out. He’s unconscious. He won’t know anything.” Female voice: “Keep him out.” “Keep him down.” Well, “Keep him out, keep him down, keep him still, hold him still. Now shut up, goddamn you, and hand me that instrument.” This is standard operation medical procedure. If these people had only kept on talking Latin . . . (laughter) Male voice: A shock engram . . . ?

Well, the shock engram without anesthesia would look like that. Oh, you mean a shock?

Male voice: I don’t mean electric shock, I mean physiological shock.

Second male voice: Surgical shock coming in on an operation.

This is . . .

Male voice: Or an accident without anesthesia when you have a couple of. . .

It’ll look like the lower one.

Male voice: It’ll look like the lower one?

Yeah, jagged. Then you’ll tell it—coasting in and out while the cop says, “What’s his name? Yeah, what’s his name?” The pedestrians come around. “Well, hold him still; he’s liable to have a convulsion. Look, he’s going into a convulsion.” I ran into that the other day.

Female voice: Ron, how about a local anesthetic?

Nothing. Well, you’ll get some unconsciousness in a local, but it’s just a little flick. A local anesthetic; here’s the normal awareness and here’s the little area there where your local is in.

Male voice: Is that true with a spinal, too?

Oh yeah. These damn spinals, they’re great stuff.

There’s nothing very strange about a spinal. A spinal is an anesthetic. And it installs an engram. I don’t know a great deal about spinals, because I’ve never run very many of them. But I’ve never found a patient who wouldn’t latch up on one. I mean, supposedly wide-awake he’s still recording.

Male voice: They quite frequently slap a fairly heavy dose of morphine in the patient in addition to the spinal.

That may be what caused it. I never had a chance to consult with doctors about it, what they do in spinals. I know the first fellow who came near me with a spinal tap, if I had any means of protecting myself, be short shrift. I’ve run into some spinal arthritis which was precipitated by spinal taps. They found out they could shove a needle in the spine. Since that there’s no holding them.

Male voice: Well Ron, supposing somebody had to have an operation and had their choice as to an anesthetic Wouldn’t a spinal be preferable . . . ?

Take ether.

Female voice: Oh, ether?

Yeah. Ether or chloroform.

Female voice: What about that? Why?

That’s right. Take ether or chloroform.

Female voice: Why?

Least harmful anesthetics I ever found. They’re lousy, but they’re a lot better.

Male voice: How about cyclopropane?

Cyclopropane, no, as far as I’m concerned. Cyclopropane is dangerous; it’s liable to explode in the fellow’s lungs. They’ve lost some patients that way. (laughter) Male voice: Locals will do that too, on occasion.

Yeah, but that’s generally static electricity in the operating room and you don’t have the guy’s lungs go out.

Male voice: Or any of those hydrocarbon anesthetics would explode.

What’s the matter, does chloroform explode?

Male voice: Chloroform doesn’t explode, but there’s too narrow a margin between the toxic and the anesthetic dose.

Yeah.

Male voice: Very narrow margin there.

Yeah. I’ll still take chloroform.

Female voice: And nitrous oxide is worse than either of those. I . . .

Nitrous oxide is a work of the devil.

Second female voice: Why, because of the somatic . . . ?

There’s some chemical reaction in nitrous oxide that snarls everything up. Leave it alone, boy, that’s the roughest stuff in the world.

Nitrous oxide is a restimulator. That is a chemical binder on the reactive bank. Anytime that you can look snide at a dentist and say, “Oh, you use nitrous oxide,” and neglect to shake his hands, per all means, do so. Because that stuff is terrible.

Nitrous oxide is not an anesthetic. Nitrous oxide is an hypnotic. And I’m sure there’s somebody around can whip himself up an anesthetic that won’t louse up the reactive mind. I’m sure that an anesthetic is possible.

I do know that on chloroform’s—engramic value of chloroform is not tremendous. Ether, it’s not too bad. These two, pretty good. Nitrous oxide, very bad. And scope is not too good.

Male voice: What about morphine?

Morphine is just morphine. That’s an anesthetic. Most of the stuff classified as hypnotics or anesthetics, several of the anesthetics are hypnotics. It’s a very clumsy-looking picture at the present time.

I don’t want to go too far into that. I want to get on this other subject.

Male voice: One question, Ron, erasing localized pain, localized by a local anesthetic . . .

Mm-hm, go over it, it’ll pull up.

Male voice: Is the guy aware of this, or is. . .?

Yeah. Yeah, you got a recording of it, underneath the anesthetic. But a local anesthetic isn’t very rough. It is actually preferable.

Second male voice: The analyzer itself is not shut down.

No, but actually there are pain impacts going in, in spite of the local anesthetic. And you’ll get it back out again when you’re running it.

There is this value, is that you start on through the thing, the person is very well aware of what’s going on. It’s very easy to recover on the thing if you can do a local. A spinal is going into the nervous system for some reason. I don’t know anything much about the spinal. But I’ve always, every time I’ve clipped one of the things, had trouble.

Now, I want to mention to you—Miles asked a question on when is it safe to leave one? Or when . . . ?

Male voice: Well, when you walk him back through one like that when he’s picking up stuff missed, when they say, “There’s no more here’ when you try and get back to the first one, ah . . .

Yeah, that’s the phrase I wanted, “When there’s no more here.” When they say, “There’s no more here.” I have discovered, on inspection of some cases, that the greatest auditor error present here is conversation with the preclear with relation to the erasure or reduction of the engram and questions to the (quote) file clerk (unquote) whether or not it is safe to leave this engram. And that series of questions is not only unnecessary but will lead you far, far astray.

It’s a type of questioning that you should just set to one side. Don’t do it anymore. Because I’ve been checking through a couple of cases here and no good. I want to cover this point because this is the most important point, by the way, I have to cover today.

The standard procedure around here, “Is it safe to leave this now? Is this erased? Is this reduced? Yakity-yak.” That is perhaps prompted by the auditor’s wish to go on to something else, probably the auditor gets bored at that point or something of the sort.

There’d be no other reason for it since there’s only one test. And that is auditor observation of the action of the engram. That’s the one test: auditor observation of the action, his observation of the patient and so on. He knows. You can tell by looking at the patient whether or not a thing is reduced or erased. You can tell by the behavior of the engram. And that is the only test.

You ask for a flash answer, “Is this erased?” and you’ll almost always get “Yes.” The reason you’ll get “yes” is because the patient may have come up to the very point in the series of runs where he thinks he is bored with this thing, he is resisting the idea of going back through it again. If you don’t ask him, he’ll go right on back through it again. But the second that you give him a chance to get out of it, he is not computing at the moment and so he flies off at a tangent and he’s willing to go on to something else and you leave an engram . . . [marking on blackboard] We might be running an engram here and we have run out this and, “Is this engram erased?” “Yes.” Oh well, we might be careful and run him through it one more time. “Is this erased?” “Yes.” “Is it safe to leave this now?” “Yes.” “Now, what do we have to go to next?” “Anywhere but here” is the motto. (laughter) So just don’t ask that question. Don’t ask anyone that question because you’ll never get a straight answer. [gap] How do you get the beginning of it? “Let us go a minute ahead of this engram.” You want to be sure—you can overwork this device, very often not necessary to use it. But if you have any qualms about this thing, send him ahead of it. Let him relax. “Yeah, that’s fine now, yeah, that’s fine. Now let’s move ahead of it again. Let’s go into it now. All right. Time is one minute before it, thirty seconds before it, ten seconds before it,” boom! (laughter) That’s wonderful. You get the most remarkable results with this.

Male voice: And you re also—generally depend that if there s an engram, something happened, and you haven t got the front of it until you find out what happened.

Mm-hm. I wouldn’t say so. I have found some of the most remarkable conversations on the coitus chain. That’s right. Somethings happening, but when did it start happening? There isn’t any clue. And there’s a lot of stuff with which there’s no real clue. But you should, if you’re running something that looks like an impact engram, you should find out pretty well.

Now, a pressure—I say there’s two general classes—there is also the pressure engram as opposed to what would have been the impact; a sudden increase of pressure, that’s in the BM chain that’s particularly true. You get back here to the beginning of the thing, it’s pretty easy to get to here.

I want to tell you how you know. That’s important to you. You should be able to look at a preclear as he is running an engram and tell what he is doing. Now, he may be a coffin case who is just lying there stretched out very neatly, hands beautifully crossed, riding it on through, stone cold dead on the couch. And he might be riding this thing through beautifully, but somewhere along the line you’ll get him out of that, I hope. But even if you don’t, you can still tell. Watch his physical manifestation. It may be so faint as to be undetectable; he’s still getting a somatic. But as he starts through this thing—you send him early in the engram, you say, “Go to the beginning of the engram; now let’s roll it.” You find out by content what it is. You observe him, all of a sudden he starts running something that’s completely out of text. And you say, “Give us a yes or no. Is there a bouncer here?” “Yep.” “All right. What’s the bouncer?” Get the bouncer and go back into the engram again. Keep running off the engram. Now start through it again. Start through it again. Start through it again.

Now he says, “Well, I guess that’s about it. I guess that about settles it.” And you say, “Go through it again.” And he says, “Well, I guess that’s reduced now, I’m going to go on to something else.” “Go through it again. Now, let’s get two phrases earlier in this thing.” And coffin case or no coffin case, you get . . . (laughter) All right. So before you leave an engram, make a time shift test; make a time shift test. Get earlier. You may run into a complete blank ahead of it. If so, okay. You may run into a hell of a lot more engram.

Now, if an engram is erasing, phrases are dropping out of it. Phrases will get in juxtaposition to each other. Phrases will tangle. New phrases will appear. It is not a smooth running picture of “I see the cat, the cat is black. I see the cat, the cat is black.” It isn’t. Its “I see the cat. Damn cats, I don’t like them anyway. That cat’s black.” That’s what it turns into suddenly.

In such a way, as you run through the engram, you can detect the fact that this is varying. Well, that’s a good test. But it’s not an absolutely necessary test because the unconsciousness through the area might have been very smooth and very light and you might have gotten the whole text on the first run. So you don’t trust that completely but it’s just an indicator. So you start through the thing again, you run it through, and if it is going to erase, it comes down to a point finally where the person is actually doing a “Don’t tell me.” (He doesn’t have to say that, but I’ve seen an awful lot of them do it.) And he says, “I can give you a replay on this. I remember what was in this thing.” And you say, “Go ahead, what was in it?” “I see the cat. The cat is black.” “All right. Let’s see if we can find that on the track.” “I see the c—” “All right. What was the engram again?” “Well, I can tell you the context.” “Well, go over the context.” (pause) The guy’s baffled and that is an erasure. That’s a real erasure. If there’s anything remaining of it, if he can replay it, it is a reduction. It is perfectly legal to leave a reduction. The somatic is gone, the words are still present.

You’re going to find lots of reductions before you get erasures in almost any case. It is not going to hurt him any and it’s not going to be aberrative. But when you come to an erasure, a real erasure is unmistakable and don’t let anybody try to kid you out of it.

If you’re playing one that is going on and on and on, the fellow can go over it and over it and over it, there’s some sort of a crazy bouncer mechanism in this thing and you didn’t get it in the first place.

Female voice: Well Ron, suppose that you were running one that you believe—have reason to believe is an engram but no somatic has turned on. Is it safe to leave that before a somatic turns on?

Before a somatic turns on?

Female voice: Yes. Suppose you’ve worked for two and a half hours and what you’ve gained is one engram and no somatic.

Well, anytime you work for that length of time without getting a somatic, there’s one of three things wrong. You’re running a person out of valence, you’re running a self-control circuit or it is computational. There is a bouncer present who is holding the person off of the engram. “Pull out before you come” is such a computation. And I’m going to come” will cause all sorts of flickers as it goes through. So it’s computational. “I can’t feel anything. I don’t know what’s happened.” Female voice: Is it safe to leave an engram in that condition?

Well, let me be very specific about this. You say, is it safe to leave? You couldn’t get a somatic on it and so forth. You should know in the first five minutes of reaching any engram what you’re going to do about it and where you’re going to go from there.

You’re going to have this case pretty well spotted before you go down into that engram anyhow. You can get a pretty good idea of what it’s going to do. But if you start running through where there is just a little twitch that’s not doing much and you’re just running context and it’s on and on and on, there’s something awfully wrong.

Female voice: In this case it was a valence shift, a terrific one and I—it took a long time, maybe it was ignorance on my part, clearing up the computation that caused the valence shift, and I had to go over and over and over and over and over . . .

He—commanded into another valence right in that engram?

Female voice: Right in the engram.

Yeah. Bang. So you’re running it off the side.

Female voice: Uh-huh.

Yeah. Here’s the point. If you’d left that, you probably could have gotten away with it all right. He probably wouldn’t have been in bad restimulation because he was in that other valence. You probably could have left that safely enough. If you’re getting any kind of a somatic and if the somatic is reducing, you ought to knock it out; if it’s reducing, not receding. Don’t stay with one that is doing a recession.

Female voice: I don’t think I actually know the difference.

Here is a thing doing a recession, [marking on blackboard] Female voice: Oh, you mean going back on the track?

Now, wait a minute. Here’s a thing doing a recession. Here’s a reduction.

Female voice: Oh yes.

The idea is one of how hard you have to work. Another thing on a recession, after you’ve recounted a recession five or six times, one or two phrases, you’ve counted that five or six times over and over and over, you’re going to after a while find out that your somatic is toughening up on you.

Boy, if you’re running the wrong engram in the case, not the one that was supposed to be run, you’re running the wrong one, you can toughen up the somatic and toughen it up more and more and more and more and more and you could count it, I suppose, a couple of hundred times. You’ll get a recession on the thing and you’ll come back to it in three days and you will be right back there where you started. That is interesting. But it’s awfully easy to solve. If you get an engram that on one phrase where the somatic is toughening up—and by this I don’t mean it’s just turning on. It’s getting worse. He’s got a slight headache at the beginning and you run the phrase again and he’s got a worse headache. And now you run the phrase again and he’s got a worse headache. And now he’s got other perceptics cutting in on the thing, only they’re worse and the headache is worse. And you run that phrase again and it’s much worse. And you run it again and it’s much worse. You can just run that fellow practically into the ground.

This means that this phrase certainly appears earlier in the bank and you’re probably running the wrong engram in the case. So the best, most efficacious method of handling it is just get the hell out quick. That’s why you shouldn’t stir up a whole engram when you’re fishing for valence and demon circuits. And that’s what I particularly want to cover with you.

First, just in the normal course of Dianetic therapy, you have to know this about engrams: It is not difficult, you will seldom run into anything that will strain your wits any in running this. But you should be aware of the fact that a little earlier material can be in the engram and that that little earlier material might be holding up an erasure of it.

Furthermore, you should be aware of the fact that five, six engrams can lie in front on one somatic, let’s say a tooth. Been a knitting needle through the teeth and there’s dentistry on top of it, so on. You run one of those things out and you’ll spring the bundle apart. But try to choose the earliest one you can get. If you can’t get that, try to choose the most intense one, one where you’re going to get muscle vibrations and so forth. You’ll then separate out this bundle.

These make the most interesting holders in the world. When a fellow is stuck on the track, he’s got a chronic somatic and he’s got one of these bundles, all simultaneously, he will have also a chronic pain or a somatic of some sort. Or he’ll have a chronic physiological derangement, usually.

There they are, all stuck together. You can run that thing out.

Yes?

Female voice: I’d just like to make sure, in an erasure, you wouldn’t even have the barest essential of the action left over?

The fellow could say, “Well, I remember what happened, it’s a hell of a fight here.” “Well, all right. What was said?” You bring him up to present time—and this should interest you also—you bring the fellow up to present time and he can probably run the engram again. But he can’t run it very often. He can run it two or three times and it blows up on him there. [gap] Male voice: . . . the engram necessary to resolve the case at this time and he hands you one, and you probe around it a little bit and find that more than likely there s something much earlier, same word content; the file clerk handed you this one asking for it and you find it’s earlier—would you run the one he gave you or . . .?

That’s a particular point I want to go into here. All of this data about running engrams is just standard information which you have to have.

The point now where an auditor has to be clever, really clever, and practically the only point where he has to be clever is in the diagnosis and the location of valence and control commands. He’s going to have to be clever. This would be right up at the beginning of the case and it’s at this part of the case that he must have a command of Dianetics at its best, at its most difficult.

He’s going to walk into a bank that is pretty badly—he hasn’t got a file clerk to help him. The somatic strip is not doing anything like he wants it to. It’s messed up. He asks for a bouncer, he gets a denyer. Believe me, that is a sure, certain pointer to a control demon circuit.

So, you start into the case and here . . . [marking on blackboard] Here is the way the engram bank looks. And this is emotion, (laughter) And this is the orderly character of the bank filing system. (laughter) All right. We start in on “control yourself.” That happens to be there. Only it’s there and it’s there and it’s there and it’s there and it’s there and it’s over here. And we’ve got to find one that will reduce on “control yourself.” Don’t let it scare you, just know that you’re doing a piece of broken field running here which can get very interesting, extremely so.

The first time you run the circuit out, you’ll probably be running it out with the patient out of valence.

You’re probably going to be running something that was not the central dramatization which caused the control circuit. But you’re running something you have to get before. So you just have to take the case by the nape of its neck and just shake it up good.

Try to find something that will reduce that contained the phrases which you are now convinced through diagnosis are there. You know that Papa—“Get a grip on yourself.” He was always saying, “You got to get a grip on yourself, you got to get a grip on yourself.” All right. You know this. But you don’t know that Grandma also said, “Now, you have to learn how to control yourself or you’ll just never be able to face anything now” You don’t know that just now That’s the toughie. But in the first diagnosis we find out, “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself,” and we say this is probably aberrative. But the fact that the patient knows it very well, by that fact alone, we say this isn’t center on the case. But it’s data and we’ve got to run it as such. So we enter the thing on a repeater technique basis. That’s dangerous to enter a case on a repeater technique basis so you want to walk carefully. Get something that’ll reduce. Just start running that phrase. Don’t worry about how many engrams it appears in or doesn’t appear in. Run the phrase down, pick it up here. This bundle doesn’t spring apart, nothing happens. You run this thing a few times, isn’t going to go. Let’s get it earlier. You may have run into a misdirector. Now you have to go later. You go later, you know. You say early, it says late. There’s demon circuits in this case. In other words, the picture is complex. So all of a sudden, however, by charging in and just trying to get your hands on that one phrase—that’s all you want—the one phrase, without exciting holders . . . Don’t worry too much, occasionally you may excite a holder. If you do, try to reduce it. But try not to excite one. Don’t go off the line of attack. The line of attack is a demon circuit command.

You don’t want, then, to get “Stay here,” because that’s no demon circuit. So we start in and eventually there’s this bundle here and we get “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself” down here and by golly you get a deintensification of it.

Male voice: Is that in reverie?

In reverie. Yeah. You’re running in reverie now, you’ve diagnosed, you’ve got him in reverie, you’ve picked up a dramatization of Papa’s that has that phrase in it and you know that’s a circuit, undoubtedly, you’ve got to get it out. So we hit here and maybe here, and gee, it’s all loused up. And then all of a sudden, we don’t even know where we are in the case but this one deintensifies.

You have two choices. Just leave it alone, or by a time shift get the rest of the engram, well knowing that that engram may not reduce and that you may restimulate an engram which you won’t be able to do much about.

Nevertheless, if this—it’s a matter of judgment—if this reduced hard, I wouldn’t do that. I would reduce it just as a phrase. And then I would look for the same phrase earlier again. Now we’re down here. And we start running the same phrase again and we find ourselves able now to reduce something rather rapidly.

The second we get one of these things that’ll do a rapid reduction even though the person is out of valence, do a time shift and run the rest of that engram. The chances are that that whole engram is available and can be run. And now you’ve got a whole engram off the case. It is better to do it that way.

Now you have scared up other phrases, you’ve loosened up the bank somewhat and you may be fortunate enough to be early enough to get off some yawns. However normally in the beginning on a case you are not going to get off any yawns. You’re just going to deintensify some. So the test is whether or not the “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself” as a demon circuit command reduced easily or with difficulty. That’s the test. If it reduced with great difficulty—and understand I don’t mean difficulty for the preclear. To hell with that. Let him walk on the ceiling, stand on his head, roll on the floor and scream; that’s not difficulty for the auditor. That’s beautiful. You reduce that—you reduce the whole engram when you get into one of those. They’ll reduce.Yes?

Male voice: Let’s say your somatic strip isn’t working; how do you get those points?

Repeater technique! Exclusively.

Male voice: You don’t know where you are, though.

No. It’s playing blindman’s buff.

Male voice: Do you care much where you are?

No. You’re just looking for something you can reduce without shaking the case to pieces, that is, without ruining the preclear completely. The only way you can ruin him is to find nice quiet engrams like “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself. I hate you, you dog, I hate you,” and so on. (said in a quiet, disinterested tone) And he’ll lie there. “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself, you’ve got to get a grip on yourself.” You say, “Well, this engram isn’t affecting him very much. Well, come on up to present time.” Walk behind him slowly, playing music. Second male voice: Assumption, Ron—I have a case, he’s held in about three or four incidents on the track, he’s all full of demon circuitry, a lot of painful emotion in the case, and somatic strip and file clerk aren’t working . . .

They wouldn’t. No, they wouldn’t for several very specific reasons. One, if he’s caught somewhere on the track, they’re there.

Second male voice: He’s caught in operations, the operations are sitting on something or tied into locks and—all the way up and down.

Yeah. What do you do first to free him on the track?

Second male voice: Well, first of all I would get him to this, but you just try to—you can’t open it in two hours or four hours, it’s going to be straight memory diagnosis. You have to find whether the painful emotion is more powerful than the holders he’s in or whether the holders are the reason why he can’t get the painful emotion off. It’s just a question of probing and probing and probing to see where you can get an opening. Is that correct? It may take anywhere up to twenty hours to do it.

Oh yeah. Anytime you get optimistic on the subject of opening up a case which has, let us say dub-in, lots of circuitry (as a result, dub-in), out of valence, bank all loused up, been operated on by a dentist, been operated on by a doctor, psychoanalyzed, psychiatrist walked through the room and looked at him one day—that’s poison. Do you know they have an evil eye? (laughter) Male voice: These demon circuits . . . Answer me a question—they can be sometimes—theoretically at least, I—the direct memory step, so even at this, could they still be running engrams in reverie or is it . . . ?

You’re adrift.

Male voice: I’m adrift? I’m trying to find out what the score is.

You’re adrift. What can you do with direct memory?

Male voice: Find cues.

Second male voice: Find dramatizations.

Male voice: Find cues to dramatizations.

What causes a circuit?

Third male voice: Engrams.

On direct memory, the first time I ever see an engram knocked out by direct memory, I’m going to be a surprised man; very surprised.

You’re going to have to run them in the engram with the pain and so on. You’re going to have to run them as phrases or a dramatization. You’re going to find the dramatization somewhere in the case, you’re going to have to try to find it where it is.

By the way, don’t assume that because everything is black and the perceptics aren’t on, the fellow isn’t moving on the track, that he’s necessarily got circuitry. Don’t assume that. Because he might merely be stuck thoroughly on the track.

Female voice: I discovered last night that I have a command which says, “You mustn’t yawn, Margaret, it isn’t polite.” If it were—wouldn’t it be a good idea to run that out? I mean . . . ?

What is it?

Female voice: “You mustn’t yawn, Margaret, it isn’t polite. It isn’t polite to yawn, that’s all” What about that! That is a—quite a discovery, I think.

Does it make you uncomfortable to yawn?

Female voice: Rather.

Go on and yawn. Go ahead and yawn.

Female voice: You must be a lady, it isn’t ladylike. (laughter) Everybody yawn. I’m not joking with it. That damned thing is aberrative. Yeah, run it out. You get the test? Be a little bit clever on it and you can get all sorts of things. This could almost be “stop yawning.” Female voice: All I have to do is say, “Well, when am I going to yawn on this engram?” and I yawn. That’s all I have to say.

Well, you may be running a command yawn . . .

Female voice: Oh. . . . and you must—here’s the command. (pause) (laughter) You may be running a command yawn.

Female voice: Oh. Uh-huh. Run it out?

Yeah. “I’ve got to yawn. I keep yawning.” Female voice: That’s a very good one. That would . . .

Male voice: Will you clarify this yawning on valence? Somebody’s in another valence and they keep yawning all the time at wherever they are. You mentioned something about that earlier.

Oh yeah. Well, that’s well advanced into the case. They only do it when they’re returned on the track; it’s all right. There’s just locks all over the darned place, just thousands and thousands and thousands of them that have never been picked up, because the fellow’s never been in his own valence. [gap] . . . not grave difficulties but the tricky, imaginative kind of work which you can expect to do when you go into a case that has lots of circuitry, lots of valences. At first, here’s the fellow, no perceptics, you can’t reach pleasure moments, you can’t do anything on the thing—he’s obviously stuck on the track someplace. He may have a series of about three or four commands that are very tough, one of those “control yourself” mechanisms that knocks out the auditor’s altitude. The next thing is a “You’ve got to lie” and “You don’t even want to know the truth of this yourself” sort of a thing that drops down and covers it up.

The next thing, “You’re just like your father, he’s no good either.” Then we have in addition to this a very scrambled prenatal picture of all kinds of assorted bruises, contusions, piercings and penetrations. This case we enter in our innocent, helpful way, unsuspecting, our heroism utterly unsung. Now, we walk into this case; it’s a solvable case. We’ve done a straight line diagnosis. We know it’s not going to be easy.

The point I’m making is when we enter this case, we must settle our minds on one operation at a time. Let’s not try to do one, shift to another, shift to another, shift to another, change our minds here and change our minds there.

We say, in a dogged, persistent sort of a way, let’s take out the control mechanism from this case. Let’s find out what there is about it, since that, by the way, would be one of the most important ones you could take out of it. We found out the case won’t work, we’re down at Step Three; we have to be there. Otherwise, nothing’s going to happen in this case.

Well—by the way, he might be frozen on the track. If he’s frozen on the track, we wouldn’t go after a control mechanism. His somatic strip can’t work and the file clerk can’t work merely because they’re stuck right there. They’ve been there for years. And try to spring that engram. And in passing, when you try to spring one of these engrams in which a person is stuck, remember that that engram may depend for its force on an earlier incident; it is necessary that when we run that engram, run some sample and we find out what it’s going to do. It’s necessary to reach the one on which it is hanging, which is invariably earlier when they’re stuck like that.

So, we get the thing deintensified. We can get him moving on the track. We should always try to get the fellow moving on the track before we start charging him into something with repeater technique. But supposing after a great deal of art we can’t get him moving on the track. He is just thoroughly stuck there and also it gets kind of spooky. We don’t know what the hell—this engram that is dodging around there—we don’t know what it is, what to do about it. We can’t get flash answers, we can’t get anything out of this case.

We can, however, do straight line diagnosis so we found out a dramatization, then dive—in spite of the stuck—then dive for the one mechanism.

Don’t try to take two mechanisms on; do one thing at a time on this. Let’s try to get out “control yourself,” After we’ve gotten down early in the bank, we’ll ordinarily find that we can get a “control yourself” which will release. The strange part of it is, if we’re having that much trouble, there’s probably a “control yourself” right in the engram where he’s stuck. Very often.

Yeah?

Male voice: Ron, if you don’t have a file clerk and somatic strip to work—that cooperates with you, how do you get to the place where he’s stuck on the track?

You just make him repeat himself into trouble. You crowd him. You wheedle, you coax, you hammer, you expound, you torture and you otherwise reach the incident, (laugh) Second male voice: Ron, well, when you finally use—have to resort to crowding and pushing a little bit and in the course of crowding and pushing you restimulate something he’s still better off being restimulated for three days if you knock out a control mechanism, if you do have to push a little bit harder?

Yeah. Of course, pushing and crowding is very last resort. It’s the application of force where thought should have prevailed. I’m talking now particularly about the “control yourself” mechanism.

Male voice: I mean it’s all full of demon circuits; you can’t get a flash or anything out of it.

That’s right. You can’t get anything out of this case, let’s crowd him; particularly against the “control yourself” species of mechanism. There we will get results. We have to sometimes. Don’t be too diffident about doing it against that mechanism. Now, against grief, never crowd a guy. Against a valence shift, something like that, there’s nothing kicking back at you anyway. You see, if you can get a “control yourself” out of a case, your own altitude goes up. That’s why you select it as a target. Also he’s no longer able to auto-activate his own circuitry.

Female voice: What did you say about the valence . . . ?

Oh, the valence. Well, just look over, what are valence commands? “You’re just like your father,” and “You can’t be like me,” and “You’re just like anybody else,” and all that sort of thing. Those things, they have no resistance built into them. Hm?

Female voice: “You’re different.” Yeah, “You’re different.” (laugh) That’s a swell command.

So, in going down the bank on such a case we have to have reassured ourselves to this degree: we’ve done everything we could think of without crowding him, then we can crowd him.

Now just start putting your hands on something. Get into it somehow. Now, there may be another kind of a computation staring you in the face that you aren’t quite witty about. There may be several little puzzles you have to undo before you can get to where you’re going. But the point I’m bringing up is the auditor’s skill is between the point where you finish your first straight line diagnosis and the point where the somatic strip and file clerk are working with you. That’s what you solve. During that stage of a case you have to reduce what you get your hands on, yes. Or reduce the earlier one on which the thing was depending, yes. But your main purpose until you get that done is to get the file clerk and somatic strip working, not to run out engrams out of the case. Your target is to get workability. In order to get that workability you can’t restimulate something that’ll hang the guy up somewhere. But your first target is to get workability. You get workability, you can go on your line happily. And you can achieve that workability. But don’t be downhearted if in the various ways and means that you have, that it takes dozens and dozens and dozens of hours to get some case working. You keep asking for it, you’re going to get it. That is always true, sooner or later.

I’ve had cases go on and on and on. I worked one case eighteen hours once without getting him out of the engram in which he was stuck, was getting no perceptics of any kind, the fellow just lying there, not responding, not talking, nothing, eighteen hours. He was just lying there, no respondo, no motion. And then all of a sudden at the end of eighteen hours, I asked him finally for, “Give me a flash reply on a holder.” And he says, “I’m stuck.” And I thought, “Well, here we are again.” Occasionally he’d repeat something for you in a dull voice.

Well, the fellow started to say, “I’m stuck.” He started to shake all over. And we ran the tension out of the engram he was latched up in, which was about three weeks postconception. I was practically in basic-basic with the case all this time and didn’t know it.

Yes?

Male voice: Ron, now, what if you theoretically had him working running in the basic area, got the phrase here reducing and so forth And then you say, “What’s the bouncer,” and he says, “Well, bouncer—this is not a bouncer but a holder” And then you say, “All right, give me the holder,” and he says, “Get out,” and he himself realizes that there s something at work here.

You’ve pointed up the surest fire test in the world for circuitry. When a case does that, start handling him on a “control yourself” species.

Male voice: Even the patient himself realizes this.

Oh sure. But just shift your tactics right there. I thought I made this clear, but that is one of the first tests made to find out if the file clerk and somatic strip are working with you.

Are they giving you the material you’ve asked for? If not, you’re wasting your time. You can play with this case and get nowhere for hundreds and hundreds of hours. Take warning from me on this. You can go ahead and monkey with it. You can lie around and run this case. You can apparently get material now and then. You can listen to it. He’s very questioning. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t know whether he’s running engrams. You’re not sure whether he’s running engrams or not.

He lies down, he starts going through it and you get a late-life lock. You say, “Well, we’ll deintensify this.” You can monkey with it and you can fool with it and you can do anything with it and you’re not getting anyplace. And you’re not giving him enough therapy to worry about and you’re wasting time.

The second you find out that the file clerk and somatic strip aren’t working with you, go to work to make them work with you, not to run engrams. Get the difference. That’s a very wide difference of policy. Don’t keep running engrams. Get circuitry.

Male voice: In these self-control mechanisms that you’ve had experience with, Ron, is there quite a high degree of definite attempts on the part of the preclear using what analyzer he has available to dodge? In other words, he realizes . . . “Let’s get that engram now.” “I’ll get it this time.” “Now, let’s repeat the first phrase of it.” “I’m going, I’m going, I’m going, I’m going, I’m going, I’m going . . .” You can do this for five hundred hours. I know, I have done it.

This was John’s example, by the way. He was demonstrating how Dick was running Grandma’s death. And he was saying, “All right. We’ll get Grandma’s death. Now, this time we’re going to get it—(snap, snap)” (laughter) [gap] On breaking a “control yourself” mechanism, “Get ahold of yourself” came up last night. He was just sitting there. You don’t have to worry too much about a person who has this circuitry in a lot of holders on the track. You say, “Come up to present time,” he goes like this.

You haven’t solved the case, you’ve been working on him two hours, he’s been there most of his life, so what the hell? Don’t worry about him. Shoot his case a few more holes, bang bang bing we get this one, bam, over here. And he’s right there anyhow. Try and solve the one he’s latched up in if you possibly can. But you don’t know what it is and he doesn’t know what it is, so you kind of grope on the track.

Last night I asked Dick—here’s an example of shooting a hole in an engram—I said something or other, and he kind of twitched so I got interested and I said, “Well, close your eyes. Now, do you remember what your father used to say about something or other; give us some kind of a command on ‘control yourself.’” And he said, “Got to get a grip on my . . . You’ve got to get a grip on yourself, Florence!” He immediately . . . (laughter) So I said, “Well, let’s go over it again. Is there a bouncer in here?” “Yes.” “All right. Let’s go to the bouncer. All right. What’s the bouncer?” (snap) “Stay there.” (laughter) “All right. Let’s go over ‘stay there’ a couple of times.” “Stay there, stay there, stay there, stay there, stay there.” “All right. Let’s go back over this thing again.” “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself, Florence!” So we knew right away that we were hitting an aberrative series. So, he goes over “got to get a grip on yourself, Florence.” He goes over the thing a few times and I say, “Come up to present time,” just to be formal. And he opens up his eyes and we took a little tension out of it. Didn’t we?

I just ran the thing till he was no longer “getting a grip on himself, Florence.” (laughter) And eventually he just leans over sideways like this on the table, that’s all. Okay. I’ve got all I can really out of the engram at the moment, worked on him ten or fifteen minutes. Just shot a hole right where he was. We didn’t go anyplace else. It was too easy. So I suppose, having gotten that out, if I’d been working in a regular fashion, I’d have tried to get the rest of the run on the thing, there probably would have been a little somatic, a little tension on it.

In other words, that’s all we’re shooting for is the circuitry. If we can get the rest of the engram, swell. That’s just fine. But if we can’t, at least we’ve gotten some circuitry out of it. And if people working him, for instance, would just keep on potshooting this type of command, the first thing you know, you’re going to be able to say to the file clerk, “Is there a bouncer in this?” (snap) “Yes.” “All right. Give me a bouncer.” (snap) “Get out.” Boy, that would really be something! Then you can run engrams. But until you can do that, you’d better run whatever you can get that is strictly on the “control yourself” level, because that’s the dub-in circuit.

Male voice: Ron, on a case of this general type, of a patient who’s stuck at the age of four, in a situation where she’s lost and the words are, “I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where I am,” and repeating this, she immediately switches to almost dispersed about the entire bank, to where she is—comes up with all kinds of crazy incidents, completely unrelated, and all through this there is painful emotion—should I keep on potshooting?

Painful emotion all through the search? You mean she keeps crying?

Male voice: Off and on, yeah.

Keeps crying. How interesting. Not on any specific incident, just keeps crying. Hm, let’s set it up as an experiment. How long will she cry? I’ve seen people cry for a couple dozen hours, line charge on the track and so forth; every time you work the case, the patient cries. I’ve never seen it keep up forever though.

Male voice: It was a long time.

This person was doing this stuff personally. She must be doing a hell of a lot of auto, wandering around on the track and skipping from this to that and so on.

Male voice: What’s that? Just try to release painful emotion on it?

Well, if you can get the specific source of the painful emotion and release the thing, let her cry But keep your ears wide open for the circuits. The second you get what they are, why, just get in there, wrap your hands delicately around them, put your foot against the chest and pull them out.

That’s the whole problem in that case. She’s not doing what you want her to do. She’s doing what a demon wants her to do. She can’t do anything about her case, you can’t do anything about her case. Let’s get ahold of the demon. He’s evidently boss man at the moment.

Okay. When it comes to the cleverness which you must exercise at this time in Dianetics, it is the moment between the first moment you approach the case and the moment the file clerk and somatic strip gets working. Goal one. When you’ve achieved that, the rest of it’s strictly pianola.

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