DMSH 1950 Book 3 Chapter 10

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Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy (Part Two)

EXTRA-SENSORY PERCEPTION

Every time the auditor has a case with dub-in recall or which is highly charged with emotion, the case may return into the prenatal area and start describing scenery. This is the awe and wonder of some beholders. There is the patient in the womb and yet he can “see” outside. The patient tells about father and mother and where they are sitting and what the bedroom looks like, and yet there he is in the womb. Some pretty theories can be advanced for this: one of them is that the tortured foetus develops extra-sensory perception in order to see what is coming next. ESP is an excellent theory and some observation may confirm it but not in the foetus.

One must recall that the foetus, even if it has highly developed and clever cells, is yet not a truly rational organism. The presence of the engram does not necessarily mean that the foetus could think. The engram became most severely aberrative when the child finally learned speech. The engram is not a memory but a recording of pain and percepts.

Returning a grown man or a child into the prenatal area returns there an experienced mind which, connecting with these engrams, forms conclusions. To listen to some pre-clears one would think they read Keats and drank lemonade every afternoon at four throughout the prenatal period.

To return reason and analytical power back into a period when neither reason nor analytical power existed, of course, impinges upon the returned individual many ideas. All he is supposed to run are the engrams and their contents. He may additionally, by dream mechanisms and current computation, try to fashion in a whole technicolor picture of the scenery.

This prenatal ESP does not in fact exist. It has been proven, after considerable test, that whenever the returned pre-clear thinks he sees something, the scenery itself is mentioned in the engrams and gives him an imaginary picture of it. There is no prenatal ESP, in other words. There are only descriptions and actions which suggest scenery and these suggestions, operating now upon the imagination, bring about the supposed visio.

This is most chronic with patients who have high powered lie factories. When the auditor sees this he begins to form a notion of the case he is engaged upon, he knows “dub-in sonic” may be used and he should find and discharge all painful emotion he can reach for it is this painful emotion which so disposes a case to avoid. He can find, then, the lie factory itself, not the lie factory of the lie factory which produces lie factories, but the actual engram which causes all this delusion.

However, never bring a pre-clear up short on this material. Don’t tell him it is imaginary, you’ll drive the lie factory into higher effort. For there are sympathy computations here, despairful losses, great prenatal pain and childhood neglect. And it would take little to shatter what self-confidence this patient has managed to assemble. Therefore walk softly, look for despair charges, allies, sympathy engrams and get the lie factory. Then the case will settle down and progress to clear.

ELECTRIC SHOCK

It has been found important, in entering a case to locate and relieve all engrams caused by electric shock of whatever kind. These seem to produce a grouping of engrams, whether they are received prenatally (as some have been), accidentally, or at the hands of psychiatrists.

Any electric shock seems to have more than usual force in the engram bank and apparently deranges the memory files of both past and future events surrounding the shock area. Further, electric shock injury contains a great depth of “unconsciousness” which thereafter holds the analytical mind in a reduced state.

TACIT CONSENT

In the case of two pre-clears working on each other, each one assuming in his turn the auditor’s role, a condition can arise where each prevents the other from contacting certain engrams.

For example, pre-clear A has an ally computation concerning a dog. He unknowingly seeks to protect this “pro-survival” engram within himself although, of course, failure to release it will hinder therapy. As he audits pre-clear B he has a tendency to project his own problems into pre-clear B, which is to say he has some slight confusion of identity. If pre-clear B is known to have some “pro-survival” engram about a dog, then pre-clear A, auditing, will actually avoid making pre-clear B contact B’s own engram. This is a mistaken idea that by letting B keep his dog engram, A can retain his dog engram. This is “tacit consent.” It might be summed as a bargain: “If you don’t make me get well, I won’t make you get well.” This should be guarded against: once known that such a condition exists and that such reluctance to clear the other is manifested, “tacit consent” ceases.

It may also happen that a husband and wife may have a mutual period of quarrels or unhappiness. Engaged upon clearing each other, working alternately as auditor, they avoid, unknowingly but by reactive computation, the mutual period, thus leaving in place painfully emotional engrams.

Tacit Consent is not easily recognized by the individuals so involved, and pre-clears, alternating as auditors, should be very wary of it for it cannot do other than slow a case.

EMOTION AND PAIN SHUT-OFFS

A case which manifests no emotion or cannot feel pain when emotion and pain should be present in some incident is suffering from a “feeling” shut-off: this most likely will be found in the prenatal area. The word “feeling” means both pain and emotion: thus the phrase, “I can’t feel anything,” may be an anesthetic for both.

If an exteriorized view of the incident (where the patient sees himself and is not in himself) or what pretends to be prenatal “ESP” is present, the emotional shut-off probably stems from painful emotion engrams in late life or at least post-birth. If there is no exteriorized view and the patient is within himself, and yet no sharpness of pain or emotion manifests itself while he is running through an engram, an early emotional shut-off or an early pain shut-off should be suspected and should be located by repeater technique. Run the words “No emotion” until a paraphrase is obtained: run the words “I can’t feel,” or some other phrase meaning the same thing and the patient, if the engrams are available and are not suppressed by others, will eventually respond.

It may happen that a case may “work” very well, which is to say that engrams present themselves and can be run and reduced, without emotion manifesting itself as part of the content and with somatics which are dull and not so much pain as simply pressure. If the pain and emotion shut-offs do not yield at first to repeater technique, many engrams may have to be

run in the basic area without pain or emotion but only with pressure and word content. In such a case pain and emotion can eventually be contacted, after which therapy is more beneficial.

EXTERIORIZED VIEWS

Whenever you find a patient, returned, outside himself and seeing himself, that patient is off the track. He should not be told so but the despair charges, which is to say, the painful emotion engrams, should be found as soon as possible and discharged. This is something of the same mechanism as the ESP described above.

TELEPATHY

Every few cases some pre-clear may try to palm off telepathy as an aberrative factor. This is more rainbow chasing. There may be telepathy but so far as research has shown the foetus doesn’t receive any and even if he receives it, it is not aberrative in any way.

Exhaustive tests were made on telepathy and ESP and in every case an explanation was found which did not need to go into mind reading or radar sight.

When a patient tries to tell the auditor that he is reciting mother’s thoughts received prenatally, be certain that somewhere around there is an engram in which she says these exact words aloud. Mothers, especially when aberrated severely and especially when aberrated severely enough to attempt abortion, have many engrams they dramatize. The power of the dramatization commonly manifests itself as monologues. Some mothers have a very great deal to say to themselves when alone. All of this speech is, of course, transmitted to the child when he is injured, and he may be injured without mother being injured as in an attempted abortion. For considerable time after such an injury the child is usually “unconscious” and in pain; he therefore records in engrams these monologues (and often the voice is quite loud). He doesn’t hear it: it is simply cellularly recorded. All such monologuing is aberrative, of course, and produces some remarkable patterns of insanity and neurosis.

But of telepathy, there is none that is aberrative so far as we know at this time. So the auditor should not accept telepathy any more than he would accept ESP.

PRENATAL LIVING CONDITIONS

It is very noisy in the womb. A person may think he has sonic and yet hear no “womb” sounds, which means that he does not have sonic but only “dub-in.” Intestinal squeaks and groans, flowing water, belches, flatulation and other body activities of the mother produce a continual sound.

as well

mother

It is also very tight in later prenatal life.

In a high blood pressure case, it is extremely horrible in the womb.

When mother takes quinine a high ringing noise may come into being in the foetal ears as her own — a ringing which will carry through a person’s whole life.

Mother gets morning sickness, has hiccoughs and gets colds, coughs and sneezes.

This is prenatal life.

The only reason anybody “wanted” to “return to the womb” was because somebody hit and yelled “Come back here!” so the person does.

THE ENGRAM FILING SYSTEM

Engrams are not filed in the orderly fashion managed by a cleared standard bank. Engrams are filed in a way which would defy Alexander. Hence, it is difficult to know when the proper consecutive item will appear.

Time, topic, value, somatic and emotion are the methods of filing.

The return from basic-basic may be an apparent orderly progress into late life. Suddenly a despair charge is triggered and discharged. The auditor looks back at the prenatal area and finds a whole new series of incidents in view. Progress is then begun back to present time, step by step, another discharge is triggered and another series of prenatals come into sight. These are erased and progress is made back toward present time when still another despair charge is released and still more prenatals come to view. These are erased and so forth and so on.

The engram filing system gives out data by somatic, time, topic, value or emotion. Usually the file clerk hands out material on the basis of time and topic. Emotion in the bank keeps the file clerk from getting at a certain series of incidents; when the emotion is discharged, the incidents become available and incidents are brought out until another emotional charge stops the file clerk. The wit of the auditor is most used, not in getting prenatals, but in finding these later life emotional charges and discharging them.

All in all the engram filing system is very poor, unlike the standard bank. But it is also very vulnerable now that we understand it.

The engram filing system data can be erased. Standard bank data cannot be erased. Pain is perishable — pleasure endures.

ALLEVIATION

The psycho-analyst or general counselor in human relations is occasionally faced with a type of problem which dianetics, applied in small quantity, can resolve easily.

It is possible, when a person has been too disturbed by an event of the day to address himself to the problem at hand to alleviate his disturbance with a few minutes of work.

A sudden change in the aspect of a patient, a sudden deterioration of his serenity, generally stems from some incident which has caused him mental anguish. Although this change of mind has its source in the restimulation of an engram, the moment of restimulation, which is a lock, may be addressed and alleviated with success.

Using reverie or merely asking the patient to close his eyes, the analyst can request him to return and be in the instant wherein he was disturbed. That instant may be in the same day or the same week as the office call. A moment of analytical shut-down will be discovered wherein some restimulative person or circumstance upset the equilibrium of the patient. This moment is a lock. It can be recounted, ordinarily, as an engram and the latest source of tension will relieve so that work can be continued. The engram itself, upon which the lock depended, may not be accessible without a full dianetic address to the problem.

The auditor, finding a patient much disturbed, can often save time by relieving the lock which caused the immediate disturbance of the pre-clear.

Locating locks on a wholesale basis is unremunerative from a dianetic viewpoint since there are thousands and thousands of them in every case. Locating the last lock, which is hindering work, may be of benefit.

THE TONE SCALE AND REDUCTION OF ENGRAMS

Because it is very important, the mechanism of the reduction of a late painful emotion engram must be specifically detailed.

The uses of reduction on late engrams are wide and various. When the auditor gets into trouble with his pre-clear by some violation of the auditor’s code, he can treat the violation as a painful emotion engram and reduce it, at which moment the effect of his blunder will be gone in the pre-clear. The auditor merely returns the pre-clear back to the blunder and runs the error itself as an engram. When the husband has quarreled with his wife or she has found out some unpleasant thing about his activities, he can treat the quarrel or the discovery as a painful emotion engram and release it with the result of no further worry about it by his wife. When the little boy’s dog has just been run over, the incident can be treated as a painful emotion engram and released. When the pre-clear’s wife has just left him, treat the leaving as a painful emotion engram and release it. Whatever the shock or upset, it can be reduced in an individual by regular reduction technique and the individual will cease to be troubled by it in the painful emotion sense. It does not matter whether the engram occurred two hours or ten years ago, painful emotion can be reduced from it. It is run exactly like any other engram, beginning at the beginning of the first shock with the patient returning to it and continuing far enough along it to adequately embrace its first impact.

The aspect of this reduction is a pattern which does not much vary. If the news struck the individual into apathy, then, as he recounts, he will, unless there is a severe emotional shut- off elsewhere, progress through the incident a time or two, perhaps, before he contacts it properly. Then there will come the tears and despair of apathy. Another two or three runs should bring up anger. Then further recounting (always from beginning to end as re- experience) brings the tone up into boredom. Further recounting should bring it to Tone 3 or 4, release or, most favorably, laughter.

This progress of the tones is the clue which led to the establishment of the tone scale from 0 to 4. A Tone 4 is laughter.

There is sometimes a stage in the Tone 2 area where the patient begins to be offhand and flippant. This is not Tone 4, it denotes more data present. He may resist recounting at this point, saying the incident is released. The auditor must insist on further recounting whenever he finds the pre-clear unwilling to recount again, for here is data being suppressed and more charge is present. The flippancy is generally found to be an escape mechanism and is sometimes uttered in the very words which are yet concealed. More recounting (without the auditor insisting any certain words be found) is then done until the patient reaches Tone 4.

Here we have, in vignette, the behavior of the whole engram bank in the process of therapy. The entire bank rises from its initial tone level eventually up to Tone 4, higher and higher as more and more engrams are erased or reduced. The bank’s rise is not, however, a smooth upward curve for new engrams will be contacted with apathy in them and some have manics in them. The painful emotion engram, however, does a rather smooth rise. If it is going to release at all it will rise up the scale. If it does not rise up the scale — apathy to anger, anger to boredom, boredom to cheerfulness or at least no concern — then it is suppressed by an incident with similar content.

An engram may begin at Tone 1 — anger — and rise from there. If it is found to be in Tone 2 at the start — boredom — it is hardly an engram.

It may, however, be in a false Tone 2 and suppressed by other data so that the patient merely appears bored and careless about it. A few recountings may bring about release of it, at which moment it will sag instantly to apathy — Tone 0 — and then come on up the scale of the tones. Or another engram may have to be contacted.

The whole physical being follows this tone scale throughout a course of therapy. The mental being follows this tone scale. And painful emotion engrams follow it.

On an erasure down in the basic area or when returning from basic-basic, two or three runs will erase an engram of whatever kind unless it is the basic on a new chain of similar incidents. But engrams which show no emotion anywhere on the track are suppressed by emotional or feeling shut-offs, late painful emotion or early engrams which simply shut off the pain or emotion in so many words.

A case should be kept “live.” There must be variability of emotion. A monotone recounting, which is to say, one which does not vary the engramic tone but merely reduces, is necessary in the basic area at times, but anytime a patient becomes orderly and “well-drilled” and expresses no concern over his engrams as he recounts them, there is late painful emotion to be tapped or early emotional shut-off. Conversely, if the patient is too continuously emotional about all and anything, if he weeps awhile and then laughs hysterically, therapy is being done but one should be alert for something engramic in the prenatal area which says he has to be “too emotional” — which is to say, he has engrams which make him emotional by their command content.

The tone scale is very useful and is a good guide. It will be most prominent in reducing post-speech engrams, but will also appear earlier.

Any painful emotion engram can be run. If it is properly reducing and not suppressed elsewhere, it follows the tone scale upwards to Tone 4.

IF THE PATIENT DOES NOT WORK WELL ON REPEATER TECHNIQUE

If, when the patient repeats a line the auditor has given him, the patient does not move to an incident, three things can be wrong: first, the patient cannot move on the track; second, the phrase may be sensibly withheld by the file clerk until such time as it can be cleared; or third, the phrase does not exist as engramic material.

The patient may also have strong “control yourself” engrams which manifest themselves by his snatching control from the auditor, being very bossy or simply refusing cooperation. Repeater technique, when directed at “control yourself” and “I’ve got to operate” and allied phrases, can then work.

The usual reason repeater technique does not work is that the patient is in a holder. If he is returned but does not shift on the track when repeater technique is given him, use repeater technique on the holders.

Remember that a “feeling” shut-off can deny all somatics so that the patient does not feel them. If the patient seems insensible to trouble on the track, be sure that he has a feeling shut-off.

A large emotional charge may also inhibit repeater technique.

The somatic strip does not go well into emotional charges — painful emotion engrams — and repeater technique is therefore indictated.

If repeater technique “the worst thing that could happen to a baby” and so forth and from his conversation may be garnered new phrases for repeater work which will take the patient into an engram.

SINGLE WORD TECHNIQUE

Words as well as engrams exist in chains. There is always a first time for the recording of each word in a person’s life. The whole common language may lie within the engram bank. The possible combinations of that common language may well approach infinity. The ways various denyers, bouncers et al., can be phrased are always beyond count.

Two “happy” facts exist, however, to reduce the auditor’s labors. First, the dramatis personae of his engrams are at this date aberrated. Each aberree has standard dramatizations which he repeats over and over in restimulative situations. The reaction, for instance, of the father to the mother is repetitious: if he utters a set of phrases in one engramic situation, he will utter it in subsequent similar situations. If the mother, for example, has an accusative attitude toward the father, then that attitude will be expressed in certain terms and these terms will appear in engram after engram. The second fact is that where the father or mother is abusive to the other, the other will eventually begin to suffer contagion of aberration and will repeat the other’s phrases. In a first-born child, where parental brutality is present, one can observe the parents through the engrams of the patient and see one or the other gradually take up the other’s phrases either to worry about themselves or to redeliver them. All this tends to make the engrams appear in chains of incidents, each incident much like the next. When one has the basic on each type of chain, the subsequent incidents on that chain are sufficiently similar to permit many incidents to be reduced or erased immediately after the first is found. The first incident on the chain, the basic for that chain, holds the others more or less in place and out of sight; therefore, the basic of the chain is the goal.

Each word in the bank can be discovered to have been delivered to the bank for the first time. Words also reduce in chains with the virtue that each subsequent appearance of the word in the bank locates automatically a new engram, which, of course, is reduced or erased as soon as it is contacted or as soon as its basic can be located.

Single word technique is very valuable and useful. It is a special kind of repeater technique. On most patients, the repetition by themselves of one word will cause the associated words to suggest themselves. Thus, one asks the patient to repeat and return on the word Forget. He starts repeating the word Forget and shortly has an associated set of words, making a phrase, such as “You can never forget me.” Here we have a phrase in an engram and the remainder of the engram can then be run.

When a late engram has had to be contacted to progress a case and yet will not relieve, it is possible to take each word or phrase of that late engram and run it back with repeater technique. Thus the earlier engrams which hold this late engram in place can be located and reduced, and eventually one will have reduced the late engram itself. This, by the way, is a common and useful practice.

There is a law about this: When any phrase or word in an engram will not reduce, the same phrase or word occurs in an earlier engram. One may have to discharge late emotion to get the earlier phrase, but ordinarily single word repeater or phrase repeater will attain it.

There are only a few dozens of words necessary to get almost any engram. These would be the key single word repeaters. They are such words as these: forget, remember, memory, blind, deaf, dumb, see, feel, hear, emotion, pain, fear, terror, afraid, bear, stand, lie, get, come, time, difference, imagination, right, dark, black, deep, up, down, words, corpse, dead, rotten, death, book, reed, soul, hell, god, scared, miserable, horrible, past, look, everything, everybody, always, never, everywhere, all, believe, listen, matter, seek, original, present, back, early, beginning, secret, tell, die, found, sympathy mad, crazy, insane, rid, fight, fist, chest, teeth, jaw, stomach, ache, misery, head, sex, Anglo-Saxon four letter words of sex and profanity, skin, baby, it, curtain, shell, barrier, wall, think, thought, slippery, confused, mixed, smart, poor, little, sick, life, father, mother, familiar names of parents and any others of household during prenatal and childhood period, money, food, tears, no, world, excuse, stop, laugh, hate, jealous, shame, ashamed, coward, etc.

Bouncers, denyers, holders, groupers, misdirectors et al., each have their common single words and these are few. The bouncer would contain: out, up, return, go, late, later, etc.

The holder would contain: catch, caught, trap, trapped, stop, lie, sit, stay, can’t, stuck, fixed, hold, let, lock, locked, come, etc.

The grouper would contain: time, together, once, difference, etc.

The single word technique shines nowhere brighter than in the Junior Case — where the patient carries the name of one or another parent or grandparent. By clearing out the patient’s name from the prenatal engrams (where it is applied to another person but misinterpreted by the patient as himself) the patient can regain his own definition and valence. Always use the patient’s first name and last name (separately) as repeater, Junior or not.

If the engram bank is blank on a phrase, it probably is not blank on a common word. Any small dictionary will provide an ample fund for single word technique. Use also any list of familiar first names, male and female, and you may discover allies or lovers not otherwise contactable.

The painful emotion engram sometimes yields slowly by simply directing the somatic strip to it. Sometimes the patient finds it difficult to approach an overcharged area. Single word technique using the name of the ally, if known, or words of sympathy, endearment, death, rejection or farewell and the love name of the patient as a child in particular will often yield swift results.

By the way, in using repeater technique, word or phrase, the auditor must not stir the case up too much. Get what shows and reduce that. Reduce the somatic the person manifests when he goes into reverie and always try to find it for a while, even if you don’t succeed. If you stir up something en route down a chain which won’t reduce, mark it to be reduced when you have the basic.

Using single word technique one often obtains phrases which would otherwise remain hidden but which come into view when the key word is tapped. Using “hear” as a single word, for instance, the following phrases came to light which had thoroughly impeded the progress of the case. No effort was being made to contact such an engram in the prenatal area. Indeed, the “fight” chain had never been suspected since the patient had never dramatized it and because such a violent prenatal fight chain existed the fact that his parents fought violently in the home was utterly struck from the standard banks so that he would have denied such a thing with shocked surprise had it been suggested. The somatic was unusually severe, caused by the father kneeling on the mother and choking her:

Patient repeated “hear” several times, the auditor asking him to return to an incident containing that word. The patient continued to repeat and then suddenly sank into a stupor when he reached the prenatal area. He remained in this “boil-off” for about thirty minutes and then, the auditor rousing him occasionally to make him repeat the word “hear,” manifested a strong somatic. “Hear” became “Stay here!” The somatic became stronger and “Stay here” was repeated until the patient could move freely on the track through the engram. He contacted his father’s voice and was most reluctant to carry on with the engram, due to its intense emotional violence. Coaxed and edged into it by the auditor, the engram was recounted.

FATHER: “Stay here! Stay down, damn you, you bitch! I’m going to kill you this time. I said I would and I will. Take that! (Intensified somatic as his knee ground into the mother’s abdomen) You better start screaming. Go on, Scream for mercy! Why don’t you break down? Don’t worry, you will! You’ll be blubbering around here, screaming for mercy! The louder you scream the worse you’ll get. That’s what I want to hear! I’m a punk kid, am I? You’re the punk kid! I could finish you now but I am not going to! (Auditor suddenly has trouble, patient taking last phrase literally and stopping his recounting; auditor starts him again)

This is just a sample. There’s a lot more than that where it came from! I hope it hurts I hope it makes you cry! You say a word to anybody and I’ll kill you in earnest! (Patient now running ahead with such an emotional surge that commands are less active on him. This command to remain quiet disregarded) I’m going to bust your face in. You don’t know what it is to be hurt! (Somatic lessened by removal of the knee) I know what I’m going to do to you now! I’m going to punish you! I’m going to punish you and God is going to punish you! I’m going to rape you! I’m going to stick it into you and tear you! When I tell you to do something you’ve got to do it! Get up on the bed! Lie down! Lie still! (Crack of bones as she is struck in the face with a fist. Blood pressure coming up and hurting baby) Lie still! You’ll always be here! I’m going to finish this! You’re unclean! You are dirty and diseased! God’s punished you and now I’m going to punish you! (Coitus somatic begins, very violent, further injuring child) You’ve got something terrible in your past. You think you’ve got to be mean to me! You try to make me feel like nothing! You’re the one that’s nothing! Take it, take it!” (String of sexual banalities screamed for about five minutes) The patient recounted this three times and it erased. It was basic-basic! Three days after conception as nearly as could be judged by the subsequent days to the missed period. It threw into view almost all the other important data in the case, which then resolved and was cleared.

The single word might have landed the patient on some other of the “hears” in the case. In this event it would be necessary to pick it up at its earliest moment or the remainder of the engram might not erase or reduce.

The word “hear” might also have landed the patient later on the track in which case the engrams would have had to have been traced back earlier until one was found which would erase, reducing each one as it was encountered until the earliest was reached when all would erase.

In using single word repeater as in phrase repeater, the auditor should not permit a rapid, unmeaning repetition but a slow repeat, the auditor requesting the somatic strip to return the while and asking the patient to contact anything else which might associate with the word.

Caution: if the patient is not moving on the track, do not give him repeater words or phrases at random as these will pile up engrams where the patient is stuck. Use only efforts to get the patient moving on the track by discovering and reducing the phrase that is holding him.

Caution: basic-basic does not always have words in it, often being only painful and accompanied with womb sounds. It will, nevertheless, hold everything in place by its perceptics.

SPECIAL CLASSES OF COMMANDS

There are several distinct classes of commands. They are outlined here for ready reference with some samples of each.

Aberrative commands can contain anything. The auditor does not much concern himself with them. Refer back to our young man and the coat in Book II and there we find, in the guise of hypnotic commands, some idea of what aberrative commands are. “I am a jub-jub bird,” “I can’t whistle Dixie,” “The world is all against me,” “I hate policemen,” “I am the ugliest person in the world,” “You haven’t any feet,” “The Lord is going to punish me,” “I always have to play with my thing,” may be very interesting to the patient and even amusing to the auditor and may have caused a considerable amount of trouble in the patient’s life. Where dianetic therapy is concerned, these all come up in due course. Looking for a specific aberration or a specific somatic is sometimes of interest and sometimes of some use, but it is not usually important. These aberrative commands may contain enough data to make the patient a raving zealot, a paranoid or a catfish, but they are nothing to the auditor. They come up in due course. Working on them or about them is secondary and less.

The primary business of the auditor in any case is to keep the patient moving on the track, keep his somatic strip free to come and go and reduce engrams. The moment the patient acts as though or responds as though he was not moving or the moment the file clerk will not give forth data, then something is wrong and that something has to do with a few classes of phrase: there are thousands of such phrases contained in engrams, variously worded, but only five classes:

DENYERS

“Leave me alone,” which means, literally, that he must leave the incident alone. “I can’t tell” means he can’t tell you this engram. “It’s hard to tell” means it is hard to tell. “I don’t want to know” means he has no desire to know this engram. “Forget it” is the classic of the sub-class of denyer, the forgetter mechanism. When the engram simply won’t come to view but there is a somatic or a muscle twitch, send the somatic strip to the denyer. It is often “Forget it” or “Can’t remember” as a part of the engram. “I don’t know what’s going on” may be Mama telling Papa something but the pre-clear’s analyzer, impinged, then doesn’t know what’s going on. “It’s beyond me” means he is right there but he thinks he isn’t. “Hold on to this, it’s your life!” makes the engram “vital” to existence. “It can’t be reached,” “I can’t get in there,” “Nobody must know,” “It’s a secret,” “If anybody found out, I’d die,” “Don’t talk,” and thousands more.

HOLDERS

The holder is the most frequent and the most used since whenever the pre-clear can’t shift on the track or come to present, he is in a holder. A holder combined with a denyer will still hold: if it can’t be found, look for the denyer first, then the holder. “I’m stuck” is the classic phrase. “That fixed it” is another. “I’m caught” doesn’t mean to the pre-clear what Mama meant when she said it. It may mean to her that she is pregnant but it tells the pre-clear he is caught on the track. “Don’t move,” “Sit there until I tell you to move,” “Stop and think” (on this last phrase, when it is uttered on a first recounting the auditor may have to start him going again for he does just that, he stops and thinks and he would stop there and think for some time: the auditor will see this strange obedience to this literal nonsense as he works a case). And thousands more. Any way words literally understood can stop a person or keep him from moving.

BOUNCERS

The bouncer could best be demonstrated by a curve. The pre-clear goes back into prenatal and then finds himself at ten years of age or even present time. That’s a bouncer at work. He goes early on the time track: it says come back up.

When the pre-clear can’t seem to get earlier, there is a bouncer ejecting him from an engram. Get a comment from him on what’s happening. Take the comment or some phrase which would be a bouncer and use repeater technique until he settles back down on the engram. If he contacts it easily, it won’t bounce him again. “Get out” is the classic bouncer. The patient usually goes toward present time. “Can’t go back at this point” may mean Mama has decided she will have to have the baby after all or finish the abortion but to the pre-clear it means he must move on up the time track or that he can’t get any earlier period. “Get up there.” “Run a mile” (“Beat it,” would not be a bouncer; it would mean the pre-clear should beat the engram). “I must go far, far away,” so he does. “I’m growing up,” “Blow you higher than a kite,” “Batter up.” And thousands more.

GROUPER

The grouper is the nastiest of all types of command. It can be so variously worded and its effect is so serious on the time track that the whole track can roll up into a ball and all incidents then appear to be in the same place. This is apparent as soon as the pre-clear hits one. The grouper will not be discovered easily. But it will settle out as the case progresses and the case can be worked with a grouper in restimulation. “I have no time” and “Nothing makes any difference” are the classic groupers. “Everything comes in on me at once” means just that. “They’re all in there together,” “Screwed up,” “Balled up,” “It’s all right here.” “You can remember all this in present time” (a serious auditor error if he uses this to a suggestible patient, for it will gloriously foul a case). “You associate everything.” “I am tangled up,” “Jam everything in there at once,” “There’s no time,” and thousands more.

MISDIRECTOR

This is an insidious character, the misdirector. When it appears in an engram, the patient goes in wrong directions, to wrong places, etc. “You’re doing it all backwards.” “All up now” is a grouper and a misdirector. “Always throwing it up to me” puts the pre-clear up the track some distance and from there he tries to pick up engrams. “You can’t go down” is partly bouncer, partly misdirector. “We can’t get to the bottom of this” keeps him off from basic-basic. “You can start over again” keeps him from finishing the recounting, whereupon he goes back to the beginning of the engram instead of running it. “Can’t go through that again” keeps him from recounting. “I can’t tell you how it began” keeps him starting his engrams in the middle and they will not then reduce. There are many such phrases. “Let’s settle down” and all “settlings” make him drift backwards down the track. “I am coming down with a cold” puts the aberree in a common cold engram. This can be counted upon to make every cold much worse. “Come back here” is really a call back but it directs him away from where he should be. A patient who reaches present time with difficulty and then begins to go back has a “Come back here” or a “Settle down.” “Down and out” misdirects him not only away from present time but to the bottom of the track and off it. This is a misdirector and a derailer all at once. “Can’t get past me” is a misdirector on the order of a reverser. “You don’t know down from up” is the classic phrase. “I’m all turned around.”

A special case is the derailer which “throws him off the track” and makes him lose touch with his time track. This is a very serious phrase since it can make a schizophrenic and something of this sort is always to be found in schizophrenia. Some of its phrases throw him into other valences which have no proper track, some merely remove time, some throw him bodily out of time. “I don’t have any time” is a derailer as well as a grouper. “I’m beside myself” means that he is now two people, one beside the other. “I’ll have to pretend I am somebody else” is a key phrase to identity confusion. “You’re behind the times” and many more.

There is another special case of the misdirector. The auditor says to go to “present time” and the file clerk throws out a phrase with “present” in it. It does not matter if the present in the phrase was a Christmas present, if it is in the prenatal area, the pre-clear goes there, ignoring what the auditor meant. “That’s all at present,” is a vicious phrase, putting everything in present time. “It’s a lovely present.”

And others. “Now” is sometimes confused with present time but not often. The auditor should not say “Come to now,” because if he did he would find more “nows” than he could comfortably handle. “Present” is a rarer engramic word and is therefore used. “Now” appears too frequently.

Several severely aberrated persons who had little memory of the past have been found to be entirely off their time tracks, regressed into the prenatal area and stuck when the case was entered. As far as their wits were concerned, they had only a few months of past from where they were back to conception. And yet these people had managed somehow to function as normals.

Emotional charges usually hold the person off his track and, indeed, are the only things which give these engram commands any power according to current findings.

DIFFERENCES

There are two axioms about mind function with which the auditor should be familiar.

1. THE MIND PERCEIVES, POSES AND RESOLVES PROBLEMS RELATING TO SURVIVAL.
2. THE ANALYTICAL MIND COMPUTES IN DIFFERENCES. THE REACTIVE MIND COMPUTES IN IDENTITIES. The first axiom is of interest to the auditor in his work because with it he can clearly

establish whether or not he is confronting a rational reaction. The seven-year-old girl who shudders because a man kisses her is not computing; she is reacting to an engram since at seven she should see nothing wrong in a kiss, not even a passionate one. There must have been an earlier experience, possibly prenatal, which made men or kissing very bad. All departures from optimum rationality are useful in locating engrams, all unreasonable fears and so forth are grist to the auditor’s mill. The auditor, with the above law, should study as well, the Equation of the Optimum Solution. Any departure from optimum is suspect. While he cares little about aberrations, at times a case will stall or seem to have no engrams. He then can observe the conduct of his patient and his patient’s reactions to life in order to gain data.

The second law is dianetics’ contribution to logic. In the philosophic text this is more fully entered. Aristotle’s pendulum and his two-valued logic were abandoned not because of any dislike of Aristotle but because broader yardsticks were needed. One of these yardsticks was the spectrum principle whereby gradations from zero to infinity and infinity to infinity were used and Absolutes were considered utterly unobtainable for scientific purposes.

In the second axiom the mind can be conceived to recognize differences very broadly and accurately, in its nearest approach to complete rationality and then, as it falls away from rationality, to perceive less and less difference until at last it achieves a near approach to utter inability to compute any difference in time, space or thought and so can be considered completely insane. When this follows one thought only, such as a sweeping statement that “All cats are the same,” it is either careless or insane since all cats are not the same, even two cats who look, act and sound alike. One could say, “Cats are pretty much the same,” and still be dealing with rather irrational thought. Or one could recognize that there was a species felix domesticus but that within it cats were decidely different not only from breed to breed but cat to cat. That would be rationality, not because one used Latin but because he could tell the difference amongst cats. The fear of cats has as its source an engram which usually does not include more than one cat and that is a very specific cat of a specific breed with a certain (or perhaps uncertain) personality. The pre-clear who is afraid of all cats is actually afraid of one cat and a cat which is most likely dead these many years at that. Thus as we swing from complete rationality down to irrationality there is a narrowing of differences until they nearly vanish and become similarities and identities.

Aristotle’s syllogism in which two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other simply does not begin to work in logic. Logic is not arithmetic, which is an artificial thing Man invented and which works. To handle a problem in logic the mind flutters through an enormous mass of data and computes with dozens and even hundreds of variables. It does not and never did think on the basis that two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other except when employing mathematics it had conceived the better to resolve abstract problems. It is an abstract truth that two and two equal four. Two what and two what equal four? There is no scale made, no yardstick or caliper or microscope manufactured, which would justify the actuality, for instance, that two apples plus two apples equal four apples. Two apples and two apples are four apples now if they are the same apples. They would not equal four other apples

by any growth or manufacturing process ever imagined. Man is content to take approximations and call them, loosely, exactitudes. There is no Absolute anything save in abstract terms set up by the mind to work out exterior problems and achieve approximations. This may seem to be a stretched conception, but it is not. The mathematician is very well aware that he is working with digit and analogue approximations set up into systems which were not necessarily here before Man came and will not necessarily be here after he is gone. Logic, even the simple logic of wondering about the wisdom of going shopping at ten, is handling numerous variables, indefinites and approximations. Mathematics can be invented by the carload lot. There is no actual Absolute, there is only a near approach. Our grammarians alone, much behind the times, insist, probably in memory of the metaphysician, on Absolute Reality and Truth.

This is here set down partly because it may be of interest to some but mainly because the auditor must realize that he has an accurate measuring stick for sanity. Sanity is the ability to tell differences. The better one can tell differences, no matter how minute, and know the width of those differences, the more rational he is. The less one can tell differences and the closer one comes to thinking in identities (A = A) the less sane he is.

A man says, “I don’t like dogs!” Spot it, auditor, he has an engram about one or two dogs. A girl says, “All men are alike!” Spot it, auditor, here’s a real aberree. “Mountains are so terrible!” “Jewelers never go any place!” “I hate women!” Spot them. Those are engrams right out in broad daylight.

Those engrams which inhibit the analytical mind in differentiating are those engrams which most seriously inhibit thinking.

“You can’t tell the difference,” is a common engram. “There is no difference,” “Nothing will ever make any difference to me again,” “People are all bad,” “Everybody hates me.” This is insanity bait, as the auditors say, and puts a man “spin-bin bound.”

There is another class of identity thought and that is the group which destroys time- differentiation. “You don’t know when it happened!” is a classic phrase. “I don’t know how late it is,” and others have a peculiar effect on the mind for the mind is running on a precision chronometer of its own and the engrams can thoroughly misread the dial. On a conscious level one goes along fairly well on analytical time. The engrams slide around back and forth according to when they are keyed-in or restimulated. An engram may underlie today’s action which belonged forty years ago on the time track and should be back there. It is not remarks about time difference so much that aberrate, it is the untimed character of engrams. Time is the Great Charlatan, it heals nothing, it only changes the environmental aspects and a man’s associates. The engram of ten years ago, with all its painful emotion, may be encysted and “forgotten” but it is right there, ready to force action if restimulated today.

The reactive mind runs on a dime-store wrist watch, the analytical mind runs on a battery of counter-checking chronometers of which a liner could be proud. The cells think that wrist watch is a pretty fair gimmick — and it was, it was, back there in the days when Man’s ancestor was washed in by the waves and managed to cling to the sand.

Thus, a primary test for aberration is similarity and identity, the primary test for rationality is differentiation and the minuteness or largeness with which it can be done.

“Men are all alike,” she says. And they are too! To her. Poor thing. Like the fellow who raped her when she was a kid, like her detested father who said it.

RELATIVE IMPORTANCESAND “BELIEVE” AND “CAN’T BELIEVE”

The auditor will find himself confronted with two arch enemies in “you must believe it,” and “I can’t believe.”

The mind has its own equilibrium and ability and it is aided no more by engrams than an adding machine is aided by a held-down seven. One of the most important functions of the mind is the computing of the relative importances of data.

In discovering and conducting research on dianetics, for instance, there were billions of data about the mind accumulated throughout the last few thousand years.

Now, with a six foot rear vision mirror we can look back and see that here and there people had expressed opinions or turned up unevaluated facts which are now data in some of the axioms of dianetics or parts of its discoveries. These facts existed in the past, some exist now in dianetics, but with a tremendous difference: they are evaluated. Evaluation of the data for its importance was vital before the information was of value. Dr. Sententious might have written in 1200 A.D. that he believed actual demons did not exist in the mind; Goodwife Sofie in 1782 was heard to say that she was certain that prenatal influence had warped many a life; Dr. Zamba might have written in 1846 that a hypnotized patient could be told he was crazy and that he would thereafter act crazy. Dr. Sententious might have said also that angels, not demons, caused mental illness because the patient had been evil; Goodwife Sofie also might have said that punk water poultices cured “ravings”; Dr. Zamba might also have declared that hypnotized patients needed only a few more positive suggestions to make them well and strong. In short, for every datum which approached truth there were billions which were untrue. The missing part of each datum was a scientific evaluation of its importance to the solution. The selection of a few special drops of water from an ocean of unspecial drops is impossible. The problem of discovering true data could be resolved only by jettisoning all former evaluations of humanity and the human mind and all “facts” and opinions of whatever kind and starting fresh, evolving the entire science from a new highest common denominator (and it is true that dianetics borrowed nothing but was first discovered and organized; only after the organization was completed and a technique evolved was it compared to existing information).

The point here is that monotone importance in a class of facts leads to nothing but the most cluttered confusion. Here is evaluation: opinions are nothing, authority is useless, data is secondary: establishment of relative importance is the key. Given the world and the stars as a laboratory and a mind to compute the relative importance of what it perceives, and no problems can remain unsolved. Given masses of data with monotone evaluation and one has something which may be pretty but is useful.

The stunned look of fresh-caught ensigns of the Navy when they first see in the metal the things about which they have so laboriously read is a testimony to more than the faulty educational system currently employed: the system seeks to train something which is perfect — the memory — ; it aligns little or nothing with purpose or use, and ignores the necessity of personal evaluation of all data both as to need for it and its use. The stunned look comes from the overwhelming recognition that whereas they have thousands of data about what they see, they do not know whether it is more important to read the chronometer when they take a sextant sight or use only blue ink in writing a log book. These gentlemen have been wronged educationally not because they have not been given thousands of data relative to ships but because they have not been told the relative importance of each datum and have not experienced that importance. They know more facts than the less educated but they know less about factual relation.

More pertinent to the auditor, there are two species of engramic commands which give monotone evaluation to data. The persons who have either of these as a major content in the engram bank will be similarly aberrated even if each manifests the aberration with opposite polarity.

Every now and then some unfortunate auditor finds a “Can’t believe it” on his hands. This case is extremely trying. Under this heading come the “I doubt it,” the “I can’t be sure,” and the “I don’t know,” cases.

Such a case is easy to spot for when he first comes into therapy he begins by doubting dianetics, the auditor, himself, the furniture and his mother’s virginity. The chronic doubter is not an easy case because he cannot believe his own data. The analyzer has a built-in judge which takes in data, weighs it and judges it right, wrong or maybe. The engramic doubter has a “held down 7” to the effect that he has to doubt everything, something much different from judging. He is challenged to doubt. He must doubt. If to doubt is divine, then the god is certainly Moloch. He doubts without inspecting, he inspects the most precise evidence, and he still doubts.

The auditor will return this patient to a somatic which tears half his head off, which is confirmed by scars, which is confirmed by aberration, and which is doubted as an incident.

The way to handle this case is to take his pat phrases and feed them to him in reverie or out of reverie with repeater technique. Make him go over and over them, sending his somatic strip back to them. Shortly a release of the phrase will take place. Feed all doubter phrases which the patient has used in this manner. Then continue the case. The object is not to make him a believer but to place him in a situation where he can evaluate his own data. Don’t argue with him about dianetics — arguing against engrams is senseless since the engrams themselves are senseless.

In ten or twenty hours of therapy such a patient will begin to face reality enough so that he no longer doubts the sun shines, doubts the auditor or doubts that he had a past of some sort. He is only difficult because he requires these extra hours of work. He is usually, by the way, very aberrated.

The “Can’t believe it” finds difficulty in evaluation because he has difficulty giving credence to any fact more than any other fact: this produces an inability to compute relative importances amongst data with the result that he may be as concerned with the shade of his superior’s tie as with the marriage he himself is about to undertake. Similarly, the “You must believe it” case finds difficulty in differentiating amongst importances of various data and may hold equally firmly the idea that paper is made from trees and that he is about to be fired. Both cases “worry,” which is to say they are unable to compute well.

Rational computation depends upon the personal computation of the relative importances of various data. Reactive “computation” deals exclusively with the equation that widely different objects or events are similar or equal. The former is sanity, the latter is insanity.

The “Must believe it” case will present a confused reactive bank, for the bank embraces the most unlikely differences as close similarities. The “Must believe it” engram command can dictate that one person, a class of persons, or everyone must be believed, no matter what is written or said. The auditor, returning the patient, will find major aberrations held in place by a lock containing only conversation.

When father is the actual source and is an ally of the patient, the auditor will discover that almost everything father said was accepted literally and unquestioningly by his child. The father may not have been aware of having established this “Must believe it” condition and he may even be a jocular man, given to jokes. Every joke will be found to be literally accepted unless the father carefully labeled it a joke, which meant it must not be literally accepted. One case folder is to hand here where father was the source of “Must believe”: one day the father took his daughter, three years of age, down to the seacoast and, through the fog, pointed to a lighthouse. The lighthouse gave an eerie aspect in the foggy night. “That’s Mr. Billingsly’s place,” said the father, meaning that Billingsly, the lighthouse keeper, lived there. The child nodded faithfully, if a little frightened, for “Mr. Billingsly” threw around a mane of hair- shadows — glared to seaward with one eye sweeping the water and stood a hundred feet tall and “Mr. Billingsly” let out moans which sounded quite ferocious. His “place” was a ledge of rock. As a pre-clear twenty years later the daughter was discovered to be frightened of any low moaning sound. The auditor patiently traced down the source and found, much to the delight of

himself and the daughter, “Mr. Billingsly.” Vast quantities of aberration, peculiar conceptions and strange notions were found to derive from casual statements the father had made. Being skilled in his task, the auditor did not bother to try to locate and erase everything the father had said — a task which would have taken years and years: he located, instead, the prenatal “You must believe me” and its engramic locks, and all the non-engramic locks, of course, disappeared and were automatically re-evaluated as experienced data rather than “held-down sevens.” Of course there is always much more wrong with a case than a mere “You must believe me,” but the change of viewpoint which the patient experienced immediately afterwards was startling: she was now at liberty to evaluate her father’s data, which she had not been before.

Because they teach in terms of altitude* and Authority, educational institutions themselves form a social “You must believe it” aberration. It is impossible to reduce an entire university education even if it sometimes appears desirable, but by addressing the moments when the patient was hammered into believing or accepting school, from kindergarten forward, many a fact-clogged mind can again be made facile which was not so before, for the facts will be re-evaluated automatically by the

* (By altitude is meant a difference of level of prestige — one on a higher altitude carries conviction to one on a lower altitude merely because of altitude. The auditor may find himself unable to gain sufficient altitude with some patients to work them smoothly and he may have so much altitude with others that they believe everything he says. When he has too little altitude, he is not believed; when he has too much he is believed too well.) mind for importances, not accepted on monotone evaluation as is the case in “formal education.”

The “Can’t believe it” is a subject so weary and dreary to the auditor that he may find himself, after a few finished cases, running adroitly away from one. The “I don’t know” and the “I can’t be sure” cases are not as bad as the “I can’t believe it.” The prize case in difficulty in dianetics is a patient who is a Junior named after either father or mother, who has not only shut-down pain, emotion, visio and sonic recall but also “dub-in” for them on a false basis, with a lie factory working full blast, who is uncooperative and who is a “Can’t believe it.”

Monotone evaluation hinders the “Can’t believe it’s” acceptance of all facts. Any case may have a few “Can’t believe its” but some cases are so thoroughly aberrated by the phrase that they disbelieve not only reality but also their own existence.

The mind has a “built-in doubter” which, unhindered by engrams, rapidly sorts out importances and, by their weights, resolves problems and arrives at conclusions. The rational mind applies itself to data presented, compares it to experience, evaluates its veracity and then assigns it relative importance in the scheme of things. This is done, by a clear, with a rapidity which sometimes requires the splitting of seconds. By a normal the time required is extremely variable and the conclusions are more apt to be referred to another’s opinion or compared to Authority rather than to personal experience. That is the fundamental effect of contemporary education which, through no particular fault of its own and despite every effort it has made to free itself, yet, through lack of tools, is forced to follow Scholastic methods. These, by contagion of aberration, persist against all efforts of advanced educators. The normal is taught on one hand to believe or else he’ll fail and on the other to disbelieve as a scientific necessity: belief and disbelief cannot be taught, they must be personally computed. If a mind could be likened to a general served by his own staff, it could be seen to have a G-2 which, as a combat intelligence center, collected facts, weighed them for importance and formed an estimate of a situation or the value of a conclusion. As the intelligence officer would fail if he had a signed order to disbelieve everything, so does the mind fail which has a reactive command to disbelieve. Certainly a military organization would lose to every puny enemy if it had, conversely, a command to believe everything, and a man will fail if he has a reactive mind order to believe all information in the world around him.

The believe and disbelieve engrams present different manifestations, and while one cannot be said to be either more or less aberrative than the other, it is certain that the disbelieve engram, by and large, seems to make the less sociable man.

Disbelief occurs in various degrees, of course. There is, for instance, a social disbelief engram which promotes a class of literature which is as insincere as it is unwitty. Insincerity, shame of emotional demonstration, fear of praising may stem from other things than merely a disbelief engram, but a disbelief engram is most certainly present in the majority of such cases.

The auditor will find, when he is trying to enter a very strong “Can’t believe it” case, that experience is disbelieved, the auditor is disbelieved, hope of results is disbelieved and that the most ridiculous and unreasonable insults and arguments may be presented. The patient may squirm in a veritable snake pit of somatics and still disbelieve that he is re-experiencing anything.

It is a sadly chronic fact that an aberree has a certain set of cliches from out of his engram bank. He will repeat these cliches for all occasions and circumstances. Mother, having an engram bank of her own and father having his, will be found to be uttering pretty much the same sort of statement time after time. These are dramatizations. One of the parents may have had an “I don’t know” ready to precede everything he or she said, which makes a whole “stack” of “I don’t knows” in the engram bank: which much undermines understanding. In the same way, “You must believe!” or “You can’t believe!” may become “stacked” in the engram bank. Once one has heard a few engrams from a patient, he knows he will have many, many more similar engrams from that source. Once an auditor has listened to the personnel in the patient’s engram bank for a very short time he knows pretty much what he will have in many, many more engrams. Hence any phrase is liable to be much repeated in the engram bank, with varying somatics and accompanying perceptics. If Mother is troubled with high blood pressure, it is raised by Father — to the intense discomfort of the child and a degree which often produces a later migraine headache — she is apt to utter, “I can’t believe you would treat me this way.” Privately, she must have been hard to convince (one doesn’t convince much against engramic “reasoning”), for he treated her this way about every three days; and every three days she was saying, “I can’t believe you” or “I can’t believe you would do this to me,” or “I can’t believe anything you say,” or some such thing.

The “Can’t believe” is apt to be rather hostile since “Can’t believe” is often hostile conversation. “You’ve got to believe me” is more apt to be a pleading or whining sort of an engram. “Believe what I tell you, God damn it,” is, however, fully as hostile as an auditor might expect.

An auditor who finds a case intensely and unreasonably skeptical should expect a “Can’t believe” stack in the engram bank. If he finds a patient incapable of holding an opinion of his own but weather-vaning to each new person or quoting an Authority (all authorities get easily identified with father in the reactive bank), he should suspect a “Must believe” in some form as well as other things. There are many manifestations of either case. The chronic aspect in therapy is that the “Can’t believe” suspects his own data so strongly that he alters it continually and the engrams which, after all, have just one, exact package of content, will not properly reduce; the “Must believe” takes up every engram he hears about as his own and that does him little good.

Do not suppose that any case has a standard aspect, however. The language contains many words and combinations of words, and aberrees are not unusual who have the entire basic language and all its idioms securely connected up to some somatic or other. Cases ordinarily contain “Can’t believe” and “Must believe” phrases in the same bank. Only when these phrases become top-heavy does the person respond in a set pattern. When the set pattern is of either species of phrase, then the auditor confronts a patient who must have had, at best, a most unhappy life. But either case clears. They all clear, even Juniors.

PHYSICAL PAIN AND PAINFUL EMOTION COMMANDS

Besides visio and sonic, another vital recall to therapy is the somatic, which is to say the physical pain of the incident. Running a physically painful incident without a somatic is worthless.

If physical pain is present, it may come only after considerable “unconsciousness” has been “boiled-off.” If the incident contains pain but the somatic is not turned on, the patient will wriggle his toes and breathe heavily and nervously or he may have jumping muscles. The foot wriggling is an excellent clue to the presence of any somatic turned on or not turned on. Breathing heavily and jumping muscles and various twitches without pain denote two things: either a denyer is in the incident and the content isn’t being contacted or, if the pre-clear is recounting, the somatic may be shut-off in the incident or elsewhere, either earlier by command or late by painful emotion. The patient who wriggles a great deal or who does not wriggle at all is suffering from a pain or emotion shut-off or late painful emotion engrams or both.

There is a whole species of commands which shut-off pain and emotion simultaneously: this is because the word “feel” is homonymic. “I can’t feel anything” is the standard, but the command varies widely and is worded in a great many ways. The auditor can pick up his own book of these from patients who, describing how they feel or rather, how they don’t feel, give them away. “It doesn’t hurt” is a class of phrases specifically shutting off pain, a class which includes, of course, such things as “There isn’t any pain,” etc. Emotion is shut- off by a class of phrases which contain the word “emotion” or which specifically (literally translated) shut off emotion.

The auditor should keep a book of all denyers, misdirectors, holders, bouncers and groupers which he discovers, each listed under its own heading. In this way he adds to material he can use for repeater technique when he sees something is wrong with the way the patient is moving on the track. But there are four other classes of phrases which he should also study and list: shut-offs, exaggerators, derailers and lie factories. He can also add to his classes.

He will discover enormous numbers of commands in engrams which can accomplish these various aspects. And he should be particularly interested in the pain and emotion shut- offs and the exaggerators, which is to say, those engramic commands which give the aspect of too much pain and too much emotion. There is no reason to give large numbers of them here. They are quite various, language being language.

Many combinations are possible. A patient can be found to weep over the most trivial post-speech things and yet have few or no somatics. Several things can cause this. Either he had a mother or a father who wept for nine months before he was born or he has an exaggerator at work which commands that he be emotional about everything: “Too much emotion.” In combination with this he can have something which says he can feel no pain or can’t hurt or even can’t feel.

A patient who aches and suffers and yet cannot weep would have a reverse set of commands: he has a “no emotion” command early on the track or a long chain of them and yet has commands which dictate pain to excess: “I can’t stand the pain,” “The pain is too great,” “I always feel I’m in agony,” etc. “I feel bad,” on the other hand, is a shut-off because it says there is something wrong with the mechanism with which he feels and implies disability to feel.

Both pain and emotion can be commanded into exaggeration. But it is a peculiar thing that the body does not manufacture pain to be felt. All pain felt is genuine, even if exaggerated. Imaginary pain is non-existent. A person “imagines” only pain he has actually felt. He cannot imagine pain he has not felt. He may “imagine” pain at sometime later than the actual incident but if he feels pain, no matter how psychotic he is, that pain will be found to exist somewhere on his time track. Scientific tests have been carefully conducted in dianetics to establish this fact

and it is a valuable one. You can test it yourself by asking patients to feel various pains, “imagining them” in present time. They will feel pains for you so long as you ask them to feel pains they have had. Somewhere you will find the patient unable to actually feel the pain he is trying to “imagine.” Whether he is aware of it or not, he has had pain wherever he “imagines” it and is simply doing a somatic strip return for you on a minor scale.

This aspect of pain is quite interesting in that many patients have, at one time or another in their lives, pretended to the family or the world that they had a pain. The patient thought, when he asserted this “make-believe” pain, that he was lying. In therapy the auditor can use these “imaginings” for they lead straight to sympathy engrams and actual injury. Further, these “imaginary” pains are generally displayed to the person or pseudo-person who was the sympathy ally present in the engramic moment. Thus, if a small boy always pretended to his grandmother, and thought he was pretending, that he had a bad hip, it will be discovered eventually that sometime in his early life he hurt that same hip and received sympathy during the engramic moment which is now eclipsed from the analyzer. Patients often feel quite guilty over these pretenses. Sometimes soldiers in the recent war have come home pretending they had been wounded and, when in therapy, are afraid the auditor will find out or give them away to their people. This soldier might not have been wounded in the war, but an engram will be found which contains sympathy for the injury of which he complains. He is asking for sympathy with a colorful story and believes he is telling a lie. Without informing him of this dianetic discovery, the auditor can often flush into view a sympathy engram which might otherwise have to be arduously hunted down.

“Cry baby” is a phrase against which the pre-clear will negate in an engram, thus inhibiting tears. It is quite ordinary to find the pre-clear confusing himself with older brothers and sisters who are in his prenatal life: their jeers, mother’s orders and so forth then all register. If the pre-clear knows of any older children, the auditor should look for them in the engrams of prenatal life, for children are quite active and often bounce up and down on mother’s lap or collide with her. Any childish phrases of derision are then not always post- birth.

It has been said during dianetic research that if one could release all the painful emotion of a lifetime, he would have ninety-percent of the clearing done. However, the painful emotion is only a surface manifestation of the physical pain engrams and would not be painful if the physical pain did not co-exist or exist priorly.

When emotion and pain shut-offs exist in a case, the patient is normally tense of muscle and nervous, given to twitching or merely tension. When pain and emotion are exaggerated by commands, one has a highly dramatizing case on his hands.

THE ALLY VERSUS THE ANTAGONIST

It is necessary for the auditor to know the reactive mind’s evaluation of importances. Moronic or not, the reactive mind distinguishes violently between friend and foe, about the only piece of differentiation it does.

There is a prime test for an ally. And recall that the ally is a part of sympathy engrams, the things which are most likely to produce psycho-somatic illnesses, immaturities and confusion on a grand scale. As long as it can rebel and negate, the reactive mind takes care of the enemies so far as it is able. It can, of course, be twisted by circumstance into the valence of the enemy and so cry havoc and abreact in general if this was a winning valence. But it will not ordinarily use the data of the enemy contained in a contra-survival engram save to negate against it. When the general tone nears Zone One, of course the reactive mind starts picking up and obeying antagonistic commands. Thus, if father is the villain of the piece, an antagonist, father’s commands are not the reactively obeyed commands but the commands the aberree will usually negate against or avoid.

This is not the case, however, with the ally. The ally, the person from whom sympathy came when the patient was ill or injured, is heeded and obeyed since his “purpose” is apparently aligned with the purpose of the individual to survive. If one thing about a person is right then, according to our moronic little friend, the reactive mind, everything about that person is right, everything that person says and does is right and particularly is right whatever that person said in the engram.

The chronic psycho-somatic illness is ordinarily from a sympathy engram. This is quite important, for the sympathy engram will be the last or hardest to reach, being aligned with survival purpose.

A “Must believe” from an ally means that the person must believe. A “Must believe” from an antagonist ordinarily brings about a circumstance that the person must not believe.

Here, in the ally and the antagonist, we have the age-old tale of the hero and the villain, the heroine and the villainess, Mazda and Ahriman, the cowboy in the white hat and the cowboy in the black. The Hindu trinity is found, as source, in father, mother and unborn baby. But the war of “good and evil” is found as reactive data in the engram bank in the form of the ally and the antagonist.

The very best logic of which the reactive mind is capable is two-valued, white and black, and two-valued logic finds its response only in the reactive bank. And the reactive mind works out all problems in absolutes, bringing about logical monstrosities, for there is the absolute of good, the absolute of evil and the absolute of identity thought. Any rational computation demonstrates an absolute to be impossible from a standpoint of truth or workability: but the reactive mind never quibbles, it just reacts. It knows a champion when it sees one (it thinks) and it knows a villain (it supposes). The ally, the champion, is everybody who has any characteristic of the ally and the antagonist, the villain, is everyone who has any characteristics of the antagonist. Further, anything associated with the ally is a champion and everything associated with the antagonist is villainous. If the ally is an aunt, then aunts are good. If the antagonist is a sign painter, then sign painters are all evil. Further, the dollies Auntie crocheted mean that dollies are good and that all lacework is good and that anything on which lacework sits is good and that anything which looks like lacework is good and so on in the ad absurdum which only the reactive mind can manage without a qualm. And the signs the painter painted were evil and where they sit is evil and paint is evil and smell of paint is evil and brushes are evil so hair brushes are evil so the dresser on which hairbrushes sit is evil and so on.

There is an axiom here which is well not to slight in working a patient:

ANY CHRONIC PSYCHO-SOMATIC ILLNESS HAS AT ITS SOURCE A SYMPATHY ENGRAM.

And another:

A REACTIVE MIND WILL NOT PERMIT AN INDIVIDUAL TO BE ABERRATED OR CHRONICALLY PSYCHO-SOMATICALLY ILL UNLESS THE ILLNESS HAS SURVIVAL VALUE.

This does not mean that the individual has a power of choice analytically. It does mean that the reactive mind, working quietly and hitherto hidden so well, chooses, on identity computation, physical and mental conditions to match any circumstance even remotely similar to any concept in the engram bank.

There is such a thing as necessity level. This rises and keys-out engrams and can key out the control of the reactive mind itself. Necessity level often rises. The individual can force it to rise analytically whether or not actual cause exists. A person may have no engram about going to the electric chair for murder and yet have an engram about murdering people.

Necessity level rises and analytically overwhelms all impulse to kill for the analyzer knows all about electric chairs. When the necessity level cannot rise, then one is dealing with a low dynamic individual. An artist, terribly aberrated about his work through the kind efforts of obligingly caustic critics, can yet boost himself by his necessity bootstraps to do another piece of work and damn the aunt who said he gave her too many chins in her portrait and ripped the work to shreds or damn the critics who said he was too new and his work too swift. Necessity level can soar above the reactive mind by, as the marine sergeant said, “Sheer guts.” Given too many current restimulators, used too hard by life, an individual, caught in the dwindling spiral of reactivated engrams, may come at last to a point where he cannot longer remain well. If this is his first serious sag and if the sag is deep, a psycho-somatic illness will appear and become more or less chronic and, this is important, it will stem directly from a sympathy engram.

All psycho-somatic ills carry with them, if less obvious, aberrative commands which mean that a person suffering from psycho-somatic illness, whether he relishes the idea or not, is also suffering from the aberration which is part of the same engram.

If the auditor wants to find the real holders, the real reasons his case appears to resist getting well, the real aberrative factors and illnesses, he will look to the ally or allies, for any case may have many. He will exhaust from them the painful emotion of loss or denial and backtrack immediately to find the underlying engrams.

Remember too that the reactive mind is not bright enough to realize that two sides of the same person are the same person. Hence we can have Mother-the-white-angel and Mother-the- howling-harridan. As the white angel she is implicitly followed, as the harridan she is negated against. Father may be Father-the-beneficent and Father-the-baby- killer. And so with all allies. But only the pure, the absolute, the never changing ally who, resolute and firm, stayed the cold sharp hand of death and placed tenderly in the expiring hand of the wistful child the strong and flaring torch of life (or at least said, “Poor baby, you feel so bad; please don’t cry,”) is the model, the paragon, the gold-footed idol with free access to the gods. (This was grandpop: he drank too much and he cheated at cards, but the reactive mind doesn’t see it that way because grandpop hauled baby through pneumonia and was darned sure baby got well: good acts if he hadn’t been so melodramatic about it and if he hadn’t talked so much while the poor kid was “unconscious.”)

Question the patient adroitly about Father and Mother: if he isn’t much disturbed by their deaths (if they are dead) or if he is simply careless of them or if he bares his teeth, they are antagonists; the allies are elsewhere. If the mother and father are indifferently or angrily or propitiatively regarded, be very sure then, that the patient had a rough time of it between conception and birth and later and be sure, if this is the case, that there will be allies in plenty for the child will have sought them out in every scrape or injury. But you will not find the allies, usually, by mere questions. The reactive mind considers them to be pure gold even if the engrams in which they appear have somatics enough to wreck a person for life. It hides allies. The auditor has to look for them through discharging painful emotion. The death, departure or denial by an ally is a certain painful emotion engram. One way or another, working at it from later painful emotion or earlier physically painful engrams, the ally will eventually uncover and can be entered as memory in the standard banks and erased as illness out of the engram bank.

The solution of chronic psycho-somatic ills lies largely in the field of sympathy engrams. These will not erase early, however, for they are the inner bastion behind which the reactive mind crouches and observes the storming of the outer defenses by antagonists. The painful emotion of ally losses masks, at times, not only allies but antagonists as well. The sympathy engram is not the only source of psycho-somatic illness by far, but it is the source of the chronic psycho-somatic ill.

By the way, nothing in this dissertation about allies should be construed to mean that one should not show love to a child. Observers in the past have jumped at questionable conclusions when they felt that demonstrated affection aberrates a child. Lack of affection may kill him, but the reverse is not true. The only way an ally can aberrate a child is by talking to

and sympathizing with a child who is very ill or “unconscious” from injury. If he does this he alloys the child’s personality with his own, creates an eventual possibility of psycho-somatic illness and aberration and may generally disable the child for life (except for dianetics, of course). Love a child best and do for him best when he is well. Do anything you please with him when he is well, say what you please. When he is sick or hurt, it is best, as the bosun said, “Patch him up and keep God-damned quiet!”

TOKENS

The tale of the magic amulet, the lucky talisman, the belief in the charm and the long catalogue of fetishes, the objects and mannerisms which one keeps as sakes are the “dearly beloveds” of the reactive mind.

There is nothing wrong with a man keeping llamas in the parlor or wearing purple and green suspenders or rubbing fire plugs for luck, nor is there anything wrong with sighing over a stolen lady’s slipper or smoking Pittsburgh stogies. Any Rights of Man should provide for such eccentricities. But the auditor can use this data to detect vital information.

In dianetics, the term token is defined to embrace the objects and habits which an individual or society keeps by not knowing they are extensions of an ally.

By identity thought there are associative restimulators for every restimulator in the environment — these things connected with the restimulator. Being blank on the subject, the analytical mind, apprised by physical reaction that a restimulator of something is nearby, then picks up the associative restimulator but does not select the actual restimulator. (In Book II, the young man’s signal to remove his coat was a touch of the tie: he did not cite the tie in his complaint, the nearest he came to it was the person and clothing of the hypnotic operator. These were associative restimulators.)

A restimulator for a contra-survival engram might be an electric light; the aberree looks to the shade, the pull chain, the room or the person under the light to be a source of annoyance, and not only does he not know that a restimulator is present but supposes that the associated objects have some evil in themselves.

The associative restimulator for a contra-survival engram needs no name other than that, associative restimulator. The pain is the thing, the things associated in any way with the thing are the thing, are other things, etc. is the reactive equation which fills the world of the aberree full of fear and fills him full of anxiety. Leave a child in a place or a room where he has been unhappy and he may become ill, for he is confronted with some restimulator and he can at best explain, like the adult, his fear in terms of things not rationally connected to the restimulator. This is the mechanism of engramic restimulation.

It is mostly terribly uncomfortable to any aberree who, try as he might, cannot say why he does not like some person or object or locale and who cannot connect any of the three with the actual item which is the restimulator and does not know he has an engram about it. This method of detecting engrams leads nowhere quickly since one cannot select objects, persons or locales and know they are restimulators. They may be only associative restimulators to the actual restimulator item in the environment. (Words contained in engrams, by the way, and any other precise restimulator can “push-button” the aberree into action or apathy if they are used upon him. In words it has to be the exact word; for instance painted will not do when painter is in the engram. What is painted, however, may be an associative restimulator and the aberree may declare he does not like it; that he does not like it does not mean that it will “push his buttons” and made him cough or sigh or get angry or get sick or whatever the engram containing the word dictates he should do.)

The token is a very special kind of restimulator. While the auditor may not find much use for the associative restimulator as applied to contra-survival engrams, he can employ the token as a means of detection to locate allies.

The token is any object, practice or mannerism which one or more allies used. By identity thought the ally is survival; anything the ally used or did is, therefore, survival. The valence of the ally is that one most frequently employed by the aberree. While the clear can shift himself into valences he imagines or beholds at will and convenience and out of them at will and can stabilize in his own at will, the aberree skids around into valences without his knowledge or consent and is most likely to be in any valence but his own. The person who seems to be a different person every time he is met or a different person to each person he meets, with special valences manifesting here and others manifesting there, is shifting into various winning valences; interfered with in his shifts, he goes into secondary valences; if forced into his own valence he becomes ill. It is understood, of course, that all valences manifest something of himself.

Shifting into ally valences is the fundamental practice of the aberree. He will feel most at ease when his own valence is alloyed to some degree with an ally valence. So long as the ally or the pseudo-ally is not available, the aberree reminds himself of the ally valence with tokens. These tokens are the things the ally possessed, practiced or did.

An aberree will often inextricably associate himself with a pseudo-ally, as in marriage, and then make the astonished discovery that he is not partnered with the optimum ally conduct. (Mother was an ally, Mother baked bread; wife is pseudo-Mother though neither she nor he knows it; wife does not bake bread: Mother frowned on lipstick, wife wears lipstick; Mother gave him his way, wife has a bossy attitude; wife is pseudo-Mother because she has similar voice tones only.) The aberree then reactively and unknowingly attempts to coax wife or partner into the ally valence by assuming that the moment of the sympathy engram is present time — a mechanical shift caused only by the restimulation of the sympathy engram because of voice tones or some such thing — and proceeds to manifest the ghost of the engram illness or injury or operation as a psycho-somatic sickness. The computation of the reactive mind is simple — just like Simple Simon — one forces the ally into being by manifesting the somatic with which the ally sympathized. This can also be an effort to turn a partner in which the reactive mind thinks it has discovered an ambivalent friend-enemy into the sympathy valence. Wife is cruel.

Mother was cruel until the injury, then she was nice. Manifest the injury as a chronic psycho-somatic illness and wife will be nice. Actually wife isn’t nicer, so the computation gets stronger, the illness gets stronger, and down into the dizzy dwindling spiral we go. The psycho-somatic illness is also a denial of dangerousness, a plea of helplessness — a shade of opossum playing, fear paralysis: “I’m no menace to you. I’m sick!”

The aberree goes into his own valence of the time of the sympathy engram in his bid for sympathy and his denial of his own dangerousness. The valence of himself, of course, is complicated by the age-tab and somatic of the engram in which he was immature and not well.

The psycho-somatic illness is, as well, a token, which is to say it is a reminder of a time when he once had love and care and was told so. He needs it about as much as he needs to be atom bombed, of course, but this is good, solid reactive mind “survival” and the reactive mind is going to make it so he can survive if it kills him.

This is all mechanical and is actually merely restimulation of an engram, but it is better understood as a low order computation.

In the absence of an ally, and even in the presence of the ally, he uses reactive mimicry. Conscious mimicry is a wonderful way to learn. Reactive mimicry is most alloying to the personality. Reactively, he once had an ally and imitates the ally. Consciously he may not even recall the ally or the habits of the ally.

The ally, remember, is somebody who has entered the interior world of the mind when the analyzer was shut down by illness or injury or an operation and gave forth sympathy or protection. The ally is part of the sympathy engram. If a child had grandparents he liked and was lucky enough not to be ill around them or be talked to by them in sympathetic terms when he was ill or injured, the grandparents would still be much loved. In dianetics an ally is only some one who has offered sympathy or protection in an engram. We don’t have to have engrams to be loved or to love: quite the contrary, one is better loved and loves more without engrams.

The token applies, dianetically, only to the ally and is an object, practice or mannerism similar to an object, practice or mannerism of the ally.

The ally smoked Pittsburgh stogies, so the aberree may smoke Pittsburgh stogies no matter what they do to his throat or his wife. The ally wore bowlers, the lady aberree dotes on riding habits but has never ridden a horse. The ally knitted, the aberree specializes in wearing knit things or a lady at least makes a pretense of knitting and sometimes wonders why she ever took it up, she is so bad at it. The ally used profanity, the aberree uses the same profanity. The ally wipes his nose on his sleeve and picks his nose, the aberree wipes his nose on a dinner jacket and fiddles with his nostrils.

The token may be a reminder of pure ally or it may be a reminder of the friend side of an ambivalent friend-enemy. And it may be a winning valence that was also ambivalent toward the aberree. The token is never an associative restimulator in the meaning that it reminds of some antagonist, for associative restimulators are abhorred.

The most chronic token, the most constant habit, practice or mannerism of the pre-clear is a direct arrow to the pure ally. And the pure ally is the one the reactive mind will guard to its highest level of the beset donjon keep. And that is the target of the auditor. He may have to relieve the majority of the engram bank before he can erase the engram which is most likely to aberrate the individual, to saddle him with strange practices and to make him chronically ill.

Observe your pre-clear and see what he does and says that are strange to his personality, things he does but does not much seem to enjoy. See what he uses and what his mannerisms are. Amongst this collection you may, by asking discreet questions, jog an ally into his memory which he had forgotten and so jogging, reach swiftly toward the sympathy engram in which that ally is contained or reach toward, for an emotional discharge, the painful emotion engram of the loss of that ally, his illness or incidents concerning him.

Another but special token is that which stems from a “die if you don’t” command. Fathers, for instance, suspicious of paternity, sometimes claim while trouncing or upsetting mothers that they will kill the child if it isn’t just like Father. This is a very unhappy type of token to say nothing of being, usually, a bad engram; it can go to the extent of remodeling structure, of making noses long or hair absent; it may compel an aberree into a profession he does not admire and all out of the engramic command that he must be like the parent. As this type of command is usually given before birth it is often addressed, unknowingly, to a girl, fathers not being gifted ordinarily with clairvoyance; in such a case it will bring about a most remarkable structural change in a woman and form some unusual mannerisms, “ambitions” (like the dog that gets whipped if he doesn’t fetch the duck) and some habits which, to say the least, are astonishing. Father, post-birth, to accomplish the reactivation of such an engram, must be quite ambivalent so that the friend-enemy compute comes into being. Not to be like father is to die: to force father into his sympathy engram self the reactive mind must manifest the token of illness. Token and likeness is the answer to such a computation. And recall, all such computations are not simple but are made further complex by the addition of dozens of other engramic computations.

The friend-enemy is rather easy to find as an enemy, not too hard to find as a friend. Standard technique with its repeater and return et al. would in themselves at last locate any

engram and erase the bank so that it properly refiles. The use of the token facilitates the auditing.

In the case of the pure ally, the champion of the right, standard technique also at last arrives. But here how smooth the use of the token sometimes makes the road! For the token may be as alarmingly strange as an elephant in a bird cage. It takes a real ally to keep some of these odd habits around.

Measure the pre-clear against his environment and education and his society and profession. See what doesn’t seem to belong amid the things he uses, the objects he adores and the mannerisms his friends find so strange. Then find out if he or the spouse knew of anyone who did those things or liked those things.

Do not suppose from all this that our clear has jettisoned all strange mannerisms. Self- determinism is individuality in the extreme; personality is inherent and revealed by clearing, looms up high above the aberree. The engrams compress a man and make him small and afraid. Released his power comes into play. The sympathy engram is to a man like a crutch when he has two sturdy legs. But oh, the pre-clear sobs where he loses old Uncle Goston, whose habit of spitting on the floor, as transplanted, so astonished our pre-clear’s friends and business associates. But the grief is brief, usually the half-hour it takes to run the sympathy engram out. Suddenly the pre-clear recalls Uncle Goston, recalls a thousand things Uncle Goston and he used to do, for the engram had Uncle Goston occluded and amongst those missing from the sight of “I.” Although it might have said in the engram, “All right, there, there, there, Billy. I’ll take care of you. Don’t thrash around so. You’ll be all right.

There, there, there. Poor little fellow. Poor little fellow. What a terrible rash you’ve got. How feverish. There, there, there, Billy. You’ll be all right as long as I am here. I’ll take care of my Billy. Go to sleep now. Go to sleep and forget it.” And Billy was all the time “unconscious” and never “knew” about it. Afterwards he got a partner who looked like Uncle Goston (but happened to be a fool), and when bankrupt somehow developed a rash and a chronic cough and got very “feverish” about his business affairs. He took to spitting on the floor no matter where he was; and his health got worse and he got worse: but if you had asked him about any uncles before he went into therapy, he would have been very vague. “Give me a flash reply,” says the auditor. “Who used to spit on the floor? “Uncle Goston,” answers the pre-clear. “Gosh, that’s funny (hawk, spit), I hadn’t thought of him for years. He was never around much, though (not more than ten years constantly, the auditor may discover). Don’t suppose he’s important. Let’s take up Mrs. Swishback, that teacher I had — “ “Let’s return now to the time Uncle Goston helped you,” says the auditor, “The somatic strip will now go back to the time your Uncle Goston helped you.” “I feel like my skin’s on fire!” complains the pre-clear. “This must be — hey, it’s my allergy! But I don’t see anybody. I don’t — Wait, I get an impression of somebody. Somebody — Why, it’s Uncle Goston!” And he runs it and the rash goes away. But maybe the auditor had to get a hundred engrams before he got this one. And then the pre-clear suddenly remembers about him and Uncle Goston and the time — but get on with therapy.

Complete remembering seems to be a synonym for complete sanity. But don’t suppose that just because a clear gets rid of his Uncle Gostons and his habit of spitting on the floor that he will not now indulge in any eccentricity. The difference is, he is not compelled into eccentricity without his consent. Good Lord, what a cleared mind can think up to keep itself from being bored!

WHAT TO DO IF A CASE STOPS PROGRESSING

Even in the easiest cases there will come times when progress seems to stop. Here is a list of possibilities of why:

1. The pre-clear is not moving on the track despite appearances, but is being subject to one of the five types of commands which can inhibit his free motion or information. The commonest of these is a holder and the pre-clear may be found to be in an engram and in a strange valence.
2. There is an emotional or pain shut-off. These can always be detected even at the beginning of a case. The patient’s muscles will tremble or twitch when he is in an engram but he will not feel the somatic: this is inevitably a pain shut-off. Out of therapy the patient may be very tense, his neck muscles in particular may be tight: this is often an emotional shut-off. Either of these conditions can be observed in many aberrees before beginning therapy. If they appear while therapy is in progress, look for pain or emotional shut-offs.
3. There is an exaggerator of emotion and a pain shut-off so that the patient weeps over anything but wriggles and twists when asked to approach pain. He is feeling emotion without feeling the pain.
4. There is an emotional charge in some area which has not been discharged but which is ready to discharge. Or, conversely, if you have been trying to get an emotional discharge in a late painful emotion engram and have had no success, there is a feeling shut-off early in the prenatal area.
5. The Auditor’s Code has been broken. Change auditors or reduce the moments when the code was broken.
6. There is an emotional upset in the patient’s life current with therapy. Question him closely and remove the charge, if possible, of the emotional upset as an engram.
7. The auditor has missed an important point in this book. Study it. IF A CASE “REFUSES” TO GET WELL It has long been a popular idea, if an erroneous fact, that people desire to retain their

neuroses. In any case which “resists” therapy, you may be certain that the engrams are resisting, not the patient; do not, therefore, attack the patient but the engrams.

There are many computations which give the appearance of resistance. The commonest of these is the ally computation, which derives from engrams containing allies who seem to plead that the patient is not to rid himself of anything. An ordinary situation is one in which some relative or friend of the mother’s is advising the mother against aborting the child. The ally is pleading, “Do not get rid of it!” The pre-clear knows this person to be a friend of his of the highest order. The pre-clear may interpret this to mean that he is not to get rid of his engrams.

Another computation is the stupidity computation, wherein the pre-clear begins to believe he will be stupid or lacking a mind if he gives up engrams. This stems, for example, from the mother saying she will lose her mind if she loses the child: she calls the child “it.” A whole chain of these may appear in a case, giving the pre-clear the idea that if he parts with any engrams, he will lose his mind. This is the primary reason why past schools believed that the mind was composed of neuroses instead of an inherent personality. The engrams, even though unknown, appeared very valuable, which they are not — none of them.

Yet another computation is one of secrecy. It seems to the pre-clear that his life depends upon holding some secret. This is common in a case where the mother has had a lover. Mother and the lover both enjoin secrecy. The pre-clear, obeying engramic commands, believes that he has much to lose if he tells this secret even though those who enjoined it were not even aware that he was present, or if they knew, that he was “listening.” One secrecy computation

stems from the mother’s fearing to tell the father that she is pregnant: if the mother is an ally of the child, then the child will be extremely tenacious of this type of engram.

All cases have one or more computations which inhibit a delivery of engrams. Some have all the above and more. This is no great worry to the auditor for, by repeater technique, he can open the engram bank.

DRUGS

The so-called hypnotics have no great use in dianetics except, on occasion, when a patient is psychotic and narco-synthesis is employed. By hypnotic is meant such preparations as phenobarbital, hyacine, opium and so on. These sleep-producing drugs are undesirable save only as a sedative and would be administered as sedatives by a medical doctor. Any patient who needs a sedative already has a medical doctor whose business it is. The auditor should not, then, concern himself with hypnotics or anything producing sleep. Some pre-clears will beg to be given sleeping drugs to “facilitate therapy” but any such drug is an anesthetic and shuts down somatics, inhibiting therapy. Further, none but the insane should be worked in amnesia trance, particularly a drug trance, for the work is longer than necessary and the results slow, as elsewhere explained. Dianetics wakes people up; it does not try to drug them or hypnotize them. Hence, the hypnotic drug is worthless to the auditor.

Patients who wish to be knocked over the head with lead pipes or otherwise put into a deep trance should not be allowed to have their way even when they humorously present their own lead pipes.

The trick is to put “I” in contact with the file clerk. All hypnotics work to shut-down “I.” While the file clerk can be reached and sonic and visio are available and even while, with much labor, a clearing can be so effected, even the most “hopeless” case is better worked in contact; the work is faster, more satisfactory and less troublesome.

When one discovers the science of mind, he inevitably discovers numerous other things not properly in his province. Amongst these is the confusion which has unwittingly existed about hypnotics. Those things labeled “hypnotics” as named above are not hypnotics at all but anesthetics. And those things labeled anesthetics are not anesthetics but hypnotics. This will become brilliantly clear to the auditor when he finds himself tangling with his first “anesthetic” nitrous oxide engram in some pre-clear. Perhaps there will have been another engram wherein morphine was administered for days and even weeks, leaving the patient in a stupor which, by the definition “hypnotic” should have been a trance: the aberrative material will be there but it will be found to be slight — compared to a chloroform or nitrous oxide engram.

Ether, chloroform and nitrous oxide, the “anesthetics,” place the patient in a deep hypnotic trance: the reactive bank is wide open and all reception is sharp, clear and aberrative in the extreme. Of the three, nitrous oxide is easily the worst, being no anesthetic which would dull pain at all but a first class hypnotic. In nitrous oxide the pain is filed and the content is filed with high and brilliant fidelity. Some years ago some investigator wondered if nitrous oxide did not make the brain decay. Fortunately brains do not decay that easily; but nitrous oxide does bring into being particularly severe engrams. The serious late-life engrams which the auditor will encounter may include, at the list’s top, a nitrous oxide dental or surgical or obstetrical engram. Nitrous oxide engrams are particularly bad when they involve exodontistry; they often form the most severe late-life engram. Aside from the fact that all exodontists have in the past talked too much and have offices which are far too noisy with street sounds, running water and flapping drill belts, nitrous oxide is not at all anesthetic and sharpens rather than dulls pain.

In reverse, nitrous oxide makes an excellent hypnotic for institutional therapy. It is far from the best obtainable from the chemists, that is certain, for some brilliant chemist will

certainly be able to bring out a good gas hypnotic now that dianetics is known and the need of it in institutions is realized.

There are some drugs which assist reverie, however. The commonest and most easily obtainable is plain, strong coffee. A cup or two of this occasionally alerts the analyzer enough so that it can reach through deeper layers of “unconsciousness.” Benzedrine and other commercial stimulants have been used with some success, particularly on psychotic patients. These bring the mind enough awake to permit it to overcome engramic commands. Such commercial stimulants have the disadvantage of exhausting a Q quantity in the mind.

This Q Quantity has not been much studied. It is as though the brain burns a certain amount of Q when it is exhausting engrams. For instance, therapy every day may bring results more rapidly but it will also bring some stale sessions. Therapy every two or three days produces the best results as observed. (Therapy once a week permits the engrams to sag and slows a case, one week being too long.) Benzedrine burns up Q. After a few sessions with benzedrine the current stock of Q is exhausted and the work has been observed to deteriorate either until a higher dosage was administered — and there is a close limit to that — or until more Q was manufactured.

Here, with all this, must be included an important and vital fact. It should be on a page by itself and underscored. All patients in therapy should be given a dosage of vitamin B1 orally or by injection at the minimum of 10 mg. per day. Reducing engrams exhausts Q which seems to depend in some measure on B1. You can be absolutely certain of nightmares in a patient who is not taking his B1. Taking liberal doses of that, he will have no nightmares. DT’s are probably caused by a similar exhaustion of Q Quantity. DT’s are best treated by B1 and dianetics. Something like DT’s on a very minor scale have been observed to develop in occasional patients who were negligent about their B1. With it, in therapy, they thrive.

Alcohol is rarely an assist to the auditor. In fact, alcohol is rarely an assist to anyone. A depressant, classifiable at best as a poison, alcohol has the single virtue of being highly taxable. All alcoholics are alcoholic because of their engrams. All alcoholics, unless they have injured their brains — which case is cited only because it is possible, not because research in dianetics demonstrated any real evidence of it — can be released. Alcoholism is engramic. It has become, in some very understandable way, a class of contagious aberration whereby the reactive mind confuses alcohol and “being a good sport” or “having fun” or “forget your troubles.” Some of these things can also be obtained by strychnine and cyanide. Alcohol has its uses: one can put specimens of frogs and such in it: one can clean the germs off needles with it: it burns well in rockets. But one would not consider preserving his stomach in a glass jar and, unless insane, does not think of himself as a needle. While some drunks think they act like rockets, few have been observed to reach an altitude of more than the floor. It is not only a poor stimulant-depressant, it is also an hypnotic in the finest sense: what is done to a drunk becomes an engram. The chronic alcoholic is physically and mentally ill. Dianetics can clear him or even merely release him without too much trouble for alcohol is apparently not physiological in its addictive effect. With the whole range of chemistry to choose stimulants and depressants from, why the government chooses a superiorly aberrative and inferiorly stimulative compound to legalize is a problem for the better mathematicians, possibly these who deal exclusively in tax income problems. Opium is less harmful, marijuana is not only less physically harmful but also better in the action of keeping a neurotic producing, phenobarbital does not dull the senses nearly as much and produces less after effect, ammonium chloride and a host of other stimulants are more productive of results and hardly less severe on the anatomy: but no, the engrams, contaging unpleasantly along from the first crude brew which made one of our ancestors drunk, decree that alcohol is the only thing which is to be drunk if a person wants to “forget it all” and “have a good time.” There is really nothing wrong with alcohol save that it depends mainly on engrams and other advertising for its effect and is otherwise remarkably inferior in performance: that it makes such aberrative engrams is probably its main claim to fame and infame. Making one drug immoral and another one taxable is a sample of the alcohol engram in society. However, although it is immensely legal, it is doubtful if the auditor will find any use for it in therapy.

And speaking of drugs, that three thousand cycle note in your ears came either from a nitrous oxide engram or mother taking lots of quinine before you were born in the hope that she would not be a mother, saying the while, “It makes my ears ring so: it just keeps on and on and on and will not stop!”

AUTO-CONTROL

Since the beginning of dianetics research eleven years ago, patients have, in the majority, had some belief that they could run their cases in auto-control.

Not understanding that an auditor is only interested in what has been done to, not done by a patient, some shyness or imagined guilt often prompts this vain hope that one can accomplish therapy alone.

It cannot be done. That is a flat statement and it is a scientific fact. The auditor is necessary for a large number of reasons. He is not there to control or order the pre-clear about, but he is there to listen, to provide insistence, to compute the trouble the pre-clear is having and remedy it. The work is done on these equations:

The dynamics of the pre-clear are less than the force in his reactive bank.

The dynamics of the pre-clear plus the dynamics of the auditor are greater than the force in the pre-clear’s reactive bank.

The analytical mind of the pre-clear is shut down whenever he reaches an engram and he is then unable to pursue it and recount it enough times to discharge it without auditor assistance.

The analytical mind of the pre-clear plus the analytical mind of the auditor can discover engrams and recount them.

(There is another equation, not elsewhere mentioned, but germane to the auditor’s code, which demonstrates mathematically the necessity of that code:

The force of the pre-clear’s engram bank plus the force of the auditor’s analytical mind is greater than the analytical mind and the dynamics of the pre-clear. This explains the necessity of never attacking the pre-clear personally. It also explains the behavior of the aberree under attack in usual life and why he grows angry and apathetic, for this equation overwhelms his analyzer.)

These equations demonstrate actual natural laws.

Auto-control finds the pre-clear attempting to attack something which has never been overcome by his analyzer although his analyzer has never been trying, interiorly, to do anything else but attack that bank so long as the analyzer would operate. The fact that the pre- clear’s analyzer shuts down whenever he comes into an area of “unconsciousness” was why the engrams could take him over and use him as a puppet when they were restimulated — they simply shut down the analyzer.

Many efforts by many patients have been made to put dianetics on an auto-control level. They have all failed and thus far it is believed to be utterly and completely impossible. The pre- clear in auto-control reverie may be able to reach some locks: he can certainly reach pleasant experiences and achieve data recall by return: but he cannot attack his own engrams without a standard auditor-pre-clear arrangement.

Aside from dianetic reverie, some pre-clears have been foolish enough to attempt auto- hypnosis and thus reach their engrams. Hypnotism in any form is unwarranted in dianetics.

Auto-hypnosis used in dianetics is probably as close to fruitless masochism as one can get. If a patient places himself in auto-hypnosis and regresses himself in an effort to reach illness or birth or prenatals, the only thing he will get is ill. Of course, people will try. None are ever convinced until they have tried once they begin to agitate about auto-control. But be sure to have a friend and this book handy so that he can audit away the headaches and such that suddenly turn on.

Dianetic reverie, which means with an auditor present, is not dangerous or severe. Auto-control is often very uncomfortable and often fruitless. It should not be attempted.

The clear alone can auto-control his whole time track back to conception and does when he wants specific data from anywhere in his life. But he is clear.

ORGANIC MENTAL ALTERATIONS

There are several things which can happen to the nervous system including the brain which can cause structural change. These are called in dianetics, organic mental alterations. They are not called “organic neuroses,” or “organic psychoses” because the alteration of structure does not necessarily produce aberrations. There has been a confusion in the past between behavior caused by organic differences and behavior caused by engrams: this confusion came about because the engram bank and the reactive mind were not known.

Any human being with an organic mental alteration also has engrams. The behavior dictated by the engrams and the action caused by alteration are different things. Engrams carry dramatizations, delusions, tantrums and various inefficiencies with them. Alterations establish inabilities to think or perceive or record or recall. For instance the radio set may have new filters and circuits added to it which change and vary its performance and reduce it from optimum; these would be engrams: the radio set might have original tubes or circuits deleted from it or it might have some of the wires crossed; this would be organic mental alteration.

The sources of organic mental alteration are as follows:

1. Variation of the blueprint of structure by reason of a changed gene pattern. Some parts of the body would grow too much or too little to establish any alteration of structure. This is usually so gross a change that it is obvious. The feeble-minded and so on may suffer either from engrams or an altered blueprint, but usually both.
2. Alteration of the nervous system by disease or growths which divides into two classes: (a) Disease destruction as in paresis. (b) Additional construction as in the case of tumors.
3. Alteration of the nervous system by drugs or poisons.
4. Alteration by physical disorder as in the case of a “paralytic stroke” wherein certain tissues are inhibited or destroyed.
5. Physical change in structure due to injury as in the case of a head wound.
6. Alteration of structure by surgery as a necessity to remedy injury or disease.
7. Iatrogenic alterations (caused by doctors) undertaken under a misapprehension of brain function. These can be divided into two classes: (a) Surgical, to include such things as the trans-orbital leukotomy, pre-frontal lobotomy, topectomy and so forth. (b) Shock “therapies” of all kinds including electric shock, insulin shock, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.etc.etc.

The first six sources of organic mental alteration are much less common than has been supposed. The body is an extremely hardy mechanism and its repair facilities are enormous. If an individual can be made to speak or follow orders at all, it is conceivable that the techniques of dianetics can be applied to reduce the engrams in the engram bank, bringing about considerable improvement in the condition and mental ability of the individual. When these various sources are so severe that they inhibit any use of therapy, and when it is certain that no recourse to therapy is possible and that it is utterly impossible to reach the engram bank by standard technique, hypnotism or drugs, such cases can be considered beyond help of dianetics.

Category 7 presents another problem. Here we have selective experimentation at work and it would be flatly impossible to conceive, without months of study of their experimental subjects, how many brands and varieties of operation have been performed and how many odd and bizarre shocks have been used.

All iatrogenic alterations of the nervous system can be considered under the heading of “reduced ability,” in other words, inability. In each case something has been done to reduce the ability of the individual to perceive, record, recall or think. Any of these complicate a case for dianetics, but they do not inevitably bar dianetics from working.

In shock cases, such as electric shock, tissue may have been destroyed and the memory banks may in some way have been scrambled, the time track may be altered and other conditions may exist.

In all such iatrogenic alterations, the results of dianetics must be considered equivocal. BUT IN ALL SUCH CASES, PARTICULARLY THOSE OF ELECTRIC SHOCK, DIANETICS SHOULD BE USED IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY IN AN EFFORT TO IMPROVE THE PATIENT.

All shocks and operations should be picked up for what they are — engrams.

NO PERSON WHO CAN PERFORM ROUTINE TASKS OR WHOSE ATTENTION CAN BE ATTRACTED AND FIXED SHOULD FEEL DESPAIR OR BE CONSIDERED HOPELESS.

Any person who has been subjected to such treatment may not be able to reach optimum mental efficiency but he may be able to reach a level of rationality even yet in excess of the current normal. The thing to do is try. In spite of what has happened or what has been done, in the large majority of cases there may be a chance of excellent recovery.

ORGANIC DERANGEMENT

A standard class of prenatal engrams has as its content the worry of the parents that the child will be feeble-minded if not now aborted in earnest. This adds an emotional overload to such engrams and it adds, as importantly, an aberrative condition in the now grown patient that he is “not right,” “all wrong,” “feeble-minded,” and so forth. The difficulty of aborting the child is nearly always underestimated: the means used are often novel or bizarre: the worry because the child has not come out of the womb after the abortion attempt is acute, and the concern that he is now damaged beyond repair all combine to make severely aberrative engrams and, because of their content, engrams which are difficult to reach.

The aberrative quality of the “feeble-minded” species of remark is of course, high. The worry that the child may be born blind or deaf or otherwise incapacitated is common. The former class of engramic remarks can bring about actual feeble-mindedness; the latter concern over blindness and so on bring about, at best, impaired visio and sonic recall.

The shut-off of the recalls is occasioned as well by an engramic belief in the society at large that the unborn child is blind, unfeeling and not alive. This belief is introduced into AA (attempted abortion) engrams by people’s self-justification remarks while attempting an abortion: “Well, he can’t see, feel or hear anyway.” Or, “It doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s blind, deaf and dumb. It’s a sort of growth. It isn’t human.”

The greater part of all sonic and visio recall shut-off has as its source the remarks made at such times or by painful emotion and other engramic data. Hundreds of hours of therapy may pass before these recalls turn on.

The bulk of all shut-offs will turn on in the course of therapy. There are thousands of engramic remarks and emotional situations which will deny the pre-clear his recall and that recall can be expected ordinarily to restore.

A very low dynamic patient (for people have various native strengths of the dynamic) may have recalls shut-off rather easily. A high dynamic patient would require much more aberration before the recalls are closed down.

These recalls can be turned on simply by running out the physically painful and painful emotion engrams.

It must not pass unremarked, however, that the abortion attempts actually can, if rarely, derange the brain and nervous mechanisms beyond the foetal ability to repair. The result of this is actual, physiological disability.

Children and adults now classified as feeble-minded may then be separated into two groups: the actual, physiological class and the aberrated class. Further, recall shut-offs must be classified into two classes as well, regardless of the dynamic and intelligence of the individual: those occasioned by brain damage received during an attempted abortion and those which are solely aberrational and derived from engramic commands and emotion.

The ability of the foetus to repair damage is phenomenal. Brain damage can ordinarily be repaired perfectly regardless of how many foreign substances were introduced into it. Just because the brain was touched in an attempted abortion is no reason to suppose that the recall shut-off has this as a source, for this is the rarer of the two causes.

It is understood that this is being read by many with recall shut-offs and it is understood that it may well produce a considerable upset. But remember this, sonic and visio recall are not vital to a nearly full release. This comment about organic damage does not mean that a release cannot be effected which will leave the person more competent and happier, for this can always be done regardless of the recalls. And remember this, recalls almost always turn on even if it takes five hundred hours or more. This condition is only remarked because it will be found in some few cases.

The “tests” and “experiments” with human brain vivisection in institutions are not, unfortunately, valid. For all the pain and trouble and destruction caused by these “experiments,” they were done without a proper knowledge of aberration and mental derangement. None of such data is of any value beyond showing that the brain can be cut in various ways without entirely killing the man. For the patients used responded both to engramic disorder and the physical disorder caused by the psychiatrist, and there is no way to differentiate between these after the operation except by dianetics. Conclusions drawn from this data are then invalid conclusions, for the response of the patient after the operation might have stemmed from a number of sources: engramic, the engram of the operation itself, attempted abortion damage early in life, brain disability on account of the operation and so forth. Hence, draw no conclusions that impairment of conceptual thinking, for instance, results only when a part of the brain is removed, that recall is shut off only when the brain is vivisected and so on. From a scientific standpoint no such “findings” were conclusive of anything except that the brain can be damaged late in life without entirely killing a man and that surgery of any kind often brings about a mental change in the patient. True, it may have been discovered that this

or that portion of the switchboard called the brain, when removed, removed also some ability to perform.

DIANETIC FIRST AID

It will be of interest to those associated with emergency hospital work particularly that the healing and recovery of any patient can be enormously benefited and the term of illness shortened by removing the engram occasioned at the moment of injury.

The accident case sometimes dies, in a few days, from shock, or does not recover and will not heal swiftly. In any injury — a burn, cut, a bruise of whatever kind — a trauma lingers in the injured area. The moment of the injury created an engram. This engram inhibits the release of the trauma. The fact that the injured part still hurts is an organic restimulator which depresses the ability of the patient to recover.

Using reverie or merely working the patient with his eyes closed, and working the patient as soon after the injury as possible, the doctor, nurse or relative can return the injured person to the moment when the injury was received and usually recover and exhaust the incident as a usual engram. Once the engram of the injury is reduced, the general mental tone of the patient improves. Further, the injured area is no longer inhibited from healing.

Some experimental work on this demonstrated that some burns would heal and disappear in a few hours when the engram which accompanied their reception was removed. On more serious injuries tests showed definite and unmistakable acceleration of the rate of healing.

In operations, when anesthetics have been used, dianetics is useful in two ways: (1) as a preventive measure and (2) as a recovery measure. In the first, no conversation of any kind should be held around or with the “unconscious” or semi-conscious patient. In the second, the trauma of the operation itself should be recovered and relieved immediately afterwards.

A PROBLEM IN MUTUAL THERAPY

R and his wife C cleared each other in eight months with dianetics, working four hours a night four nights a week, each of them auditing the other for two hours of the four. This mutual arrangement had been complicated by the fact that whereas R was very eager to be cleared, his wife was quite apathetic about the work: he had managed only after much persuasion to get the cases started.

He was a high dynamic case with much emotion encysted; she was an apathy case who entirely neglected her troubles (black panther mechanism). He was troubled with a chronic ulcer and anxieties about his job; she was troubled with a general allergic condition and a chronic carelessness in domestic affairs. They were not to any great degree mutually restimulative, but they had problems about tacit consent, avoiding the subjects which had most upset them while together, such as a miscarriage she had had and the loss of their home by fire many years before, as well as other shocks. Further they were faced by R’s intensity on the one hand and his introversion, which caused him to slight her therapy, and C’s apathy on the other hand, which at once aided R’s effort to take more time as the pre-clear than she and which made her less interested in being a good auditor.

Further complication took place because C did not understand the auditor’s code or its use and on several occasions had become angry and impatient with R when he was in session and returned, an attitude which tended to force R into an anger valence.

Along this uncertain course therapy had been continuing. R was then informed of tacit consent and told he had better release some of their mutual painful emotion. He thereafter

addressed the engram of the burning home and suddenly found himself able to audit some early sympathy engrams of his wife’s which had not heretofore been available. It was discovered that her allergies stemmed from a father sympathy compute and that R was the pseudo-father. This resulted in a marked improvement in C’s case. She began to suffer less from her allergies and a chronic heart pain she had had so long that she no longer heeded it vanished as well. She became interested in being a good auditor and studied the subject. She became slightly annoyed with R when he demanded more than his share of therapy time. (This increase of interest is always true of any apathy case which began with neglect of engrams.)

R, however, was much inhibited by her periods of anger and found that he now operated almost exclusively under auto-control, a condition wherein he decided what should be run and what should not be run in himself. This auto-control is, of course, useless, since if he knew about his aberrations and the data in his engrams, they would not be engrams. He, therefore, started on a period of refusing to display any emotion since she had mocked him about it, would not follow her directions and was, in short, obeying the engrams which she had given him when angry with him during past sessions. C was advised to pick up the moments of anger she had displayed as an auditor during therapy and when these were reduced, it was found that R worked well again and cooperated.

His ulcer stemmed from an attempted abortion. His father, an extremely aberrated individual, had sought to abort the baby when it was seven months in the womb. The mother remonstrated that the baby might be born alive. The father said that if it were alive when born he would kill it as soon as it came out. He had said, further, that the mother had to hold still while he operated. On another occasion the father had said that he would lock the mother in a closet until she decided to abort the child. (This case was much complicated because the mother had been afraid to tell the father and had pretended not to be pregnant for three months, giving the husband the belief that the child, seven months along, was actually only four months along. Therefore, there was much secrecy in the case, much confusion and conflicting data.) This meant that R had a severe holder in the prenatal area: he was held by the engram which included a penetration of his stomach. This was the key engram, which is to say other engrams, by the mechanism of similar somatic and content, had gathered around it to suppress it. This was the tangle of incidents which C was confronting unknowingly: it had become more tangled by her anger. R would now cooperate but his time track had wound into a ball around the holder engram, the key. Two exodontistries for the removal of wisdom teeth with nitrous oxide anesthesia were also suppressing the prenatals.

C worked for some time trying to get at the late extraction engrams, which contained an enormous amount of conversation between the dentist and his assistants and R’s mother, who, unfortunately for his sanity, had accompanied him to the dentist’s office.

R was made intensely uncomfortable by the continual restimulation of engrams which yet could not be reached. He was no more uncomfortable than he had often been in the past and his discomfort would have been absent had C understood and followed the auditor’s code. The case made no progress for several weeks.

C’s therapy was progressing. It was intensely restimulative to R to work upon her and increase his discomfort, but the more he worked on her the better auditing she did and the more intelligent she was (her I.Q. went up about fifty points after five weeks of therapy). C desired to know how she could break the impasses in his case and was informed that she was now practicing tacit consent, for she had many times been needlessly thoughtless of R long before therapy was undertaken and she now realized what she had done to him and yet could not bring herself to face the fact that she was a responsible party to so much of his unhappiness — she had quite ordinarily used angry language to him which she well knew would “push-button” him into doing something or into retreating from a quarrel, which language had been restimulative to him long before therapy.

C thereupon entered into painful emotion engrams late in R’s life and, by working early physically painful engrams which said R could “feel nothing” alternately with late engrams

when he was feeling intensely on an emotional plane but could not exhibit it, began to release the emotion in the case. R then showed steady improvement. Late painful emotion was released and early prenatals would show to be reduced, at which more late emotion would be visible for reduction.

It was suddenly disclosed in the case that the reason R was so easily upset by C lay in the person of a nurse who had attended R during his tonsillectomy when he was five years of age. C had some similarity of mannerism to this nurse. This was a sympathy engram, and when it was released the time track began to straighten out and the abortion engrams could be more easily contacted.

It so happened that R had been well off his time track most of his life, his memory occluded, his recall in poor condition. This was found to lie in the hidden key engram, the abortion attempt wherein his father had vowed to kill him if he came out and had added that the child could not see, feel or hear anything anyway, engramic material which was demonstrated by R’s inability to move on his time track.

The moment the key was found — two hundred and eighty hours of therapy had elapsed — R came back on the time track, could move on it, and the erasure of his engrams proceeded in an orderly fashion.

C had been cleared about two months before R reached the final engram. C’s allergies, however, disappeared long before her case was cleared completely and R’s ulcer and some other psycho-somatic difficulties also vanished well before his case was finally cleared.

A PROBLEM IN A RESTIMULATED CASE

G was cleared in ten months of sporadic sessions. His case had the initial diagnosis of non-sonic, non-visio, pain and emotional shut-off, permanent light trance, permanent “regression” at the age of three years. This is to say that the instant he went into reverie he was startled and frightened to find himself in a dental chair, three years old, and having a tooth pulled, an engram in which he had been situated, unknowingly, about half of his ensuing life. It had been the partial cause of his chronic tooth decay and his inability to sleep as negation against the anesthetic. The situation was obvious since he immediately began to wrestle about and lisp, which condition was instantly remedied by running the engram so that he could come to present time, which he did.

He had had considerable difficulty in life, was a high dynamic but manifested apathy. It was discovered after seventy-five hours, at which time release took place, that his wife was sometimes his pseudo-grandmother and also, by ambivalence, was his pseudo-mother. As his sympathy computation demanded that he be ill so that his grandmother would stay with him and as his contra-survival engrams demanded that his mother was only nice to him when he was ill, the reactive computation added up to the fact that he must be ill continually, which demand had been obeyed by his body for twenty-three years. All this was recovered and remedied, of course, only by reducing engrams.

The erasure began to take place at the end of about two hundred hours of therapy and was proceeding when the case suddenly stopped all progress. For fifty or more hours of therapy, few engrams could be located, those which were located could not be reduced, no painful emotion could be reached and whatever engrams were reached and reduced were located and treated only because the auditor in this case used highly skilled forcing techniques which are almost never necessary and should not be employed save in psychotic cases. Such endeavor had not been necessary at the beginning of the case. Something was obviously wrong.

On close questioning it was discovered that G’s wife was violently opposed to dianetics, that she never lost any chance of leveling the most scathing attacks against it to G and

particularly when he was in the company of friends. She derided him as being psychotic. She sought a lawyer to give her a divorce (announcing it after he had entered therapy but actually having had continual consultation on it with a lawyer for two years past) and generally agitated and disturbed G to such an extent that he was continually receiving painful emotional engrams even though he did not display any emotion against her.

They had a child, nine years of age, a boy. G was very fond of the boy. The child had had an unusual number of childhood illnesses and suffered from eye trouble and chronic sinusitis; he was backward in school. The wife was somewhat sharp with the child. Anything he did made her nervous.

The auditor in the case, on learning the facts about her attitude toward her husband in general and dianetics in particular, held a conference with her about her husband. She was found to be unopposed to therapy for herself. Shortly after the conference, G and this woman had a brief quarrel in which G made the remark that she must be aberrated. She took intense affront at this and said that he must be the one who was crazy since he was interested in dianetics. He countered with the fact that of the two he must be the least aberrated since he was taking steps to do something about it. Further, he pointed out that she must be aberrated or she would not be as quarrelsome with the child as she was, a fact which definitely indictated that she must have a block on her second dynamic, sex.

The following day he came home from work and found she had withdrawn the money from the bank and gone to another town, taking the boy with her. He followed and found her staying with some of her relatives. She had told them that he beat her and had gone so crazy that he had to have therapy. The truth of the matter was that he had never touched her brutally in his life. In this meeting, before witnesses, she began to rave and revile any “system of psychiatry” which believed in pre-speech memory. He pointed out to her that many schools of the past had believed in pre-speech memory, that the whole background of psychiatry had long talked about “memories of the womb” without knowing what they were, and so forth.

Her relatives, seeing him so calm about it, forced her to return home with him. En route she made a dramatic gesture, although in no way threatened, of committing suicide by leaping out of the car.

The auditor in the case had a private conversation with her on her return. He had somewhat belatedly deduced the fact that there was something in her life which she was afraid her husband would find out and that, confronted with a science which could recover all memory, she had become wildly emotional about it. She at length admitted under close questioning, that this was the case, that her husband must never know. She was so disturbed that the auditor, with her consent, gave her a few hours of therapy. It was instantly discovered that her father had many times threatened to kill her mother and that her father had not wanted her. Further, it was found that her father’s name was Q and that her engram bank was strewn with remarks such as “Q, please don’t leave me. I will die without you.” Additionally, when she was no longer in session, she suddenly volunteered what was to her a hysterically humorous fact that all her life she had been having affairs with men named Q no matter what their shape or size or age. This was far from a release but in view of the fact that his other patient, G, was jeopardized by all this unnecessary hubbub and that therapy was being stalled, the auditor further questioned her. She divulged that she had tried many times to abort their son because she was terribly frightened that he would be a blond whereas she and her husband had dark hair. Further, the engrams of that child, she knew, contained data which she considered incriminating beyond mere abortion; while pregnant she had had intercourse with three men other than her husband.

The auditor pointed out to her that this guilt feeling, no matter how real, was still engramic in her and that it was doubtful if her husband would kill her on receipt of these tidings. He told her that she was condemning a child to a second-rate existence and that she was reducing her husband to apathy by her fears and causing the auditor far more work than was necessary. In her husband’s and the auditor’s presence she confessed her infidelity and

learned with some amazement that her husband had known about it for years. He had not known about her attempts on their child.

She was requested to study a therapy manual and clear the child which, with her husband’s help, she did. The auditor continued G on to clear, who then cleared his wife.

ADVICE TO THE AUDITOR

The hidden source of human aberration was hidden for a number of very specific reasons. The auditor will encounter all of these and although with these techniques, the ability of the reactive engram bank to deny him is precisely nil, he should know the nature of the beast he has under attack.

The mechanisms of protection which the engram bank had — although they are not very good now that we know how to penetrate this armor of insanity’s cause — are as follows:

1. Physical pain.
2. Emotion in terms of captured units.
3. “Unconsciousness.”
4. The delayed character of the key-in.
5. Delay between restimulation and illness.
6. Utter irrationality. Of the physical pain we know much — that the mind, in memory, sought to avoid it just

as the mind in life seeks to avoid it as an outside source: hence, memory blockage.

Emotion of loss piles up to make a buffer between the individual and the reality of

death.

“Unconsciousness” is not only a mechanism of hiding data, it is also a block to memory which cannot jump the gaps of past moments when the fuses were blown.

An engram might slumber for the better part of a lifetime and then, given the correct set of restimulators in the right moment of physical weariness or illness, manifest itself, making an apparent cause of insanity or lesser aberration many years after the actual incident had taken place.

Another aspect of the bank protective mechanism was the restimulator lag, which is to say that when a keyed-in engram was restimulated it often required two or three days for action to take place. (Example: say a migraine headache has as its restimulator a rhythmic bumping sound; that sound is heard by the individual who has the engram; three days later he suddenly has a migraine.) Given this lag, how could one locate the cause of a specific restimulation of a sporadic illness?

The utter irrationality of an engram, the ultimate in irrationality, that everything equals everything else in the engram and that these are equal to things in the exterior environment which are only vaguely similar is a feat of idiocy which any sentient man might be expected to overlook as a “thought process.”

Man has been looking for this source for some thousands of years; but he was looking for something which was complicated on the grounds that anything which could be so

harrowing, so destructive, so vicious and so capable of producing complex manifestations must therefore have a complex source; on examination it is remarkably simple.

The auditor will have very little to do with trying to draw a line between sanity and insanity, they are such relative terms. He will be asked to compare dianetics with old standards such as the complex classifications of Kraepelin: it can be done but it has the usefulness of Aristotelian natural history, of interest only to the historian.

If an individual is incapable of adjusting himself to his environment so as to get along with or obey or command his fellows, or, more importantly, if he is incapable of adjusting his environment, then he can be considered to be “insane.” But it is a relative term. Sanity, on the other hand, closely approaches, with dianetics, a potential absolute meaning for we know the optimum mind. Modifications of education and viewpoint may make the rational action of one person appear irrational to another but this is not a problem of sanity, it is a problem of viewpoint and education, with which the auditor will have but small concern.

Thus the patients the auditor will encounter will fall into the three general dianetic classes of non-sonic recall, imaginary recall and sonic recall. The question of sanity does not arise: the question of how difficult or how long the case may be is fairly well determined by the degree of these three conditions.

However, the auditor will find that he may have in his hands a truly “insane” case, one which is “psychotic.” The treatment of such a case depends on which of the three above classes the psychotic patient may be entered. The problem is to de-intensify the engrams of the patient as swiftly as possible.

The conditions and mechanisms which hide the engram bank do not vary: they are uniformly present in every patient, in every human being. The techniques of dianetics may be improved upon — and what scientific technique, particularly in its first few years of existence cannot be — but they also do not perform selectively but are applicable to all individuals.

Hence, if we have an “insane” patient, the fundamental problem does not change and dianetic technique works as in any other case. The task is to reduce the intensity of charge in the case so that it can be resolved by standard technique.

Insane patients are often found stuck on the time track, in which case a holder is fed to them, one kind after another, until they are moving again. If the patient is regressed, he has become so thoroughly stuck that he has lost touch with the present time. Any patient can begin to relive instead of merely return and the auditor, as the remedy for this, merely snaps at them that they can remember this, which places them in a returned status again. Insane patients are often found listening to one engram over and over, in which case it is again only necessary to fix attention and feed them holders until they are once more moving on the track. Insane patients are sometimes discovered completely off the time track, listening to demons or seeing illusion. The problems are always the same; use repeater technique when, by one means or another, their attention has been fixed and then either get them moving on the track or get them back on the time track. The schizophrenic is usually a long way off his time track.

The best way to de-intensify a case so that it can be entered in routine therapy is to discover and discharge painful emotion engrams. If ordinary means fail, get the help of a medical doctor, place the patient under nitrous oxide or sodium pentothal and reach a deep level of trance where the patient will be found, ordinarily, to be capable of moving on his track even though he was off his track when awake. Find a late despair engram and discharge it as described in the chapter on emotion. The technique for deep trance is no different except that very cautious safeguards must be taken to say nothing which will aberrate the patient further but to limit all conversation to therapy patter, being very careful to include the canceller.

The insane patient is obeying some engramic command, perhaps many, no matter what he is doing. That command may dictate, by the patient’s misinterpretation, some strange action;

it may dictate demons; it may dictate anything. But diagnosis merely consists of observing the patient in order to discover, by his actions, what the engramic command might be.

This volume does not cover Institutional Dianetics beyond these few remarks, but an auditor who knows the fundamentals in this volume and with any understanding can bring about a “sanity” in patients in a short time which the boards of these institutions normally consider a miraculous recovery. The patient, however, is very far from a release, and many more hours should be spent in discharging further painful emotion and reducing engrams before an auditor should consider it safe to permit him to leave therapy.

The auditor should be extremely cautious, at least for the next twenty years, about any case which has been institutionalized, for he may be getting a case with iatrogenic psychosis — caused by doctors — in addition to the patient’s other engrams. Dianetics may help a mind a little in which the brain has been “ice-picked” or “apple-cored,” but it cannot cure such insanity until some clever biologist finds a way to grow a new brain. Electric shock cases are equivocal: they may or may not respond to treatment, for brain tissue may have been burned away to a point where the brain cannot function normally. In entering any such case, the auditor will be perplexed by the scrambled condition of the standard bank, to say nothing of the circuits by which he should be able to reach the engram bank. Syphilis and other brain erosions should be similarly classified and should be approached or undertaken only with the full knowledge that dianetics may not be able to help the dismembered machine at all. There have been many thousands of these brain “operations” and hundreds of thousands of electric shock treatments: thus the auditor should be alert not to engage upon what may be a hopeless cause when there exist so many cases which can better be helped. Any case which has been institutionalized should be suspected. And if anything unusual in the way of memory scramble or lack of coordination is observed, searching inquiry may reveal hidden institutionalization. Further, an auditor called upon to assist a case which is about to be institutionalized should always be wary. The case which is being sent to an institution may be a case which has been in one before, regardless of the protestations of relatives or friends that such is not the circumstance.

Similarly combat exhaustion cases should be warily undertaken, for the case was probably processed before quitting the service, at which time electric shock or brain operation or narco-synthesis may have been applied without the knowledge or consent of the patient.

These warnings are given not because the auditor will be in any particular physical danger — patients seldom do anything but cooperate, sane or insane, when dianetics is applied, even if they snarl about it — but because much work may be expended only to discover that the entire mental machinery has been wrecked beyond repair.

If the auditor undertakes an electric shock case, he should address his primary attention to the release of that shock as an engram, for there is all manner of careless chatter contained in these institutional engrams, which may further inhibit treatment. This is aside from the fact that any electric shock, anywhere in the body, has a tendency to derange the engram bank and bind it so that its incidents are more than usually snarled.

For no other reason than the advance of dianetics, and the conservation of an auditor’s time, it should also be remarked that the third degree methods of some police departments and general police abuse of criminals or ordinary citizens may have to be released in a case before it can be further treated. Prison terms may contain large despair charges sufficient to derange the mind and yet may be hidden by the patient under the mistaken idea that the auditor is interested or will be disappointed in his “character.”

Various other things enter into the engram bank which would not be suspected as obstacles to therapy unless mentioned. Hypnotism can be extremely aberrative and may hold up a case. An auditor should have some working knowledge of it so that he can release the engrams it makes, not so he can work dianetics. Hypnotism is the art of implanting positive suggestions in the engram bank. Here they may append themselves to engrams and become locks on those engrams. As most engram banks contain a sample of most common words,

hypnotism is almost certain to be aberrative. The reduction of analytical power by artificial means places the subject in an optimum condition for the receipt of an engram. The hypnotist uses the forgetter mechanism with most of his suggestions and most people have similar engramic remarks which make it impossible for the hypnotist’s suggestion to release. Hypnotism can be considered as a “high-powered” lock and may be a serious obstacle in the patient’s engram bank. With clearing, the suggestions having no anchors of pain below them in engrams, vanish as locks. But hypnotic suggestions may have to be found and cleared before a case can proceed. Hypnotism is very commonly used in this society and it is very often the case that, with the forgetter mechanism, the patient is unable to recall whether he had ever been hypnotized or not. Return technique will discover it, repeater technique, making the patient return with repetition of hypnotic patter (by the patient) such as “Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep,” can be depended upon to locate it.

Not all hypnotism is in the parlor. Perverts quite commonly use it despite the fact that the “moral” nature is supposed to rise in a hypnotized subject. Incidents even with people of repute have been found in patients when examining their childhood. These incidents were often entirely occluded to the patient, so thoroughly cowing were the commands contained in the hypnotic suggestion.

Dianetics and hypnotism can be combined, but so can dianetics and astronomy. The auditor will find himself working with hypnotic patients and will have to be very careful with patter in order to install minimal words of his own in the engram bank so as not to turn dianetics into hypnotism.

Any benefit derived from hypnotism is in the field of research or the installation of a temporary manic engram. The latter has far more harm than value. Hypnotic anesthetic is vastly overrated. And hypnotism as a parlor game is a thing which no society should tolerate, for it may be sufficiently destructive to cause the engrams to restimulate to a point of insanity. And the hypnotist never knows the content of the engram bank. Any good hypnotist, if he can conquer his desire to talk, should make a good auditor: but if he tries to combine dianetics and hypnotism he will find himself with a very thoroughly sick patient on his hands. Never install a positive suggestion of any kind in a patient no matter how much he may beg for one. It has proven nearly fatal.

An entire case can be worked in deep amnesia trance. It is often possible to waken a sleeping person into a deep trance simply by speaking to him quietly several nights in succession at the same hour and finally getting him to respond to the invitation to talk. Dianetic therapy can then be entered upon and pursued and will succeed particularly if the auditor is not careless enough to artificially restimulate a late physical pain engram, treating in the post-birth life mainly engrams of painful emotion.

If the person on whom the therapy is being done is aware of the action, he can be put into reverie so that earlier data can be reached, “I” being more powerful than the weak if wise attention units which constitute basic personality. He is alternately worked in amnesia trance and then in reverie. The case will resolve eventually even if reverie is not used. But there are grave responsibilities with amnesia trance: a canceller must always be installed and used in every session. Minimal conversation must be employed. All auditor desires should be stated as questions if possible, as these are not aberrative to the degree that commands are. This method has been successful and can be used, but reverie, even if it appears slower, even if sonic is not present, is far more satisfactory for the excellent and incontrovertible reason that the patient recovers more swiftly and recovers on a steady upgrade whereas amnesia trance may incapacitate him for days together, when incidents are apparently lifted in deep trance but nevertheless “hung up” in the awake state. Amnesia trance is definitely not advised: it has been subjected to much research and has been found to be both uncomfortable for the patient and harassing to the auditor. However, if other methods cannot be used for one reason or another (and none of those reasons include the desire of the pre-clear who, if the auditor would let him, might crave drugs, hypnotism and positive suggestion in an effort to escape his engrams and who, if allowed, would have himself a wonderfully messy case for the auditor to unsnarl),

amnesia trance can be employed, but always with the greatest caution and always with the full knowledge that the patient’s recovery is retarded by as much as a factor of three, for working on a level with the engram bank leaves the analyzer circuits unused in the discharge. Reverie is best.

EXTERNAL PROBLEMS WITH PATIENTS

It may happen that a patient who has made progress suddenly ceases to make further progress. The answer may lie elsewhere than therapy. The environment of the pre-clear may be so intensely restimulative that he is distracted, always in restimulation and thus works slowly. It may be discovered, in such a case, that the pre-clear (as in one case) has made a bargain with a wife or husband who desires divorce that he or she wait until the pre-clear is cleared. Other situations of a life nature can place an environmental value on not being cleared. The auditor has no business with the private lives of his pre-clears, but in a case where therapy itself is made difficult by existing situations the auditor, with his time at stake, has every right to discover the reason. All these reasons will compute into some environmental advantage in not being clear. Removing the pre-clear temporarily from his home, for instance, may change his environment and advance therapy. The auditor has a right to ask that, clear or not, the patient resolve the problem on his own initiative. It is common with pre-clears that they do not realize that they are releases for so glittering is the goal of clear that they cease to compare themselves to the normal which they have already overpassed.

A patient can commonly be expected to introvert to a very marked degree in the course of dianetic therapy. As the case progresses this introversion reaches an acute stage about three- quarters or thereabouts through and thereafter recedes. Ambiversion is a marked characteristic of the clear. When introversion has been marked, a fairly good gauge of the advance of the case is in the pre-clear’s interest in exterior things.

Nearly all pre-clears talk a great deal about their engrams up to the point when they are very solid releases. If they don’t or won’t talk about their engrams in common conversation, the auditor can suspect something highly protected in the engram bank concerning the necessity to hide something: the auditor can act accordingly. Although the auditor may weary of such conversation, it nevertheless reveals much new material to him if he observes the phrases which the pre-clear uses about engrams.

It is very, very true that aberration is caused by what has been done to not what has been done by the patient.

The actions of the patient in dramatizing, in committing crimes and so forth are not aberrative to the patient. Therefore the pre-clear’s activities need be no concern whatever of the auditor’s. Whole cases have been completed without the auditor’s knowing what the pre-clear did for a living. While responsibility for his actions is necessarily demanded of him by an aberrated society, antisocial activity is the resuit of engrams which dictate it. The patient is not responsible for what he himself has done. Cleared, the matter is different. A clear can be considered entirely responsible for his own actions, for he can compute rationally on the basis of his experience. But the aberree has little or no real control over his actions. Therefore, the auditor should make it plain that he does not care what the aberree who becomes a pre-clear has done in life. The problem on hand between the auditor and the pre-clear is an engram bank which contains, exclusively, what other people have done in life and what has been done to the pre-clear in moments when he could not protect himself. This approach is not only truth, it has a therapeutic value, for in so explaining himself an auditor can often obtain cooperation which would otherwise be denied.

The auditor should never violate the auditor’s code with a patient. Extended terms of therapy inevitably result from such violations.

RESTIMULATION

The mind is a self-protecting mechanism — but so is dianetics. A science of thought which works would so closely approximate the working principles of the mind that it would follow in parallels the injunctions and provisos of the mind itself. Such is the case with dianetics: the mind is diagnosed by its reaction to therapy, therapy is improved by the reactions of the mind to it. This is a working principle of great value since it explains much observed phenomena and predicts most of the remainder. Part of this parallelism is the self-protection feature.

It is almost impossible to injure a mind: it is an extremely tough organism. Of course, when one begins to hew and saw upon it with metal or poison it with drugs or bacteria or throw its natural armor aside as with hypnotism, unfortunate things can occur.

Charlatanism is almost impossible where dianetics in any of its principles is being practiced. One either practices all dianetics and gets results or practices himself into a decline: that is a mechanical, scientific fact. Dianetics, as a self-protecting science, demands practice by clears or at least good releases. A clear very closely follows in all his conduct the better aspects of the auditor’s code: his ethical level is very high. Hence, anyone starting a practice of dianetics is going to find himself, no matter what his original intention, thrust toward the goal of being a clear.

There is an excellent reason for this. There is a principle known as restimulation of the auditor. We have an understanding now of what makes an engram come into restimulation. When it comes into restimulation, it forces the pain or the action of the engram into being in the organism. The observation of some percept in the environment which approximates a recording, sound or sight or organic sensation, in the engram brings the engram into greater or lesser play. Similarly, when an auditor is not cleared himself or when he is not in therapy himself working toward the goal of a clear, he becomes restimulated. He is, after all, listening constantly to engramic material in a patient. This engramic material is the very stuff of which insanity is made. Anyone has engrams: sooner or later a patient is going to start going over an engram of his own which will approximate the auditor’s own engrams. This leads to great discomfort for the auditor unless the auditor is in therapy and can have the discomfort so brought forth released. So long as one is merely working late locks, this is not so much the case and has made it possible for practitioners and mental healers of the past to escape much of the penalty of their own aberrations, but when one deals with the root material of these aberrations, a constant hammering by restimulators can bring about a serious condition. This is the mechanism which causes people in asylums to fall prey themselves to psychoses, although one must have had them in the first place for them to have been restimulated.

The auditor may run one or two cases without any serious repercussion: indeed, no matter what the repercussion, it can be eliminated by dianetics. To save his own comfort, however, he should himself be cleared or released as soon as possible. He can work as a release without too much trouble, and this makes it possible for him to make a mutual compact where he is worked on while he is working the other. A condition can then come about where two pre-clears are each auditors. This alternation between the couch and the auditor’s chair will usually work very well.

Two persons, however, after they have begun work, may discover that they are mutually restimulative — which is to say each is a pseudo-person in the other’s engrams or one is restimulated (voice tone, incidents) by the other. This should be no bar to therapy. It has been overcome and therapy has gone forward despite the most severe restimulative circumstances. A common avoidance technique on the part of a subject is to claim the auditor restimulates him: it is not sufficiently important to stop therapy. It may be, however, that two people can enter a third into the chain and by one clearing the next considerably ease the tension. The triangular work plan, where no person is working on the person who is working him, is quite successful.

A husband and wife who have quarreled long and often may find it too restimulative to clear each other. It is possible to do if other arrangements cannot be made and it is often done: but if therapy does not go well, he should find a therapy partner and so should she. Mothers who have attempted abortion on their children or otherwise maltreated them can accomplish therapy on those children, but in any case of restimulative circumstance such as this, the greatest precaution must be taken by the auditor to adhere severely to the auditor’s code — to do otherwise might bring much more stress into therapy than is necessary. In such a case, the mother had better herself have at least a release accomplished upon her before she attempts to clear her children — and she should not touch those children until they are at least eight.

The subject of auditor-restimulation, where the auditor restimulates the pre-clear or the pre-clear restimulates the auditor, does not include the routine aspect of therapy that the pre- clear is always being artificially restimulated via standard therapy. An engram can be restimulated by being touched several times and so it will lift. The auditor-restimulation problem is a specific one where the auditor is a pseudo-enemy, a similarity to a person who has harmed the patient. Wild antagonism on the part of a patient to an auditor is usually traced to this. Some patients have such a hatred of men that only women can work them, some have such a hatred of women that only men can work them. But even when there is a wild antipathy, if there exists no other auditor or person who can be trained quickly as one, therapy can proceed anyway: and it will accomplish results.

REBALANCING A CASE

Any case dropped out of therapy will rebalance itself in a few weeks, which is to say, it will settle to a new high for the individual. Unless drug hypnotism or some other dianetically illegal method is used, all cases will so rebalance, much benefited. Restimulations can be expected to die down if they are due to therapy. The patient will gradually find his own level in the released state. Cases do not have to be carried forward to clear if auditor time is short, but it is, of course better if they are and, indeed, the majority of patients will insist that they be.

WORKING TIME IN THERAPY

The usual period of a dianetic treatment is two hours. In these two hours, with the usual patient, everything is going to be accomplished which can be accomplished on that day. Working every day is not necessary, but working every two days or every three days is desirable. Working with periods a week apart is not optimum, for the case tends to rebalance. Further, there is a “sag” in a case, usually every fourth day when it is not worked in periods as short as three days. The fourth day “sag” is a natural mechanical thing: an engram, keyed-in, when it is restimulated in life, takes about four days to cut in sharply. In therapy, three days is sometimes required to “develop” an engram. This does not mean that three days have to elapse before it is available and it does not mean that work has to stop for three days, but it does mean that engrams, not being memories and articulate as such, take three days, sometimes, to come to the surface.

To be more clear, an engram can be asked for on day one and will be found on day three. Meanwhile the auditor is getting other engrams. This process is so automatic that it requires no attention and will not come to notice except in cases that are being worked once a week. The engram is asked for on day one, is ready to reduce on day three, sags on day four and is rebalanced by day seven.

The three day aspect is interesting in another sense. This time of three days is just an observation of the average behavior of pre-clears. Precision investigation may fix it at 2.5 days or 3.6 days (it varies in individuals), but three days is close enough for our purposes. When one is doing just a release on a case, he will sometimes find that it is necessary to take a late engram and run it: the physical pain engram of later life (post-birth) will appear to rise, will remain constant for three days and then will “sag.” When it sags, the auditor will have to go

back to it and run it again. Taking out these “sags” will eventually make the later life engram stay in a recessed state.

Euphoria often sets in on a case when the auditor touches an engram which contains a manic. The patient will then go around saying how wonderful dianetics is because he is now in magnificent condition and is so happy. Watch out. In three or four days this manic will have sagged back to a depressive state. Be wary if somebody experiences one of these sky-rocket “recoveries” for it is about as permanent as the fire of a burning match. It goes out and leaves very cold ashes. The auditor, seeing this euphoria, had better enter the case again and reduce the engram it contains more thoroughly or get a more basic engram.

The length of time it takes to clear a person is quite variable. By blowing despair charges and working a few early engrams, an auditor can get a better state of being in the patient than in any past therapy in twenty or thirty hours: this is a release. It compares to two or three years of past therapeutic work. The length of time it takes to get a clear cannot be compared to any past standard because a clear is something no past standard ever dreamed about.

In a sonic case, where recall is in good condition, a clear can be obtained in a hundred hours. In a case which has thoroughly shut down recalls, anything can happen up to, in extremity, a thousand hours. Similarly, the imaginative case which has things which never happened, may be long.

Look at it this way: we can get the results of two or three years of psycho-analysis in a score or two of hours of dianetics and what we accomplish with dianetics does not have to be done again, which is not true with psycho-analysis. This is the release. He can go about his business in a far more competent fashion, his emotional charges being largely freed. In the clear we are attempting and can achieve a supernormal state of mind. Thousands and thousands and thousands of hours were spent in the education of a man: the expenditure of two or even ten thousand hours of work to make him rank about what would formerly have been possible for him is work well spent. But we do not have to spend anything like this amount of time. People have been cleared in anything from thirty hours, when they had sonic and little volume, to five hundred hours when they had shut-down recall plus imaginary recall. What an auditor can do with his first few cases by way of time is a question mark. He will get to the clear eventually and certainly in less than twelve hundred hours in a severe case. All the time he is working toward a clear he is achieving a higher and higher release which, after at least fifty hours, rises well above the current norm and keeps right on soaring. Improvement is such that from week to week the charge is physiologically noticeable and psychologically startling. If one thinks the reach for clear is a short jump and a small gain, then he has no conception of just how high that goal is.

Most auditors will try for release at first and are wise if they do. When their own case is finally cleared, only then will they suddenly realize that the state was worth far more time than was expended to attain.

It is impossible to forecast, with a new auditor, just how much time he will consume in making errors, learning his tools, attaining skill. It is therefore impossible to estimate for him how long it will take him to gain a clear in a patient. A well trained auditor never takes more than eight hundred hours with the worst of cases: five hundred is high.

DATA FROM RELATIVES

The auditor will always be plagued by the anxiety of the patient to get data from relatives or friends. The request for this data itself is restimulative both to the pre-clear and the relative. Mothers have been made very ill by being given the restimulators of their own past illnesses by the child who has “suddenly found out.”

It is a uniform experience that the data obtained from relatives, parents and friends by the pre-clear is absolutely and utterly worthless. Here we are depending upon an aberree’s memory when we have at hand, with dianetics, a reliable source of accurate material. Auditors have had cases progress very smoothly and then suddenly stop progress: on inquiry it is discovered that the pre-clear has been running around to his parents and relatives for material and they, wanting nothing more than that he forget all about what they have done to him, throw him red herrings which have to be carefully eliminated. These are the villains of the piece, the people who have done the things to the pre-clear which made him an aberree. If one expects accurate data from them, one might as well expect the moon to be green cheese.

If the auditor wants data from these people and requests it, by-passing the pre-clear, he may get somewhere. But any data so received has a value which, in intelligence, is used to label “Incompetent Source — Improbable Material.”

Warn a pre-clear not to bother his relatives and parents and explain to him that he can make them ill by asking for data, on the restimulator principle. If we want confirmation of the data received, the only way to get it is put the parent or relative in therapy. At such time, we shall get the basic dramatization sources: in the prenatal life and childhood of the parent. This is a problem of research, not of therapy.

If the auditor has Mama available, he can run off the child’s birth and then Mama giving birth, keeping the two apart, and get his check on the accuracy of therapy. And there are other data that can be so compared, using proper safeguards.

The subjective reality, not the objective reality, is the important question to the auditor. First, last and always, does the patient get well?

STOPPING THERAPY

The woman scorned has a violent rival in the pre-clear on whom therapy has been stopped by the auditor’s decision.

Keeping the pre-clear in therapy, no matter how seldom are the sessions, satisfies in some measure the effort his basic personality makes to fight clear of the aberrations.

The basic personality, the file clerk, the core of “I” which wants to be in command of the organism, the most fundamental desires of the personality, may be considered synonymous for our purposes. There is an enormous surge of this basic self — which is really the individual himself — to conquer the engrams. The engrams, borrowing life from their host, appear as things which do not want to be conquered. As mechanistic as all this actually is, the auditor will often find himself wondering at the resistance the engrams can make and marveling at the efforts of the basic personality to conquer the engrams. He works with the basic personality, the individual himself, and ignores the engramic efforts to interfere. But there is a situation in which the basic personality seems to give free play to the engrams in an effort to accomplish therapy.

In work, a “patient” might have been skeptical, sarcastic or even vicious to the auditor. Or the patient may have been thought to be completely neglectful of his engram bank. Or the patient may even rage that he hates therapy. For some of these reasons the auditor may injudiciously decide to cease working the patient. The patient is so informed. For a short while, perhaps, the patient may manifest no reaction but in a few minutes, a few hours or a few days, basic personality, denied a route out, may begin to use every weapon to hand to compel the auditor to resume therapy.

Disturbed by cessation of therapy, even though he may have insisted upon its being stopped, the ex-patient may begin either to rapidly decline or to attack to his face or behind his back the auditor and even therapy itself. The woman scorned has rarely made such thorough

upsets as ex-patients who have been refused continuance of therapy. Auditors have been personally reviled, have had other pre-clears searched out and undermined by violent attacks upon therapy itself, have been targeted by all manner of accusations and whispering campaigns and have been made most uncomfortable by pre-clears who have had further therapy denied to them before a release had taken place. Even solid, legitimate releases, whose psycho-somatic ills have disappeared and who should be quite cheerful, have been observed to create turbulence when the auditor would not take them through to clear. Any number of mechanisms may be used by the ex-patient. as many mechanisms as men use to force other men into action. One of the mechanisms is a resumption of apathy and a “swift decline.” Another is wild campaigning against therapy. Another is personal attack of the auditor. Each has, as its provable intention, the resumption of therapy.

The mind knows how the mind works. And the mind which has tasted a way out of pain and unhappiness may be expected, if that way is blocked, to use all methods to cause therapy to be resumed.

No matter how thoroughly disagreeable the ex-patient has been, the moment the auditor starts therapy upon him again, the attitude alters. No further destructive efforts are made against the auditor or therapy but all is almost as well as it was before the cessation was declared.

Do not suppose, however, that the pre-clear, if he has been neglectful, recalcitrant or generally uncooperative before, will now embrace therapy as chastened patient. Far from the case, he is now at least as difficult to work as he was before plus some additional antagonism engendered by the cessation order.

In such a case the auditor is damned if he does and double-damned if he doesn’t. But there is a way out of this. The phenomenon of “transference,” where the patient simply transfers his griefs to the practitioner, is not the mechanism here at work; transference is a different thing, bred of a thirst for attention and a feeling of needed support in the world. Transference can be expected to keep up forever if permitted; the patient of a doctor, for instance, may go on and on having illnesses just to keep the doctor around. Transference may occur in dianetic therapy, the patient may lean on the auditor solidly, beg the auditor for advice, appear to hold out engrams in an effort to keep the auditor working hard and available and interested; all this is the resultant of a sympathy computation and is aberrated conduct. The clever auditor will not give advice or attempt to run anyone’s life, for a person works well only as a self-determined organism. In dianetic therapy, no matter what the attitude of the patient, no matter how great his “desires to be ill” or his transference of burden, no matter about even his vicious remarks to the auditor during sessions, the condition cannot obtain forever.

Basic personality is trying to get through; “I” is trying to integrate self. Even indifferent work will eventually release enough charge from a case and reduce enough engrams to bring a higher stability to the patient. Basic personality gets stronger and stronger and therefore more self-reliant. The introversion occasioned by continual effort to reach the interior world of the engram bank de-intensifies and extroversion comes more and more into being as the case advances. The way out is to work the patient smoothly and well and one day he will be well released or clear. But meanwhile, if you stop therapy on anyone, don’t be surprised at anything that happens; you can only remedy it by resuming the case.

AUDITOR EVALUATION

The auditor must do much evaluation to himself. He does not evaluate or force upon his pre-clear any computation. If the pre-clear computes that this was what was making him ill, then this is what the auditor accepts. Explaining to the pre-clear what it was in the engram which affected him so and so is not only a waste of time but also makes the pre-clear confused. The reason an auditor evaluates is to make sure he is not accepting imagined data or incomplete data as engrams.

An incident will not lift unless the data in it is correct: this is automatic. Change just one syllable in the incident and it will stick. Or, if it seems to go away, it will be back. So there is no fear that any incident which decreases with recounting is incorrect. The data in it must be more or less correct or it would not so reduce. Thus the auditor who challenges incidents, data or otherwise plays god is going to have a thoroughly fouled up case on his hands before he goes very far, and he is going to have a subject who is not progressing. If the subject begins to run an engram where Mama is having intercourse with five Eskimos, let him run it and never, never, never, never tell him that you feel it was untrue. If you tell the subject you think he is imagining things, you may give him a serious set-back. Tell him you think Mama had her reasons and you have sided with the opposition: you are not attacking the engram, you are helping Mama attack the subject. To criticize, correct or otherwise judge the pre-clear has no slightest part in dianetics and will do more to slow up a case than any other single action. An auditor who challenges the material given him may be practicing witchcraft or Chinese acupuncture or shamanism or voodoo, but he is not practicing dianetics. And he will not get results. One remark to the subject such as, “I think that you are mistaken in believing your mother would try to abort you,” or “I feel that you are imagining it” may set your pre-clear back fifty hours. The auditor does not criticize or judge the pre-clear, nor does he evaluate for the pre-clear that person’s material.

Auditing is all done privately and to oneself. If the patient has just recounted his fifth prenatal train wreck, you may be sure you have run into a lie factory in some engram. The wrong way to go about correcting this is communicating it to the pre-clear. The right way to go about it is to find the lie factory, an engram containing such a remark as, “Tell me anything! Tell me anything. I don’t care so long as you say something. But for God’s sakes don’t tell me the truth, I can’t stand it!” Or, “You can’t tell him the truth. It would hurt too much.” There are a thousand forms of lie factory. And they are not too uncommon.

Never tell the pre-clear why you are looking for anything. If you say you want a lie factory, the lie factory will make up a lie factory. If you say you want an emotional charge, you will inhibit any emotional Charge from discharging. Simply make a quiet estimate of the situation, reduce everything which seems valid and keep on trying to get the reason why the case is not functioning as well as possible.

The test for validity of an engram is not plot. Plot is worthless. Engrams are just collections of remarks contained in periods of “unconsciousness.” It makes no difference whatever whether these remarks agree with the way the auditor thinks a life should be run or the way a pre-clear should look up to his parents. Plot is something writers put in stories. Auditors have nothing to do with it. An engram is basically illogical and irrational; don’t try to read rationality into one! If the parents were known to be fine, upstanding members of the community and the engrams seem to indictate that Mama nightly played the prostitute, accept the engrams.

Validity is very simply established. Ask these questions of the engrams:

(1)  Does it have a somatic?

(2)  Does the somatic undulate, which is to say, undergo a running change?

(3)  Does it reduce? (If it does not, the content the pre-clear is running is wrong or the engram is way up the chain and has others before it.)

(4)  Does the engramic content agree with the patient’s aberration?

(5)  Does the somatic agree with psycho-somatic ills the patient is known to have had?

(6) Does it bring relief to the patient? And this last is more important than all the rest.

Because mental healers of the past have grandly said, “Oh, this does not fit with my idea of how life is run” is no reason an auditor should run dianetics off the rails. Mental healers of yesteryear did not get results. Dianetics gets results: and one of the most important reasons why dianetics gets results is that it is not trying to warp life to fit dianetics but is applying dianetics to life. Many new and startling things will come to the notice of the auditor.

His motto, as seen on an ancient English crest where a ninety-foot raven stood upon a castle, could read, “Be surprised at nothing.”

The Kinsey report did not begin to tell the story you, as an auditor, will get in dianetics. Because the mother, by herself, is neither the face she showed Junior nor the face she showed society and because mother and father, by themselves, do not conduct themselves as they might be supposed to have done in society is insufficient reason to force a pre-clear to go on being an aberree.

Continually in the psychiatric texts we come upon patients who tried to tell psychiatrists about prenatal life and who were told, with droll solemnity that the incidents were imaginary. Patients who had been given up on all fronts by all existing schools because their data was not tailored to fit the belief of those schools have recovered fully and achieved optimum mental condition, well above that of their former mentors, with dianetics, partially because dianetics does not set itself above the facts of life. He not only requires the patient to face reality by running the engrams but he also requires himself to face reality by accepting the fact that whatever the content, if it fits any of the above conditions listed, it is valid in therapy.

Auditing means to listen; it also means to compute. Computing on a case consists of establishing where the patient departs from optimum rationality in his conduct of life but, more important, where physically painful and painful emotion engrams exist and how they can be approached and reduced.

Patients discover some astonishing things about their parents and relatives when they are in therapy. Often they discover, like one patient who had believed he had daily been beaten by his father, that life was actually much better than it had seemed.

Pre-marital conception cases are very common, with the patient yet unborn discovering himself at his parents’ wedding. And these cases are often very difficult to resolve since they contain so much secrecy in their engrams.

The lie factory mechanisms will often try to give Mama extra lovers and try to make Papa into a raving beast, but a lie factory is very easy to detect: the incidents brought forth do not run like engrams: the second time over their content is widely changed, they do not have somatics and their content is not aberrative.

In short, the test is whether or not one has an actual engram, not whether or not the engram makes sense. For father could well have been a raving beast in a boudoir and mother could well have had coitus with the boarders: and father could well have been a tame lamb for all the reputation mother gave him post-birth and mother could well have been a frigid prude despite the wild tales the pre-clear might have heard. The truth will come out in the reduction but its truth is no concern of the auditor’s beyond getting up engrams.

First, last and always, get engrams, get them as early as possible for pain, later for emotion, get them, erase them, discharge them, clear them! That they did not compute as true data was what drove the aberree into being an aberree. Leave plot to writers: our task is therapy.

But don’t “buy garbage”: ask for the somatic, see if it varies as the pre-clear utters the words. Test for engrams. And devil take the plot.