The Anatomy of the Engram (500815)
Date: 15 August 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I want to talk to you about the anatomy of the engram. (I want to get off in high gear, make ourselves a good start here. A little bit difficult to talk about the anatomy of the engram without a blackboard.) The understanding of this beast is very necessary to putting him down and to shooting him. It’s something like big game hunting, except that he only occasionally bites back. Of course, if you have ever seen a preclear come up off the couch: “Wrangle, wrangle, wrangle, wrangle; you did this; you did that. You know you can’t do that”—that’s an engram fighting back.
An auditor was running a psychotic one day, a paranoiac schiz, and as the psychotic lay there he started into an engram. Suddenly, he rolled over on his side, reached into his pocket, brought out an 8-inch knife, opened the blade up, took a look at the auditor. The auditor said, “Put away the knife; go back to the engram.” So, he closed the knife, put it in his pocket, and went back to the engram.
Now, therefore, you can see that the hunting of this beast is not without some of its dangers. But I don’t think very many of you are going to get into trouble. If you do a very good job of it, you will keep your friends and influence people. If you do a very bad job of it, why, your preclears are liable to wind up hating you. It’s a touchy subject with some people, that they have engrams. However, in view of the fact that everybody seems to have acquired them in a lifetime, the number of the beasts for you to hunt is practically unlimited. And we want to give you the habitat and diet and combative methods and so forth of this beast, in a way, so that you can track him down to his lair and do him in rather rapidly.
You must know that if you don’t know about him thoroughly, know your subject well, that you merely reactivate him, and he gets very mad; and he chews up not only the preclear, but sometimes you too.
There are a lot of misconceptions, I understand, about engrams. Some people think they include the analytical mind; some people believe the only reason the analytical mind behaves is because it has engrams—a lot of nonsense. One of the most remarkable things about the engram is its utter parasitic quality. It is without doubt the world’s greatest parasite. It can’t act, it can’t do anything unless it has an analyzer through which to act. Therefore, when we talk about the anatomy of the engram, we must immediately begin with a discussion of the analytical mind, because the analytical mind is the switchboard or control system which the engram uses in order to handle the human being. Remove the analytical mind and you could leave the engram, the whole reactive bank, completely in place.
Now, to remove the analytical mind would of course make the patient more tractable; it would “adjust” him better. That is to say, he could be so thoroughly adjusted that after that, one never had any trouble with him at all. A reductio ad absurdum of this is that it often kills him to remove his analytical mind. But nevertheless, the work which has been done with the prefrontal lobotomy, the transorbital leukotomy and the topectomy does demonstrate that the engrams aren’t disturbed—they’re still there.
You get a situation like this. This fellow has been going around saying, “They’re swearing at me all the time. They’re cursing me. They just keep cursing me. I can’t stand it anymore. I keep hearing them.” So they give him a prefrontal lobotomy. So he is sitting there quietly about two or three weeks later. “How are you getting along?” “Fine.” “Do you hear those voices anymore?” “Oh, yes.” “Well, do they bother you?” “No.” “What are they saying?” “Oh, you son of a bitch. Goddamn you.” “Well, doesn’t it worry you?” “No.” He is adjusted. That gives you some sort of an idea of the engram action. Of course, that engram has been licked, in that it can no longer activate. It can’t charge out against the psychotic, because the switchboard has been wrecked It’s something like blowing up a freight engine because the engineer’s gone a little bit off his nut.
This is not so much a criticism of the prefrontal lobotomy and the rest of them as it is a demonstration of the actuality and the identity of an engram. Now, the engram bank, the reactive bank, is a separate bank. I myself didn’t know that it was a separate bank before about a year ago. I said, “By analogy it seems to work better if one considers it a separate storage bank.” Now, we have discovered the very odd biochemical research that the engram can be affected independently of the analytical mind. It can be affected in such a way that it itself will nullify—with no diminution of the intelligence and so forth of the analytical mind—biochemically, which speaks for the probability of a separate entity and a separate storage place. One could consider this engram a sort of block in the standard memory storage, but it really isn’t. It’s evidently something that is standing out separately.
Now, the engram bank, the reactive bank, has a difference from the analytical mind’s standard banks. There is a definite difference between the two. There’s only one difference between the two, but it’s a very important difference—I mean as far as the storage capacity is concerned. The engram bank stores pain. There is no pain stored by the analytical mind. There is a notation stored in the standard banks that such things are painful or that pain may be received, and the standard banks can’t handle the proposition of pain. Saying, “Do this, you will get hurt,” it’s perfectly competent to do that, but it doesn’t store pain. The pain is stored in the reactive bank, and as far as the perceptive storage is concerned, they have only that one difference.
I am not talking about thinking, now. I am talking about the memory bank. We use the word memory bank, by the way, because when we speak of working with big electronic brains, you can change their memory banks. Here’s a brain computer, lots of wheels, cogs, flashing lights and ringing bells. And over at the side someplace is a punch-card system memory bank. And it files those. It takes data out of the memory bank, compares it, and puts it back in the memory bank again. That’s standard operation for one of these giant electronic brains. Well, just to keep up an analogy, we call it—there actually seems to be such a storage system in the human mind.
So, here we have the standard banks, here we have the reactive banks. The reactive banks are high priority stuff, according to the structural basis on which it was built—a very high priority—because, if the data there is not handled just so and so and so, pain results. So, there is the mechanism. You know, it’s just as simple as that. A person who can’t follow through the command of the engram gets hurt by the engram. There it has pain and the command. The commands can run off all right; everything’s going to be fine. That engram’s going to be perfectly content to be reactivated and played.
It will actually block off the standard banks, use the analyzer, channel its way down through another mind, the somatic mind (which is merely the border control system of the body—such as a man learns to drive after a while) — it gets filed down in the somatic mind. He doesn’t think about it anymore—sort of a branch of the analyzer that goes indirect on the organism. But the engram can reactivate certain muscles, do certain things as long as it’s unblocked and uninhibited. No harm to the organism itself, of course, when the engram says, “I have got to kill myself,” and blows his brains out. Nevertheless, he wouldn’t get any original pain of the engram; but as soon as you stop this thing, as soon as you block it, then it has a weapon. And it throws—and it stops over the other way and you get pain. No dramatization, pain; dramatization, no pain. That’s the complete, you might say, “choice” a person has, if you can call it a choice.
Therefore, when you start to erase an engram you have got to get the person near the source. Well, you rise up from the source sometimes and he will dramatize rather than experience the pain in the engram. If you can get him to experience the pain in the engram and the various perceptics with it by standard therapy, the engram folds up. Unfortunately, in late life, it’s a matter of can’t dramatize, feel the pain. Just one, two. No other choices.
The engram contains all perceptics, which is sight, sound, kinesthesia, hot and cold, saline content, et cetera, et cetera. There are about—last time they were counted—over twenty-six perceptics. A whole lot of them. The main ones that you are interested in are tactile and kinesthesia, sight, sound, smell. Those are the ones that you use on your standard list. Of course, there’s joint precision, muscular tension; there’s a whole catalog of small perceptics there. They come in just as a matter of course. You don’t have to worry about them, but there are lots of them there, but the engram records every one of them.
The engram goes unconscious, you immediately have a file system spread out there of all these perceptics with some other data added. The other data it has says, “The organism is such-and-such now—such-and-such an age, such-and-such a physical structure.” The amount of unconsciousness, which we called “anaten”—analytical attenuation, the amount of unconsciousness—here’s some metering system or another, maybe “ +1,” meaning almost out. “The injury present is so and so and so.” It’s just laid in.
Now, if you had some sort of a visio-audio-tactile sort of phonograph, you could put it on a wax platter and play all of this stuff onto the wax platter, there could be your engram. And this could be more or less detached from the body to that degree. It isn’t any good, it won’t do anything until it’s put back in, back of the analytical mind, and has the analytical mind work through it. Up to the point where it starts playing behind the analytical mind, it’s nothing. Some prenatal engrams (you find this out when you are clearing a case) will have slumbered twenty, thirty years, no reactivation, and will be a vicious engram. Here’s a whole chain of migraine headaches. For instance, in one case, there must have been about 110 engrams, each one of which called for an enormously powerful migraine headache. And not one of them reactivated until the person was twenty-two years of age, at which time, chain-fashion, they all reactivated. So, this mysterious cause of a migraine headache was evidently an airplane crash. One got a headache in the airplane crash; and actually there wasn’t even a head injury in the airplane crash, but there were about three words spoken while the person was unconscious which reactivated the chain. So that’s your engram. It has very specific content. It contains pain, and part of the registry of that pain is unconsciousness. It’s an actual chemical commodity. That’s how much the analyzer’s off, but that is part of the pain, and it contains perceptics. And that is all it contains actually.
The age of a human being is a perception of that person’s age. An analytical attenuation is still a perception of how closed down the analyzer was at that time, so it’s just perceptics. Well, that’s all you are trying to get out of an engram, then, that’s all.
If you ever get the idea that the analytical mind is confronting you, that the preclear is resisting, if you get the idea he is resisting analytically, you are off on the wrong track. Of course, any rational human being will resist poor, destructive auditing. A person gets chewed up with some bad auditing. Today, tomorrow, the next day, first thing you know, he doesn’t want to go on with this. That’s basic personality kicking through and putting on the brakes. Basic personality, however, under a lot of persuasion and some good auditing and so forth, will eventually kick back in again.
That’s about the only circumstance under which you would say the preclear refuses, but the fact that the fellow is saying, “Oh, I just can’t believe it, I just can’t believe what I am running here. After all, I don’t know whether this is true or not. I haven’t got any idea about this. I don’t really see—my parents couldn’t have done this to me,” he is just playing an old record over and over and over and over. Poor guy. This doesn’t mean that Dianetics has invented a self-trapping mechanism by which everything a person objects to is automatically in an engram. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, even if it’s true.
It happens that all of these principles with which you are dealing came about through a hard analytical effort to follow the operation, the modus operandi, of the human mind. We found out what it couldn’t do and found out why it couldn’t do it; found out what it’s trying to do and then how we can assist it to do that. So, it so happens that every time Dianetics makes an advance in its techniques, it’s toward a simplification, usually, but it contains this factor. Suddenly, we have found something so that we can more closely approach the operation, the actual operation of the human mind. That is to say, here’s the mind operating, here’s Dianetics; here’s the mind trying to do something, here’s Dianetics trying to do something. The same parallel follows through. The person says, “I can’t go back. I can’t go back.” His mind can’t go back. The attention units of his mind can’t go back because of an engram. Dianetics can fix it up so that we can send him back.
As a consequence, we get this play between the processes—Dianetic processes that you are studying right now and the action of the analytical mind. In order to understand the anatomy of the engram, we have to go into that a little more closely. One of the main things that the analyzer is attempting to do, of course, is think. That sounds more like an oversimplified statement, but it is trying to think. That’s only one of the things it’s trying to do. The other thing it is trying to do is execute. It is trying to do both, and it thinks and executes in order to be.
Now, anything which interrupts its thinking or its execution, of course, interrupts to some degree its ability to be, until it gets down to a point it says, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” I found that in an engram bank, several places.
Now, the analyzer, in order to do these things, has to be in communication with its own standard banks. It has to reach back into yesterday, to get data by which it can compare the data of now, which it’s perceiving, and from these two things work out tomorrow or the next ten minutes—work out the future. In other words, it perceives in the present, adjudicates on the basis of the past data, uses its thinking to work out something it will execute. Its reality then has to be past reality, present reality, future reality—the three stages of reality. “I don’t believe my parents would do that to me” and so forth—he can’t indeed believe his own data. Of course, the auditor’s trying to push an evaluation on him that it isn’t true, but a good auditor won’t do that. And he suddenly runs full into this data, “Oh, no. They couldn’t have done this to me. It’s impossible. And besides, I think I lived in Duluth when I was nine years of age.” And I ask him real quick what his name is and he won’t even know that sometimes. Yesterday’s reality is foggy. He doesn’t know what’s in yesterday; so, if he doesn’t know what’s in yesterday, how can he use that data back there in order to compare with this data?
You take a person, find out through his past performance how ably or unably he has performed and executed solutions about tomorrow, you take him back and you start checking off: business failure, divorce, kid bad, lost his job and so on—failures, failures, failures. Maybe just little failures, just a little. He wasn’t getting along. But yesterday’s foggy. How can he compare today’s reality? How can he find out if it is real, if there isn’t any reality here? There’s got to be reality, a feeling of reality, for a mind to be. And the mind which is not in contact with that reality— when that reality is not present and when it’s not perceived, then there’s not going to be any reality of mind in the future. That is to say, the mind is not to be. It’s just moved back off existence that much.
Now, the engram is exterior force entered into the being. Of course, it’s done very mechanically. A person gets knocked out, a lot of people talk around him or someone’s trying to force him to do something, and he doesn’t respond and he is punished. Life itself has been busy punishing him, too—the error of omission. He forgot to turn off the electric light switch when he went to fix those bulbs and life punished him for that little omission and off went the analyzer. But life didn’t count on language. Wifey comes in, says, “Oh, my God. I know you’re dead. Come here, come here, Agnes—he is dead.” “He’s unconscious. He can’t hear anything.” “Oh, you shouldn’t have said that.” “He is unconscious, he can’t hear anything. Be calm, be calm. Keep it down. Now hold it down.” First thing you know, this fellow wakes up and he is not the same man. But the mechanic is the same.
Now, when he starts back into the past, there’s a blocker there on the channel and he tries to get back to his standard bank with the analytical mind, but there is a phonograph record there. It might be still in the files. One day he hears the sound of a crackle, buzz-buzz. It’s the same noise, but he is wide awake at this time. It goes buzz-buzz, and all of a sudden he doesn’t feel well, doesn’t feel well about life. He is a little bit nervous, and a few days later, why, his hearing starts to cut down. Obviously, there’s something mechanical about the thing. He must have contacted a germ or something.
Now, one interesting thing: the untraceableness of these triggers. One fellow had asthma who had an allergy to cold, clean air. All of his life, his family had been expending a fortune to send him to the mountains where he could get cool, clean air, and a restimulator was cool, clean air. Now therefore, one doesn’t know much about when these things are going to reactivate. Electric light cord shock—platter. A little restimulation, it goes full to the turntable, you might say, and now it’s keyed in. That’s the second stage. Now it just waits. Life has given him the chance. It says, “You know, this might happen again.” And he gets this little restimulation and life says, “Yes, it can happen again; it will happen again. Let’s move this thing over and get it ready.” That’s where the cells split. They put it over on the turntable.
Now we get in position with the standard banks; the reality of yesterday goes out a little bit because this has emergency priority. And the next thing you know, we get a fellow who’s operating on turntable full. I have seen quite a few of them. They operate almost exclusively on a turntable system. You can count on it absolutely, of getting the same words back from them with the same stimulus. You tell somebody, “I wouldn’t do that,” and you get the same strain of words called back again from him. He says, “I will ...” sometimes, a very rough dramatization. People who speak mainly in clichés and so on are more likely to be dramatizing turntables.
Well, very often, they don’t run off with any great degree of savageness, because the emotional degree of consciousness, which is one of the contents of the engram, that is not very heavy. I mean, the emotion of the engram may be bored with it, so he gets this engram reactivated and he is bored, doesn’t have to be apathy. It doesn’t have to be anger necessarily. It can even be an emotional content of an engram, extreme joy—you know, “Joy, joy!” You see these guys around institutions. They’re happy, yes. Any one of the emotional reactions, then, can get held out; and here, we walk into something else.
The engram can only dictate action along those lines which the analytical mind can perform. The engram says, “Build a great bridge.” If the analytical mind is capable of and has the data to build a great bridge, it will then do so. Without the engram, it would probably go on and build a better bridge. With the engram there, it has to build a bridge. That’s a compulsion operating. It has no choice, and that’s the only trouble with the engram. It’s a lesson learned once but which can’t be forgotten. And which must also go into effect on certain given stimuli. So the engram has a very definite position there—pain, perceptics—but it hasn’t any life.
The only life it has is the analytical mind. Now, if the analytical mind can imitate well, then any imitation dictated by the engram will be activated and become effective; but if the analytical mind can’t imitate well, if it doesn’t have that ability, and yet the engram says to go ahead and imitate well, the analytical mind is not going to go ahead and follow through.
It’s like this. Supposing a fellow’s got very short legs, and he’s been rather weak all his life, and he is barely able to crawl around and the analytical mind hook-up, somatic mind, and the rest of it—the engram says, “You have got to be the world’s greatest runner.” Well, he can charge around a lot, but he won’t make it. And if it merely says, “Run, run, run,” this fellow can’t run. He doesn’t run either. Of course, he will get a surge to run, but if the analytical mind was—or the somatic mind and the body were able to run and run well, then he would run. Just because the engram says, “You must take a hundred pounds of lead in your right hand and throw it 652 feet” is no reason a person can. I am stressing this point, because you, as auditors, must know that very well, so that you never become confused about what you are examining there.
You see, the preclear starts to do something, and if you suddenly believe that it is the preclear himself, even though it appears to be his natural nature—“He is naturally a bad-tempered man, and he is naturally this and that” — if we believe this, we start to push against him. We are upsetting the equation to this degree.
The only reason you can reach an engram is by the analytical mind of the preclear joining up forces with the analytical mind of the auditor to go down against the engram.
Now, if you fight the preclear in any way or spoil your affinity with the preclear, you are then setting up this type of equation: analytical mind of the preclear versus engram power and analytical mind of the auditor. He can’t do it. He can’t even do this. The analytical mind of the preclear must have been less than the engram power, otherwise he would have blown it up himself. So the analytical mind of the preclear is already less than the power of the engram, because of its main content.
Now if we can add to the analytical mind of the preclear, the analytical mind of the auditor, that engram will blow up. You can get it now, but the other way around you won’t be able to achieve it. That’s evidently why it takes an auditor. There is also a mechanical reason why it takes an auditor.
Now, the engram is a savage beast—has the power, then, of the organism. That’s all the power it has. The reactive mind, remember, is also a part of the organism. If that reactive mind is capable of storing a great deal of pain and of activating a great deal of pain, then the engram is going to be more effective.
Now, we might have a very dull reactive mind. I never figured out how to test whether a reactive mind was dull or not, but we have to postulate that it can be. A very dull reactive mind can’t do much with these engrams, can’t do much with the pain. Let’s say the circuit is starting. It’s not going to do anything, just the gadget that puts the turntables on, but it doesn’t do a good job of it and the person’s relatively unactivated by his engrams. I swear that psychotics have had some specific thing wrong with their reactive minds, because I find some of them without as near as many engrams as some people passing for normal.
So, we have the difference of the reactive mind and the difference of the analytical mind. You are not terribly concerned with the difference of the reactive mind, but you are concerned with the difference of the analytical mind. We take now a strong, capable analytical mind. We take an engram bank, put good, solid sections—I mean it’s an able reactive mind, if the reactive mind is ever able, and now we go up against this fellow. We have got a job on our hands, because without his engrams, he would be quite a powerhouse, but with these engrams feeding upon him and using him, he is quite likely to become a case that’s very, very hard to open or attack.
It is a sad thing in Dianetics that a lot of people who are very able are very hard to work on. It takes somebody with some force and push in order to force down against those engrams, because the engram all of a sudden will restimulate; on goes the platter up against the reactive mind, and the first thing you know, this fellow has the most marvelous reason why—“Well, let me come up and have a smoke and we will go back to it in a few minutes. I am sure I can get this in a few minutes.” He will come out of it and have a smoke. That’s a very rough thing on an auditor. He has to know enough to sit on this case, hold it down, because the engram is using a very powerful analyzer in order to activate. But the analyzer itself is a thoroughly self-determining unit unless influenced by the engram, but it doesn’t know the engram is there until the engram’s brought into view or deintensified.
Now, the analyzer—we are speaking now just from the processing side. I could stand here and give you a long dissertation on the analytical mind. It’s a fascinating subject; it’s the thing which the Clear is most interested in. Of course, its ability, how it works, what its proper function is, the principles of its function and so on—very able. It works best when self-determined, and it learns by mimicry and so on. There’s no particular reason to cover this at this time, because I’m going to cover the analytical mind with you later. But I have to cover it from the therapeutic processing side, because this is what the engram is reactivating against.
The engram, then, is this phonograph record which contains all these perceptics plus pain. Of course, pain is a perceptic too, but that is the reactive mind bundle, and each one is a separate record. They can play without any sense of order—in other words, just as soon play one as a ten-year-old as one which occurs two months postpartum—and just whatever happens—just a jukebox. Got about as much sense as a jukebox. The records, too, make about as much sense. So, we drop a nickel in the slot, which is our stimulus. A little circumstance, a little mild stimulation, drop a nickel in the slot and the reactive bank picks up the record and plays against the back end of the analytical mind, and a person dramatizes something. It’s pathetic. He has an analyzer which will defend to the death its ability and its right to be right. The analyzer works on the principle that it is right, and if it isn’t right, it’s got to adjust itself to find out why it isn’t right. And naturally, if it observes the organism itself operating in a certain way, acting in a certain way, and everybody says, “That’s wrong,” then it’s got to find some justification, some reason why it’s not wrong. It can’t be wrong; to be wrong is to be dead. I mean, if you get that wrong—dead. So, the analytical mind just can’t help itself much about one of these things, except when a new mechanism cuts in. Evidently back along the track of evolution somewhere, they had the ability to cut this mechanism in—very simple mechanism. Such a terrific need against such a threat to survival right in the moment of now, in present time, will kick out the engrams; that is, it will destimulate them. It won’t throw them back into the bank and annul them.
Now it’s actually possible for a person to trip up a false necessity level—“Well, I have got to do this”—and sort of automatically ride above this engram bank once he knows it’s there. A person is not, then, just a puppet to his engrams. This can get very confusing to some people because they say, “Well, the engram isn’t known and it doesn’t do this. How on earth, then, can the analytical mind ever rise above this?” They’re mistaking the fact that an organism which is not prepared to throw an all-out thrust against the threat to survival is a—natural selection has been cutting out organisms which couldn’t for an awful long time.
The organism, then, can, during a great threat to survival, act in a highly sentient, powerful way, very rational. Out go the engrams, for the moment. You see, it’s in times of stress. The house burns down; somebody carries out the grand piano. Somebody’s liable to come around afterward and say, “You see, my engrams are useful. I had no recollection of carrying out that grand piano until there it was, sitting on the front lawn.” And you say, “Well, what gave you the power to do that?” “Well, naturally, operating this way, it must have been an engram that did this.” Well, it isn’t; that’s necessity level at its highest pitch.
A person will do some computations which are very remarkable when necessity swings. All attention units have to be brought up to present time. It was all right to be back there walking around on the track inspecting these strange things that happened yesterday, but all of a sudden, bang! here’s death right there in the face. And the equation now reads: death or victory. Bang, bang! All the attention units go up to present time. Complete concentration, dedication of action, and sometimes it happens so fast that it’s merely recorded in the standard banks exactly what the person did or said. But, he handled the situation very ably.
I recollect one time coming over the brow of a hill on a wet road, wet asphalt road, during a storm down in Maryland. And the next thing I knew a tree had fallen and I had stuck the nose of the roadster in the exact place it would fit underneath the tree so as not to dent the roadster, and had missed the high-tension line over here very expertly which was lying there burning grass. I had to go back and reconstruct the scene, because I was traveling about fifty-five or sixty miles per hour and there was no time to brake on the asphalt road. The only thing you could do was skid the thing underneath the tree. In other words, there must have been an estimate of the situation, an estimate of what to do without wrecking the car. Also, a coordination of how to make the wheels skid in order to get in there just at the right moment, a noting of the high-tension wire, that one couldn’t go over that way so you won’t get electrocuted. Here’s an enormous awareness. The analytical mind comes up and operates 100 percent. It pulls up to itself all attention units, and they come up to present time.
Now, in shock, we knock out the attention units and disorganize. They would not come up into a line. The analytical mind has the power of aligning all the attention units it has suddenly on a threat. But that threat has to be very great. Shock turns off the analyzer, usually. It gets up to a point where it could have done something, but then suddenly it was unable to bridge it, and it’s a sort of a penalty. Off it goes. It’s failed at that point. All shock therapy, by the way, lies as a new engram and some of these cases that have had a hundred shocks and that sort of thing, each one of those shocks has to be treated as a separate thing.
Male voice: Instead of the analyzer analyzing his reactions, why doesn’t it just report that if you do something you will get pain?
Why doesn’t it?
Male voice: Yes. You refer to rationalization by saying the analyzer always has to be right. Why doesn’t it come out with the answer, “If I do this, why don’t I get pain?” That’s what you know. It’s got a new datum. You have never compared this thing up, but now, you have got that datum. As a matter of fact, I have noted people who knew Dianetics, behaving much more rationally—sentient about things. So what we are covering right now is the fact that the analytical mind works as an independent unit, as the thinking, executing unit of the body, and is that part of the body which tells a man that he is. The analytical mind operates on the verb “to be” and “is.” The engram bank is a super impression of other entities and forces exterior to the body, which sought to be, and by seeking to be, to some degree, overcame the unit. And the implantation there was a very sad little mistake of conclusion. The fact that we have engrams, that these things are there and aren’t released easily and so on, might possibly be traced to a dietary alteration in man’s past. Some place back down along the track, a man might have stopped eating what he was eating—maybe some change of climate. And up to then, he might have been an automatic clearing engine.
Male voice: Would you enlarge a little on that?
Well, we have found that in biochemical research, that plant drugs and so forth are, pretty dull in operating against engrams. But we have found that food and lots of it has a tendency to kick out the engram bank. And certain types of food and food products start an automatic clearing process.
Here’s the thing, then. A man might possibly have had a certain diet in the past, and evolution brought him along very neatly and nicely, and he obviously—the mind has a self-clearing mechanism in it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to clear people’s minds of engrams, and we can do so, and furthermore, we can actually set the mind running so that it will do so. And by paralleling the attempt of the mind to clear itself, we accomplish processing. The thing was all set up. It isn’t something I invented.
That’s very amusing, by the way. Every time something happens— that we discover something in Dianetics that doesn’t quite follow along the status quo—people come around and look at me very accusingly. And I am evidently guilty of the whole thing. That repeats a foolishness. In trying to shape up scientific research and keep it going, discovering things about this and that, we occasionally find something that looks pretty incredible. Well now, because it looks incredible, do we take it up and just throw it away? I don’t think that would be very good research. So, we include it in the research where it belongs and then people look at it and they say, “This Hubbard’s crazy.” Well, automatic reaction. But the mind—and nobody at the Foundation invented the way the mind operates, but we are trying very hard to discover the methods of operation, know them a little better; trying to move over a little bit into structure now, not having much luck.
Structure’s really complex; nobody knows anything about it. They have got a lot of names on a lot of parts, but actually how the mind operates structurally is unknown at the present time. But now, talking about this automatic clearing, evidently the mind was able to do this for a long time. We can look over the past few centuries and say, “Well, man has made some great remarkable advances.” But we don’t know what remarkable advances he might have made in the past when he was an automatic clearing mechanism. He might have been at once an automatic clearing mechanism. That seems to be indicated. It seems that we are on the downward evolution down-slope. That’s the current thought on the subject. And that current thought on the subject will probably be refined and all changed by next Tuesday. But, that’s the best I can give you right now. Because, evidently, by feeding certain foods, the automatic clearing . . .
Male voice: I think, Mr. Hubbard, that accounts for the race consciousness.
Of course, there might be a lot of explanation on this. I am perfectly open-minded about anything on the subject. A lot of people at the Foundation know all about Dianetics, know all about engrams, and they know just exactly how this stuff works, which leaves me in the rather lonely place who knows he is the only one who doesn’t know Well, I can give you an awfully good approximation, so that it will work out. Now, there is an engram. There are two things it sets up: the valences and the analytical circuitry. Those things are very important and they are often confused with the engram itself. It’s an analytical effect of the engram’s.