Introducing Dianetics (500810)
Date: 10 August 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
There have been I believe, some little papers passed around on the subject “What is Dianetics?” Is that correct?
Therefore, I am going to spare you a minute description of “What is Dianetics?” I think most of you have some idea. And from what I hear there most of you have read the book.
Dianetics, actually, can be found in any unabridged Merriam Webster s dictionary spelled with an “o”—D-i-a-n-o-e-u-t-s or something like that. And the word has been sitting there for a long long time ready to be worked over and formulated.
The actual work was begun about fifteen years ago, the first philosophic tenets of it were delineated about twelve years ago in 1938. Book was written at that time—actually your present handbook is one chapter out of the original philosophic dissertation on the subject. That original dissertation is on a jaw-breaking subject called epistemology, “the science of knowledge.” We’re not interested too much in the science of knowledge but with Dianetics we are interested in what we can do about man’s activities.
There has been some rumor around that mans activities at the present time are not running at optimum.
The work was kept under wraps for rather obvious reasons until last year. Dianetics is, according to a gentleman who never investigated the subject, a very dangerous subject. It is a very dangerous subject if one were not to publish to the society at large the antidote for what can be done with a man’s mind.
Dianetics, suppressed, might place into the hands of some power group a very grim grip on men; not so placed but generally circulated, it’s very safe.
We have had now, out of the half-a-hundred-thousand copies of the book sold, a great many reports from the field. Only two of those reports demonstrated any injury that might possibly be traced to Dianetics. Now that’s a considerable—a very remarkable record.
One of these was immediately traceable to a beating a person received which made him irrational for a week or so. And the other one was traceable to ineptitude. Somebody was treating her husband up in the Northwest, I think it was, and the gentleman was running engrams on this line: his wife would send him back to the engram and say “Now, what’s it all about?” And he would say, “Well, here I am, lying here on the football field and I’ve just had my head kicked in.” “That’s fine. Now let’s go to another incident.” At the Foundation back East we are receiving quite a few letters; the mail truck drives up in the morning and brings out the mailbags. At first we were getting one derogatory letter to 550 approvals, and the ratio has now stepped up to about one slam to a thousand letters.
The psychiatrists who have examined and who have used Dianetics are, in the East, rather enthusiastic about it.
Psychologists who have examined the subject have written us many complimentary letters about it; medical doctors as well.
There is one holdout, however, in the field of the United States right now; that seems to be the press. The book reviews which have appeared on Dianetics, such as that article in Time have not been completely complimentary.
A gentleman back East who is a pastoral psychologist wrote one in the New York Times and he said that “Dianetics says man is a machine!” Well, I looked up some of this gentleman’s work and the work is—the machine is the cause of all the evils of man. So it appeared to me his engrams were hanging out. But this poor fellow is more to be pitied than censured because the people back East who have been using Dianetics put him under a landslide. He was practically buried in mail. The New York Times in the—I think last week, didn’t mention it specifically but on their letters page, which was all devoted to Dianetics, Dr. Frederick Schuman, the famous political scientist at Williams College (with whose work you may be familiar) took occasion to write in and make things uncomfortable for this reviewer. And they published Dr. Schumans letter and my letter and a reply by Rollo May. But the whole page has got three little pictures on it showing mail being dumped out of bags and mail, mail, mail.
All in all, the picture of Dianetics in the society is a very heartening one, a very pleasant one. We feel very good about it. We haven’t anything to do now but work hard.
Our research is going along at a very great rate. Our Foundation was formed just this last spring. And we have working for us now Lewis, the former Director of Research at Block Chemical; we have some graduate psychologists who are doing psychometry. We have a considerable research program that’s going along there very swiftly. The Foundation itself is not too short of money at the moment. It’s getting all the book royalties.
People keep asking me, they say, “My, you must be getting wealthy.” As a matter of fact, I am not getting wealthy. I draw a salary of $500 a month from the Foundation. All the royalties of the book, all magazine articles, everything of this character, comes in as revenue, goes to the Research Foundation and is used there on research.
Now there’s been quite a request in the field for documented cases in Dianetics. I imagine any of you who have tried to sell Dianetics to your friends have possibly had it pointed out that there are no cases available in this handbook.
The handbook got a little bit out of hand. Mr. Arthur Ceppos, who wanted to be here tonight and I told him “No, stay back East and sit on the lid,” (he’s the president of Hermitage House), picked up the manuscript on Dianetics and he’d committed himself to a $4.00 price tag. And I said, “Well, I think I can write it in maybe a hundred thousand words. I’ll try.” “Well,” he says, “you hold it down to that.” So I gave him the 180,000 words, and Mr. Ceppos did a faint swoon and said, “Well, we’ll have to do something about it.” And I said, “Well, you’d better not, because it might play hob with the whole subject if you start taking bricks out of the middle of it.” So he took out of it the chapter on the mathematical derivations of the philosophy. He said nobody would be interested in that. I’ve been rather bitterly criticized for saying it’s mathematics and then not demonstrating any mathematics!
The next thing that happened, he took out the acknowledgments. Well, I’ve been criticized for not having acknowledged it. After all, Dianetics owes a great many acknowledgments: it owes acknowledgments to Freud and his co-workers, acknowledgments to Herbert Spencer and Francis Bacon and Aristotle and a list of names that he really didn’t care to set up in type; it would add in too many pages. So when the book came out, I said, “Well, we’re all set now” And I open it up, I look at the back, “Where are the case histories?” “Well,” he says “those three case histories, they’re long, look at the amount of type they take up.” I said, “Well, people are going to want to see case histories on this, authentic case histories.” “Well, this subject’s good. It’ll ride over anything.” But I have been quite severely criticized on that. And when the book came out and I opened up the first page of it, what do I see but “Synopsis” at the top of it, and it says “Dianetics is the greatest thing since the invention of fire.” That’s a quote from Walter Winchell. That’s the publisher’s synopsis and that’s probably the reason why the book reviewers pick on me; they say “This Hubbard is an egomaniac!” But we’ve gotten over even those hurdles and right now we are setting up at the Foundation a long long series of case histories. We have some graduate psychologists working with us, working psychometry. And these people are taking in preclears, tagging them, sending them out to a big medical clinic which couldn’t be bought or sold by Dianetics, and there they are being examined with laboratory work and with x-ray plates and so on. Then they are being sent over to a psychiatrist who doesn’t know where they come from, and from there they go to either Columbia University psychometric section or to the Rorschach institute7 psychometric section. And as a matter of fact, I don’t think those two institutions have ever been bought. I expect to hear somebody say they have been, but here is going to be this list of evidence. Then we take the preclear, process him for fifty hours, just arbitrarily, fifty hours. We say, “Well, at the end of fifty hours we’ll find out what’s happened.” We send him back to the same clinics and then we assemble the evidence and the graduate psychologists there compile it in statistics. We have a series of three thousand cases set up in this fashion. They’re really working like a factory back there. They’ve gotten this thing streamlined down, it’s going off snap! snap! snap! And people are getting well all over the shop.
So, this material is going to be published in part in a small book to come out in the very near future; Diane tics do’s and don’ts with case histories, just a little review of auditor technique, giving a new Standard Procedure. And the bulk of these cases are going to be run through statistics, are going to be presented in a university text of Dianetics.
Unfortunately, it’s going to take us almost two years to completely compile and edit this university text. Because I have guaranteed that it is going to be so incomprehensible, so completely obtuse and abstract and so exhaustive that it will be utterly exhausting.
Dr. Chafets—well as a matter of fact, that’s giving her a little bit of airs, actually she’s in the doctorate school at Columbia and I don’t know whether she’s finishing up her doctor’s degree here in the next two months or not; it may be not until November. A very bright little mind. She is going back over all the basic philosophic mathematics of Dianetics and she has been putting her nose in the door regularly and saying, “Now, how did you get across this and what has to do with that?” And the result of her work is going to be published in about two months for those that are interested in the mathematics of Dianetics. The mathematics there consists of symbolic logic with transfinite cardinals and topology and a few other things. It will be absolutely unrecognizable.
The beautiful thing about Dianetics is that it doesn’t happen to need all this. I have found by experience that I could sit down and carefully explain the subject to a high-school boy and he would get it. When I tried to become very academic with him he often didn’t get it. But the people who are working this at the present time are really doing an excellent job.
Now we come around to the person who is doing the work in the field with Dianetics; they’re having pretty good luck on the book alone. The book has now been supplemented and any of you people that send in a card to the Foundation saying you want to know some more about publications are going to receive in the next few days “Bulletin No. 1” of the Foundation. It contains in it the new Standard Procedure.
It includes in it two things that are not in the handbook—were not perfected at the time the handbook was put out.
Dianetics is very interesting. For the last few years at any point along the line—it comes along here, and here we get a—January—and we say “Well, we can cut it here and we’ve got a workable technique.” So about the time we’re ready to put that down as a workable technique, somebody dreams up something else and it comes over to here and this is May and it’s a workable technique but it’s refined. It keeps going like that. It won’t stand still.
It was the bane of the auditor’s school existence that—as a matter of fact, they made me stop it. I’d come in in the morning and give them a talk and “we’ve just had an idea down in research and it goes this way.” So instead of studying Standard Procedure all the boys would be trying out this new one.
What we’re trying to do is cut down the length of time it takes to clear a human being. And we’re cutting it down. We found out the other day what caused dub-in. And we can cure it.
We found out a couple of new things that influenced sonic. We had been using them before but they’d sort of been lost in the shuffle. Now, we can point them up; we’ve got a better chance of turning on sonic. And in this new bulletin there is a Standard Procedure; you open it up, there’s a center chart there and it says “If the case runs this way, do this and do that and do this, and if it doesn’t do this, then you come down here to Step Three and you do this and then you go back up here and do that.” In other words no point in the case are you going to break down with nothing to do. (applause) We have been able to start most any case that was bogged down. One gentleman came back to the Foundation here from Hollywood and he seems to be the one holdout that we have. He’s stuck on the time track and he’s out of valence, he is not himself, he’s not in his own valence, he’s off valence, therefore, he doesn’t have perceptics.
That’s a new one on you. What turns off sonic? One of the things that turns off sonic is being out of valence.
You know where it says “valence shift” in the book; that you can shift a person over into a valence and let him deintensify what Mama said, and then shift him over here and deintensify what Papa said? Well, we find out that people stay over there saying what Papa said and stay over there saying what Mama said all their lives. And it’s very hard for a person who is somebody else to get any perceptics as himself! So this is one of the mechanisms of “sonic shut-off” A lot of these things in the past we would trip accidentally without knowing exactly what was causing them and so we have that set up a little bit better.
Now, all of the work that we have done, as I have said, has been aimed toward making less auditor skill, much less auditor skill, and greater speed in the case. And this one gentleman who came back there defied practically half the professional auditing class. But, we’ve got him here in Hollywood. And I’m going to take a little time out here myself and polish this one off. This is the one holdout of all the cases I know. And, you know, I think the fellow was just being difficult until he was really sure he was going to get some expert auditing. I’ve noticed people do that. Having a hard case pays off because sooner or later somebody’s going to get interested who is a very good auditor. It pays off to a point. All right.
New Standard Procedure I’m going to demonstrate to you after the intermission, tell you how it’s done. Some of you running cases are going to recognize immediately just exactly what you can do to your preclear in order to start his case up again. It’s getting very simple. It’s still too complicated though, but it’s getting pretty simple.
What I would like to do right here at the present moment—I know lots of you have some questions to ask about it on this little dissertation we’re giving here—is ask for a question or two from the floor. I don’t suppose that will be terribly disastrous if you give me a hand.
Anybody who has a rather burning question? Do I see a hand there? Stand up, please.
Female voice: What are the results with psychotics?
The results with psychotics at the present time are pretty fair. Of course, psychotics are definitely in the hands of psychiatry, they are actually wards of the state. We run many psychotics, but we are trying very hard to keep those psychotics in the hands of psychiatry where they belong. After all, psychiatry is organized to handle that problem.
We get reports along in this line; a writer by the name of Robert Moore Williams out in St. Louis wrote us the other day and he said, “The psychiatrists at the state institution are no longer open-minded about Dianetics. They have been open-minded for quite a while. “The other day I was over there and the chief of the institution was running a young lady and I pitched in and gave him a hand. She’d been a schizophrenic for a number of years and she lay down on the couch insane. We worked on her for about two hours, we hit the key engram in the case and she got off the couch sane.” The psychiatrists are no longer open-minded at Missouri State, Yes, the gentleman in the aisle, Male voice: I tried to sell Dianetics to a Catholic woman and she bought it and told me to find out if you have Catholic practitioners . . .
Announcer: The question is from a Catholic woman addressed to this man, “Do we have Catholic practitioners?” Thank you for the question. We have been receiving a great many letters from persons of the Catholic faith, I am not at liberty to state this monsignor’s name, but he has been having very good success, a monsignor of the Catholic church, has been having excellent success with Dianetics, And there is one example and there are many others. The Catholic church in many of its locales seems to be using Dianetics and seems to find no question that it questions the religion.
We have had to answer letters and the usual questions that we get are something on this order: “What will Dianetics do for an atheist?” Actually atheism is rooted in engrams as we have demonstrated, and people who have had such engrams run out of them are no longer atheists. It doesn’t mean that they have an abiding faith now suddenly in religion. But a man without a faith is a man who has no—well, he has no purpose, you might say faith, even if it’s only faith in himself. And as a result, the ministers and the priests who have been working with Dianetics have been espousing it. And I have had no single letter from any church organization which condemned Dianetics, so there must not be too much conflict there. After all, it says right in one of the tenets a man seeks his potential immortality as a spirit, as a man and so on, Dianetics is a science. It does not take into consideration such a thing as a belief, A science can’t believe in something. For instance, physics never believed in Einstein, As a result there’s no conflict between the two. And you will find, however, occasionally an aberrated person will feel assaulted with Dianetics and becomes very protective of his own engrams and so on and will find some excuse to take it up. But so far there is nothing but sweetness and light between Dianetics and religion and I hope it so continues. Thank you, (applause) Male voice: If there are such a thing as Clears, where are they and what are they doing?
Ah, ha!
What you trying to do there, boy, steal my program?
I’m going to show you a Clear tonight.
You didn’t think I’d come out here and not show you one, did you?
Male voice: Are you a Clear?
When you ask if I am a Clear, I can tell you that we didn’t have any trained auditors. Everybody was very busy, no auditors trained and Dick Saunders over there right now is finishing the swamp-up on my case. It’s the first chance I have had—I’ve been working hard. In about thirty days, something like that I’m going over and get a psychometry and post it someplace, say this is a psychometry on Hubbard and there won’t be any question. Okay?
Any more questions on this?
Male voice: How to differentiate between an engram and a chain of engrams, or an engram from one single experience and an engram that results from a chain of experiences.
Okay, I gotcha! An engram is a unit. An engram would not result from a chain of experiences. If there had been a chain of periods of unconsciousness, each one of them would be an engram, so you would have a chain of engrams and this would add up to a whole series of engrams which would have to be lifted one by one from the earliest to late, as a chain.
An engram does not result from incidents but is an incident in itself. Now, is that a satisfactory answer for you?
Okay.
Male voice: How do you get in reverie?
Ha! That’s what I’m going to show you. That’s what you’re here for.
Yes?
Male voice: How do you know an embryo is unconscious?
How do you know an embryo is unconscious? Is that the question?
Male voice: That is the question.
I don’t know, I never talked to one. I have talked to a lot of people who have been back there being one though and they seem to object to being unconscious when they get knocked so.
Male voice: Most impressive stuff!
Right!
Male voice: What do you think of psychometry?
Well, okay. As a matter of fact, we’re using it right now because we haven’t got anything else. And we have a couple of graduate psychologists right now, experts in psychometry who are beating their brains out trying to adapt TAT and Rorschach and so forth, so it shows us material in a hurry, Rorschach has the beautiful faculty of doing just one thing we found out so far on which we can rely absolutely, and that is it shows up a paranoiac. And when we get a paranoiac diagnosis from Rorschach, we know exactly what engram to go for. That engram is “against me,” “They are all against me.” And every paranoiac with which we have collided so far, who has shown up as a paranoiac on Rorschach has had this “against me” engram. And when the engram itself was contacted and deintensified, he ceased being a paranoiac.
Now there are undoubtedly many, many psychometric tests which will lead to that type of diagnosis and people in the Research Department are really trying hard now to get correlations on psychometry and engrams. And they’re doing a good job, Male voice: Psychometry is formed with Dianetics?
Well I would hardly take over psychometry, after all it’s belonged for a long time to psychology. But don’t mistake us on Dianetics; when you’re covering the field of the mind, anything which is known about that field must come under examination. And we have a crew we call a “salvage crew,” And they are going through all the old-time methods of healing. For instance, they turned up this beautiful one the other day—just a gorgeous one. Shock therapy was in use in the days of the Aesculapians, the days of the early Greeks, They used a drug, hellebore, with which they produced a convulsive shock. And they were curing people or trying to or alleviating it that far back. And we’re finding quite a bit of material of this kind and that kind. And we’re trying to find out how it ties into Dianetics or how Dianetics ties into it. And we’re gathering an enormous amount of very valuable information in this way, Male voice: A personal question in the balcony.
Okay!
Male voice: I have read a little sheet of paper and I can’t—you’ve had some teeth trouble and that the cavities have begun to heal themselves. Is there any degree of truth in that?
Announcer: The question is “Are the holes in Mr. Hubbard’s teeth filling in?” Not worth a darn. Actually, I had a hole back here on the back of one molar that was right up in the gum and I notice now that the hole has progressed down about an quarter of an inch. It’s almost to the end of the tooth. It seems to be growing out or something, I don’t know Dr. Sloan, the head of a dental association in New York City, is making some very interesting studies on this and they are going to be part of a bulletin in the near future. “Do teeth grow themselves whole again or don’t they?” Now the dentists have noticed occasionally that a tooth would fill itself up. Possibly an engram key-out or something. They’re trying to prove this. That’s in the field of dentistry.
Anybody who will take Dianetics and see what it does in his own field will get every cooperation from us certainly. Whole principle of existence is hand it out and . . .
This young lady has a question here.
Female voice: Have you tried any experiments to eliminate the auditor by having a person try the repeater technique on himself?
This is ghastly. A person who would do this, he doesn’t care what happens to him. Because here’s what happens: in the first place, right at the beginning here, there is too much repeater technique used by everyone. They are entering cases with repeater technique. They find somebody stuck somewhere on the track so they say “Give me a holder, and let’s repeat a holder.” The fellow says “Stay there, stay there, stay there.” “Well that isn’t it!” “Hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it.” We got—that’s two engrams now. Try, “Get down, get down.” All right, “Get down, get down, get down, get down.” That’s three engrams he’s got. And that’s very bad. These engrams go into restimulation and they’re very hard to handle after that. It takes them three or four days to die down.
Now, on a person using repeater technique on himself, he usually does this because he has a command that says, “I have to do it myself.” That’s analytical circuitry, demon circuitry to say “I have to do it myself,” “Only I can do this,” so on.
Now, he starts to repeat a phrase which he believes is in an engram. The analytical mind starts shutting down as he nears that engram because one of the things that engram does is shut down the analyzer. So he starts in repeating the word “Don’t stop.” So he says, “Don’t stop, don’t stop, (said more and more slowly) don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.” Analyzer shutting down. He just gets restimulated and at this moment the attention units that have gone in there blank out and so he forgets what he’s been saying and he doesn’t do anything with it and he says, “Well, that’s all right with that one. Now let me try another one.” And he could stack his case up.
The good way to do this is by direct memory. A person can use direct memory on himself and I’m going to tell you something about that after the intermission.
Female voice: Thank you.
You bet.
Second female voice: How may a person determine whether he possesses the required degree of intelligence to participate in Dianetic therapy?
That’s a toughie. Nobody seems willing to admit he’s dumb. Here’s something here that is a rather hard question to answer but if one did care to answer this, he did want to know the answer himself, he could very certainly go down to some psychologist and have a psychometry done. If his IQ on the Army Alpha12 were to fall below, let us say, 90 or 85 or something like that he probably shouldn’t attempt it. But normal IQ is quite well above that.
It is one of those things that you’d have to judge. Actually a person who is too dull to work it generally won’t.
Male voice: Can the auditor benefit from therapy?
You mean by auditing?
Can the auditor benefit from therapy? God help any auditor who doesn’t enter himself as a preclear because sooner or later, sooner or later he’s going to find himself running one of his own engrams out of the preclear; that is to say, a duplicate. He has an engram in there in his bank that says “I’m dying! I’m dying! I’m dying! I’m dying! Oh my God, why was I ever born!” This is the way his engram runs and he doesn’t know about this engram, you see. And so he’s running this preclear and the preclear runs an engram and it says “I’m dying! I’m dying! I’m just dying!” And all of a sudden the auditor says “I don’t feel good.” An auditor should be a preclear or Clear.
Male voice: Do you think the communist confessions are intentionally caused engrams?
You know, that’s been a very interesting question, that’s been asked several times but Stalin hasn’t written me any information about it to date. And although I expect momentarily to get a release from Russia saying that they have now invented Dianetics . . .
Female voice: I’d like to ask about this information the auditor’s not supposed to give the preclear. Does that apply only during therapy or does it also apply outside of therapy?
Outside of therapy as well.
The one thing—by the way, while I’ve got you all here together, let me tell you something. This is important. The only very certain way we have seen therapy interrupted is by the auditor invalidating the data of the preclear. This is very, very, very bad! This spoils the preclear’s sense of reality and it is one way where the therapy can really be slowed to a walk.
The auditor suddenly saying “Hmm, that doesn’t sound like it fits in there” or “You know, its a funny thing but I don’t think your father would have done that.” Or the preclear suddenly writing home to Mother and saying, “You know that terrible time you had with Uncle Frank back there when I was on the way.” And Mama writes in and because it seems to be discreditable to her says, “Oh, that never happened! That never happened!” You really see preclears take a spin on this invalidation of data. Telling a preclear that what he is saying is delusion is almost a certain way to make him very uncomfortable and very, very unhappy.
Female voice: Can Dianetics . . . (said very softly) Announcer: Can Dianetics release or clear a psychopathic personality?
Yes, providing that psychopathic personality is not caused by iatrogenic psychosis or let’s say brain tumors; sometimes these are the case. About 30 percent of psychosis, I imagine, is physiological; it has to do with such things as paresis, missing parts of the brain and so forth. Dianetics can’t grow a new spine for you!
Announcer: What is the action of the analytical mind during the normal sleep?
It’s awake. That’s right, there is some small portion of it is still monitoring and is still alert and if you want to test this at any time, if your case is not thoroughly stuck someplace through an overuse of repeater technique or something, all you have to do is time shift the preclear back to a moment when he was asleep. And if you work at it for just a very short time, you’ll start picking up the things he recorded. He is not unconscious in that the analyzer is not shut off during sleep completely. He doesn’t receive engrams during sleep in other words.
Announcer: Please explain how Dianetics differs from psychiatry or psychology.
Yeah. There are some small points of similarity. The goals of Dianetics are perhaps a little further but to consider Dianetics as this package and psychiatry as this package and psychology as another package is a bit of a mistake. Actually they are all more or less trying along the same lines.
These people are using Dianetics; Dianetics, after all, couldn’t have gotten anyplace without looking at what these people have been doing.
Male voice: After reaching basic-basic is it better to come up the time track, engram for engram, or is it safe to come back and discharge some late-life emotion?
Very good. You come up the time track, engram after engram, erasing up the line.
Male voice: What was the question there?
The question is, “Is it better after you have contacted basic-basic, to come up and find late painful emotion or should one erase in sequence the engrams?” One should erase from the bottom of the track right on up the line every engram he can reach and erase.
Okay. I’ve just been handed a note that said some of the people here have not read this book and they want a definition of these various words. They want a definition of engram.
Engram is an experience, not an experience actually, but a recording done by the body when the analytical mind, that is to say the conscious mind, is unconscious. As you know, the conscious mind can become unconscious in accidents, severe illness, surgery, anesthesia, so on. The conscious mind shuts down. There is still some part of the organism, as is easily demonstrated, which is still recording. Now the recording in that, complete with pain, is an engram. It is just like a phonograph record. It is recorded on, you might say, as if it were a cellular level and it acts then when the analyzer comes back on; the conscious mind is back on—it doesn’t know the engram is there so it. . .
Announcer: Mr. Hubbard, I think we have time for one more question and the written question handed to me from a lady from Fresno was, “What is the expansion program of the Dianetics Research Foundation?” The expansion program, yes. I would very much—these papers that were handed out, I think, do explain these terms, don’t they?
All right, the expansion program of the Foundation at the present time, Plan A has been accomplished. We have a place in Elizabeth and we are getting a large training center near Morristown in New Jersey. This is also the research center. We are placing departments in the major cities of the country. One of these is now in New York at 55 East 82nd Street; one is in Washington, DC at the Parklane; one is being set up in Chicago at this time. And I came out here to set up the Los Angeles Department personally, because I like you so much.
Let’s say we take an intermission now and right after the intermission of fifteen minutes I will show you a new procedure, straight line memory diagnosis, and after that show you exactly how you put a person in reverie. (The lecture resumes after the intermission.) Several people here have asked that I give a complete explanation of Dianetics from one end to the other with a definition of all terms. It would take me quite a while to cover these terms. Let it suffice to say simply this: we have found that the source of aberration and psychosomatic illness stems from recordings laid down in the organism at times when the conscious mind is unconscious through injury, anesthesia or other reasons, so that the recording laid down is then buried below the level of the conscious mind and it reactivates against the unconscious mind as though the exterior world had gotten inside and under the conscious mind. The conscious mind unaware of this behaves toward these hidden commands in a highly exact fashion. For instance, the moment of unconsciousness is called an engram. The literalness of an engram is very fantastic; it’s literal. It’s like Simple Simon, he’s ordered to be careful how he steps in the pies so he uses a great deal of care to step in the pies. It makes no difference in an engram which is in the reactive mind— that mind which contains these engrams below the conscious level—it makes absolutely no difference to that mind whether or not you say “He rode a horse’ or “he ‘rowed’ a horse.” “He rowed a horse.” That seems perfectly reasonable. You get such puns; it is a mind full of puns, it’s a very interesting thing.
We had a pilot, a chief pilot on American Airlines at the Foundation one day and we were examining the situation and he was more or less looking it over for American to use. And we looked over his engrams, and running him back in reverie (which is just what you’re going to see now) we found this phrase—this man, by the way, had failed at owning and running a garage; he had failed at farming but he was a great success as a pilot—and we found this phrase in his engrams “He’s no earthly good.” Now Dianetics is the delineation of these entities in the mind and the processes of application by which one gets them out.
Dianetic therapy could be summed up in this fashion: by taking all the moments of physical pain out of the organism, one restores to that organism complete rationality. That is the sum of it, actually. One attains these engrams no matter how early they appear with a standard technique that anyone can be made to do with a, at least, fair auditor, and the person is returned. That is to say, he is brought back to a point where he will reexperience the incident. He reexperiences these very, very early incidents several times. And if he is back at the earliest part of his time track—that is to say, the consecutive moments of consciousness of his life—then that early, early engram when reexperienced a few times with tactile, pain, so on, it becomes reduced or actually erased. And then by proceeding forward up the time track and finding these various moments of unconsciousness, by reducing and erasing them, one eventually attains the goal of Dianetic therapy which is the Clear.
One attains long before the Clear a Release. The attainment of this is an attainment of a deaberrated state. It doesn’t change the educational level of the person but such things as psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, obsessions, so on, disappear, and leaves him, as we have discovered, a strong and capable person. This is—fairly easy to demonstrate it. The goal of Dianetic therapy then is discovering these engrams in the person—and eradicating them by this technique.
Now, right now, I’m going to show you something new, to you who know the handbook, which was developed about two years ago on the thought that if psychoanalysis can attain alleviation by never returning the human being but merely keeping them in present time and letting them free associate, then certainly in Dianetics, knowing the source we should be able to do more in less time than one can do in psychoanalysis.
We’ve discovered that those things which a person is worried about have been told to him and told to him usually in the exact words that he is worrying. So he tells you his worry, he is making a statement which has been made to him. That statement is contained in his engrams but it’s been keyed in somewhere along the line, that is to say, the engram once laid down very early in life, later reactivated. Then after that he was uncomfortable or anxious about something. And by straight memory we can locate these key-ins. And by locating them, very often, key out an engram. In twenty or thirty percent of the time this technique, which is really merely a diagnostic technique, is quite therapeutic and one discovers some interesting material.
Now, he discovers this material; he discovers, for instance, that Papa habitually said, “Forget it.” He’ll find then that he can first key out some locks that say “Forget it” by making the person remember them—just straight memory. And then he can take the person back down the track and start to find the engrams because he knows that the words “Forget it” appear in those engrams.
If an aberrated person will dramatize an engram once, they will dramatize it many times, which accounts for these habit patterns. A person says habitually “Aw, can it!” or “Forget it” or “You’ve got to do what I tell you.” That’s usually in his engram bank and as such you find out that Papa was in the habit, for instance, of saying “You do as I tell you” and you can find it after, in conscious memory, and it appears lower in the engrams, too. But by straight memory we can recover these dramatizations and we can recover the exact wording of these dramatizations. And as such, it has therapeutic value. It is usually used just as a diagnosis. I’m going to show you how that works.
Now, Mrs. Southwick, I would like very much to demonstrate just a line of questioning which an auditor follows. [to audience] I am demonstrating to you tonight a technique, demonstrating it to you for your use, I’m not up here trying to accomplish any miracles or do a good old Aimée Semple McPherson. So the best thing I can do is to make it as easy as I can for you and to show you how and that is all I am trying to do here tonight. I don’t expect to produce any very remarkable results. We have just two people I am going to do this short demonstration on and I might pick somebody up off the audience; we’ll see if we can accomplish something. We might, who knows? All right.
LRH: [to pc] What have you been worried about lately?
PC: My little girl, mostly.
LRH: What’s the matter with your little girl?
PC: Well, I feel that probably due to Dianetics, she’s not getting as much attention as she should. (laughter) LRH: Look, I was asking for an aberrative worry.
PC: Oh!
LRH: [to audience] Mrs. Southwick is what they’ve started to call around the Foundation a pianola case: it plays itself and the auditor sits down and he says, “All right, the file clerk will give us the moment of pain or unconsciousness which we now need to resolve the case and when I count to five, one-two-three-four-five (snap), the first words will flash into your mind” and it flashes and she runs off this engram and then she runs off another engram, and then she runs off another engram. [to pc] All right, now how is your therapy going?
PC: Well, I haven t had any for about a month, but before that it was going very well LRH: Tell me, do you have good sonic recall?
PC: No, none at all.
LRH: You don’t have very good sonic recall?
PC: None at all.
LRH: Uh-huh, and who used to say you were like somebody?
PC: Well, I used to be very aggravated when people would say I was like my aunt Gladys, whom I thought was a little crazy.
LRH: Uh-huh. But who used to say this?
PC: Um—principally my mother LRH: Your mother.
PC: My aunt—my aunt’s sister LRH: Your aunt’s sister. Can you remember a specific moment when this was being said?
PC: Um—yes I think I can. (pause) Um—um—let’s see . . .
LRH: You can remember this.
PC: I’m returning to it. (laughing) LRH: Don’t worry about returning, let’s , , , PC: Well, it was something to do with—with papering the wall. I must have been about eight or nine years old and I wanted to help my aunt Gladys paper the wall in the living room. And my aunt Gladys was known among family circles as the “expert” because she always knew everything. So I was telling everybody at the supper table how I knew everything about wallpapering and my mother turned around to me and said “You’re acting just like your aunt Gladys” or words to that effect.
LRH: You remember this?
PC: Yes, uh-huh.
LRH: Uh-huh. Does your mother ever say that any other time?
PC: Well, that’s one specific incident that I remember, yes.
LRH: Who else did she think was like somebody? Who’d she think your father was like?
PC: Um—I don’t remember her thinking that he was like anybody.
LRH: Did he ever say that “You’re just like your mother—just like your father”?
PC: Um— I don’t think so, no.
LRH: You don’t think so?
PC: No.
LRH: What was sometime in your life when your mother became very angry at you, extremely angry at you?
PC: Um—oh, it’s a little hard to think of a definite incident, I wasn’t with my mother a great deal of the time.
LRH: Mm-hm.
PC: Um. . .
LRH: Who’d she used to get angry at principally?
PC: My sister.
LRH: And what did she say to your sister?
PC: Um—for a nonsonic case this is very hard. (laughs) LRH: Uh-huh, what’d she used to say to your sister? “You never listen to me” or anything like that?
PC: Um. . .
LRH: “You don’t pay any attention to what I tell you.” PC: No, I think, she used to say, “You sit right down there on that stool until you can behave yourself” LRH: Uh-huh. Did she ever tell you this?
PC: No, I think that most of the period when I was living at home with her that she gave me the impression of being a little frightened of me.
LRH: Who do you think you’re most like in your family?
PC: Well probably my father.
LRH: Anybody ever say you were like your father?
PC: Well, I guess they did, I can’t remember that they did.
LRH: All right, I’ll give you some homework. Tell me tomorrow who used to tell you you were like your father, will you?
PC: All right LRH: Okay, thank you. [to audience] I wanted to say something about this to you. It may look to you at first glance—it may look to you as if these questions are a bit random. We’re looking here for a command, a habitual command on the part of somebody that would command the preclear out of a valence. You understand how that would be? “You’re just like your mother.” This has a tendency to shift valence. And the person will stay in the shifted valence because there might have been other people around and mother also said to them “You’re just like your mother.” It may be in the engram bank somewhere. This is a valence shifter.
Another type of valence shifter is “I have to pretend I am somebody else; I can’t be myself around you.” Now, that valence shifter puts a person, you might say, in another valence. That is to say, he is not himself, he thinks of himself as his father, that he is his father. A complete identification with another human being.
By straight line memory we can sometimes part that identification so that a person comes off from being just like Father and is himself, and at that moment will attain a greater perceptic range. In other words, he’ll be able to hear, see, feel better as he returns on the track to old incidents.
Some people have sonic—that is to say, he can hear things which are said to him. Some people cannot, and the valence is one of the reasons why people can’t. Now, we are trying to discover what valence people are in. You follow me? Okay.
LRH: [to pc] Tell me your name, sir.
PC: Harry Wasserman.
LRH: Harry Wasserman. Very pleased to meet you.
PC: How do you do, Mr. Hubbard.
LRH: I was demonstrating here and would like to demonstrate just this straight line memory. It is important as a diagnostic technique. We’re trying to discover somebody’s dramatization—somebody in the family’s dramatization on the theory that that dramatization will appear in an engram. Once you know the words in the dramatization it is, of course, very easy to find the engram. So in straight memory we force the person, as best we can, by various questions to recover memory of one of these dramatizations. [to pc] For instance, did your father used to get angry?
PC: Very.
LRH: He used to get very angry?
PC: Very.
LRH: What’d he used to say?
PC: He’s told my mother to hold her mouth!
LRH: Yeah, “Hold your mouth.” PC: Yeah, in German.
LRH: In German.
PC: Yeah.
LRH: How’d he say it?
PC: Halt den mund!
LRH: Halt den mund.
PC: Yes.
LRH: My German is not so good.
PC: (laughs) LRH: [to audience] That’s nothing. I was running a case the other day in Chinese!
That’s a very brilliant boy, by the way, who is in charge of Honolulu now, he’s making things hum out there. [to pc] Now tell me, did he ever punish you very much?
PC: Oh, extensively.
LRH: What did he say to you when he punished you?
PC: “Dummkopf!” LRH: Mm-hm, “dummkopf.” Did he ever tell you to control yourself?
PC: No. He figured that the punishment would do the job.
LRH: Uh-huh. Whoever said you were like your father?
PC: My wife.
LRH: Your wife said you were like your father?
PC: Yes.
LRH: Have you been happy about this?
PC: No.
LRH: Now, let’s remember a specific moment.
PC: Right.
LRH: Can you remember a moment when she said this? Not reverie, just remember it straight. Remember a moment when she said, “You’re just like your father.” PC: I was very angry.
LRH: Uh-huh. Do you remember when she said it?
PC: Yes.
LRH: Where was she standing?
PC: She was standing next to me in the kitchen.
LRH: Uh-huh, and what did she say?
PC: She said, “You’re just like your father!” Like this.
LRH: Uh-huh. How do you feel when you contact that?
PC: Well, I—I sort of get a mingled emotion, I sort of feel strange, a little elated, and strange, a little disappointed.
LRH: Why?
PC: Well, I don’t admire my father too much.
LRH: You don’t admire him too much.
PC: Not too much.
LRH: Did your mother ever say you were like your father?
PC: Never!
LRH: Who does your wife remind you of?
PC: (pause) (laughing) Well, she’s unlike any other person that I’ve ever met before.
LRH: She is completely?
PC: Yes, yes.
LRH: You get along well with her though?
PC: After therapy.
LRH: Ah, ho! All right. Now, tell me this then, was your mother well self-controlled and so forth, very self-controlled?
PC: Quite self-controlled.
LRH: Did she ever tell you to control yourself?
PC: No.
LRH: Never did?
PC: No.
LRH: All right, did your father punish you very often?
PC: Yes.
LRH: Did you have an elder brother?
PC: No.
LRH: Only child?
PC: No, I was the only male child.
LRH: Was there an older sister?
PC: Older sister, yes.
LRH: Did he ever call her a dummkopf?
PC: Yes.
LRH: Yes.
PC: A great deal.
LRH: Yes, a great deal. How much older?
PC: Year and a half.
LRH: Year and a half older. When she was a little baby would he have called her a dummkopf?
PC: Would he have?
LRH: Yeah, would he?
PC: I don’t think so. He’s partial towards the girls.
LRH: Partial, huh.
PC: Yes.
LRH: When did he say he was partial toward girls?
PC: He never said so.
LRH: He just acts that way?
PC: Yes.
LRH: All right. What would your mother say if she were very angry with you?
PC: (pause) She would say “Why!” LRH: And what else?
PC: (pause) “That is not right!” LRH: She would say what?
PC: “That is not right.” LRH: How would she say this?
PC: Well she’d say it in English.
LRH: She’d say “That is not right”?
PC: Yes, “That is not right.” LRH: Mm-hm. Would she tell the daughter this, your elder sister?
PC: Yeah, she would say that.
LRH: “That is not right.” PC: “That is not right.” LRH: What are you doing in therapy?
PC: Auditing and being audited.
LRH: Yes, but in your auditing do you ever have trouble with your data?
PC: Sometimes.
LRH: You change it sometimes as you’re running it?
PC: Yes. (pause) Jeez! (laughing) LRH: Thank you.
PC: Thank you very much, (laughing) [to audience] Just showing you the mechanics of this. They are very simple. We’re trying to establish first, does he have control circuitry. Now, you’ve probably—any one of you have trouble with “altitude”—you know, you’re running some preclear and the preclear says, “You know, I think I ought to go to so-and-so.” And you as the auditor say “Well no, let’s run so-and-so, now.” “Well, I think I had better go to so-and-so anyway,” and do it. “You’ve got to take care of yourself,” “You’ve got to control yourself.” We just spread over this whole thing and say—we call that control circuitry. Because it’s actually controlling a person. Well now, to cure dub-in, we find these control circuits and that’s why I asked him this question about “Who used to say ‘control yourself’?” He says “Nobody said it.” All right, so nobody said it. But a case which is running dub-in, you find that there is somebody in that case that habitually said “Control yourself” or “Do it yourself” or something of the sort and it actually does cause the imagination to go to work. There is a false individual set up inside the individual, you follow me?
All right, that’s what you’re looking for in straight line memory, you’re just looking for one of those dramatizations. You find that dramatization and you use repeater technique with those exact words and you go right straight down the bank and you knock out engrams with it. You’ll get the first engram in which that appears and you run that out and reduce it.
This other thing about valences—the fellow who can’t be himself. Now, this fellow who can’t be himself has been told to be somebody else. “You are just like your mother,” “You are just like your father,” “He’s just like me, the little lamb.” Usually occurs right after birth. Poor baby lying there, unlike anything in the world and Grandma, the ally, comes in and says, “He’s just like me.” After this, of course, he has a valence shift and he goes out of valence and his perceptics have a tendency to close down on him because he’s out of valence. So we’re looking for these two things. Now, therapeutically we ask him what he’s worried about. He says, “Oh, I’m worried because I’m no good, I just can’t seem to do anything.” And you say, “Who told you that?” And the fellow says, “Nobody” or “I tell myself that” or something of the sort. And you say, “You can remember somebody. Who would have said that in your family?” And the first thing you know, why, he may remember that his father said it. You make him remember a specific moment when it was said to him and he chuckles for a moment and he’s not worried about it anymore.
This is therapeutic to this degree—Dr. Jacobson, a psychiatrist in New York City is using this. He’s one of these doctors who takes on about fifty patients a day, so he can’t put everybody in reverie. He’s using Dianetics and he’s using straight line memory and a couple of months ago he was talking to me and he said he’d turned three cases out of five of Parkinson’s disease off with straight line memory. It’s fantastic. It’s his statement. I haven’t verified it. But I know that we have made people feel very good with this.
Now, I am going to give you a demonstration now of reverie, how you induce reverie and what you do with it when you have it induced. Okay.
I hope you all can hear this. All right. And I’m worried about reverie. Not all auditors are quite as lucky as this.
Now, you’ll notice that the patient reclines upon a couch. Dianetics has this in common with psychoanalysis. The patient, however, is very carefully kept out of a hypnotic trance. Nothing wrong with hypnosis used by proper practitioners as anesthetics and so on but for heaven’s sakes, let’s not use too much hypnosis in reverie.
Sometimes people go into an hypnotic trance by accident with this count system that we have been using, so at the Foundation we have knocked out the counting system. We don’t count anymore to patients and the way you induce reverie is simply this way, and I want you to follow this very carefully please.
LRH: [to pc] Lynn, close your eyes. [to audience] She is now in reverie. [to pc] Open your eyes. [to audience] She is now out of reverie.
I want you to note that there is nothing strange about reverie, except that because of Johnny Campbell we gave it a name and this has made it a special state. And by giving it a name, people have been trying to achieve something very special. And there’s nothing special to achieve!
A person, wide-awake, could be said to be in reverie. That is to say, he returns up and down his track—especially some people running auto.
Reverie then is no very special thing. It has a name. We use the name reverie; it denotes the fact that we are practicing therapy upon the preclear. We are not even calling it therapy now, we are calling it processing.
We call it the preclear, not the patient. We haven’t figured out one for diagnosis yet, but its probably “scouting the case” or something. Somebody objected and said it sounded like we’re going to give merit badges for it, but . . . anyway.
LRH: [to pc] All right, Lynn, close your eyes. Now, anytime in the future that I utter to you the word “cancelled” anything which I have said to you while you are lying here is to be cancelled and will become completely nonaberrative, okay?
PC: Mm-hm.
LRH: [to audience] All right, we installed a canceller because sometimes people do go to sleep and we don’t know it. [to pc] All right, let’s find out now something very important. How old are you? (snap) PC: Thirty-two.
LRH: [to audience] Ah, hah! She’s in present time. This is so unusual, I have to stop here. This stops the whole show.
It says in the book, if the preclear is stuck in present time . . . Now, the editor of the book took the quotations out from around “present time” since no one could possibly be stuck in present time and he’s always stuck in past time. He isn’t stuck at the end of his time track, he’s stuck on his time track somewhere and it’s up to you to find out where he is.
Now, it startles people very much. You sometimes walk up to somebody who knows nothing about Dianetics and you say, “How old are you?” And he says, “Ulp (pause) twenty-eight.” And you say, “Well what was the first age that flashed into your mind?” “Well, four years. I can’t understand that.” And you say, “What happened to you when you were four years of age?” “Nothing! Nothing. Oh, well, ah . . .” “Well, go on, what happened? You can remember what happened when you were four.” “Nothing—well, oh that’s when I was run over by the truck!” Well, if Lynn, for instance, had said at that moment, “Five years of age,” I would have tried to have found out who had said, “Wait there,” “Stay there,” “Come back here,” “Sit down”—some holder, in other words, some command that would make a person stay in one spot. And I would try to find that command, not with repeater technique so much as trying to scout up the incident. Now failing to find out what had happened to her at five, I would go into the second process.
LRH: [to pc] Let’s go to the time you went down to the beach, about a week ago. Were you at the beach a week ago?
PC; No, but I have a very recent incident at the beach.
LRH: All right, let’s contact that incident. Now, what are you doing there?
PC: I’m lying on a blanket; it’s spread out on the sand.
LRH: How’s the blanket feel?
PC: A little bit scratchy.
LRH: Do you hear the surf?
PC: Yes.
LRH: Who’s with you?
PC: A boyfriend.
LRH: What’s the color of the blanket?
PC: Army tan.
LRH: What’s his bathing suit look like?
PC: Winesap, I believe.
LRH: Let’s take a look at it.
PC: Yes, it’s a little—a little tired.
LRH: Uh-huh, it’s a little tired. Okay, come up to present time.
PC: Mm-hm. [to audience] The odd part of it is that running a pleasure moment—now I didn’t run this moment very thoroughly. You take a person who is well shut-off; sometimes they have commands which inhibit them from experiencing pleasure, but in a lot of patients you can get the pleasure moments. And you just run a recent pleasure moment and you run it just like an engram.
You find a moment there when she’s been, for instance, diving into the water. And you go over this moment, over it and over it and over it, and all of a sudden you can pick up the perceptics. You can make her see, feel, hear and, if you go over it, one pleasure moment, another pleasure moment . . .
One preclear on whom this was practiced by the way was completely shut in and a little time went by and I found a moment of pleasure he could remember. And then I found his perceptics, gradually, one by one. And the moment was the first movie he had ever attended as a little boy and he was watching Felix the Cat slide off a roof and fall in a rain barrel. And the xylophone went “Brrrrrr” and he finally heard the xylophone. He got so excited he jumped off the couch. And we sent him back over it again and again and again, and we just let Felix fall off of that roof, time after time after time until the preclear was sitting in his theater seat looking at that screen, smelling whatever odors there were in the theater, feeling the emotion of enjoying that picture! And gradually just working at it and finding, first, one pleasure moment and then another one and working each one very thoroughly, one by one, his perceptics began to come on and his case began to move.
Merely by finding a pleasure moment sometimes you can crack the patient out of a holder on the time track. If she’d said “five,” I couldn’t maybe have found the incident at five. The next thing I would do would be to return her to pleasure incidents which were recent and the attention units in the mind get so interested in this pleasure that they will come out of painful incidents and the person can come up to present time.
The mind seeks pleasure. And you can actually get the person up to present time this way.
You can also turn off headaches, toothaches and so on by running a recent pleasure moment because it has a tendency to key out the engram. This is very useful to you, very useful. You can practice this on some people; you’ll see how it works. Okay?
We have now induced reverie on Lynn and I would first—I tested her perceptics; I found out they were very good. She’s in present time; she is evidently moving on her track. This is a sort of a patient you dream about.
She just came back from the Foundation; a lot of experts have been working her. Anyway, here’s the next thing we would do.
We have a case now that’s all ready to go.
We use the file clerk and we use the somatic strip like this, we don’t fish around in the case and we don’t question the file clerk and we don’t question the somatic strip.
The auditor orders the somatic strip around. He tells it where to go. But he asks the file clerk, politely. So I would say to her—now I’ve installed the canceller—I would say to her, “The file clerk . . .” LRH: [to pc] Do you want to give me an incident, Lynn, or would you rather just dub one?
PC: An incident is perfectly all right.
LRH: Ah, let’s dub one.
PC: All right (laughs) LRH: After all, I don’t want to detain these kindly people and I never leave an incident until I’ve reduced it or an earlier incident on the chain. [to audience] One doesn’t leave an unreduced incident. If you’re having any trouble with your preclears, it’s probably because you aren’t reducing incidents.
If you find an incident you can’t reduce, you’ve got to get the preclear earlier to one of the same type which will reduce. In other words, don’t leave the case with an unreduced incident because that’s very restimulative.
He won’t feel badly lying there regressed, returned on the track, perhaps. When you bring him up to present time he really gets the somatic, so we reduce incidents that we locate, we don’t leave them carelessly. If any of you are having real trouble, it’s probably from that and we’d run the actual incident.
Now I would say to her “The file clerk . . .” LRH: [to pc] You’ll now give this in present time. [to audience] “The file clerk,” I would say, “will give us the next moment of pain or unconsciousness we need to resolve the case. The somatic strip will go to the first moment of this engram. When I count from one to five, the first words of the engram will flash into your mind, one-two-three-four-five.” PC: “I don’t know how I can do it” LRH: Okay, let’s go over that again.
PC: “I don’t know how I can do it.” LRH: Go over it again.
PC: “I don’t know how I can do it” LRH: Next line.
PC: “It seems to be so much trouble.” LRH: Let’s go over those two lines again.
PC: That’s very interesting, I’ve lost the first one. (laughing) “I don’t see how I can do it I don’t see how I can do it. I don’t see how I can do it” LRH: Next line.
PC: “There isn’t any use.” LRH: All right, go over that again.
PC: “There isn’t any use.” LRH: The next line.
PC: “Why do you have to do it?” LRH: The next line.
PC: “Because I think it’s necessary.” LRH: Next line.
PC: “Well, this is just useless procedure.” LRH: Okay, now, let’s give me a yes or no on the following: Is there an earlier phrase in this engram, yes or no? (snap) PC: Yes.
LRH: All right, let’s contact that phrase. A little bit earlier. [to audience] You’ll notice by the way that the somatic strip, you know, has gone to the front of the engram but sometimes the unconsciousness is deepest right there at the front, if it’s a blow or something, and a phrase or two will be lost before the first ones you’ve contacted. And if you try to reduce the engram without reducing the first pain of it the engram is liable to hang fire on you. [to pc] All right, let’s go over that now, the first line that you just contacted.
PC: “I don’t see how I can stand it.” LRH: All right, let’s go over that again.
PC: “I don’t see how I can stand it.” LRH: Go over it again.
PC: “I don’t see how I can stand it.” LRH: [to audience] All right, you’ll notice what I’m doing here is getting her to repeat that first one a few times. And by repeating the first one a few times, she settles into the incident solidly. Now, if we run the incident along and we discover something that says in this incident, “Get away,” that’s what we call a bouncer. When we run the bouncer “get away,” we know that that thing is going to activate as a phrase because it has command value and she’s going to go off of the incident a little bit. So when we find a bouncer or a misdirector or any one of those phrases, right there, we take that phrase and we say . . . [to pc] Well, for instance, let’s pretend you just found a bouncer that says “Get away,” okay?
PC: “I don’t see how I can stand it, go away.” LRH: All right, go over that “go away” again.
PC: “Go away.” LRH: Go over it again.
PC: Go away.
LRH: Go over it again.
PC: “Go away.” LRH: Go over it again.
PC: “Go away.” LRH: Go over it again.
PC: Go away.
LRH: Go over it again.
PC: (yawns) “Go away.” LRH: Go over it again.
PC: “Go away.” LRH: Go over it again.
PC: “Go away.” (whining) LRH: Go over it again.
PC: “Go away.” (deep sigh) LRH: The next line.
PC: “I’m too tired.” LRH: Let’s go over that again.
PC: “I’m too tired.” LRH: Go over it again.
PC: “I’m too tired.” LRH: Go over it again.
PC: (yawning) “I’m too tired.” LRH: Go over it again.
PC: “I’m too tired.” LRH: Go over it again.
PC: “I’m too tired.” LRH: Go over it again.
PC: “I’m too tired.” LRH: Okay. [to audience] Now this will demonstrate to you merely the running of an engram. This demonstrates to you reverie. [to pc] By the way, were you running a real engram there?
PC: (laughs) There were certainly parts of one.
LRH: Okay, let’s come up to present time.
PC: (pause) LRH: Come up to present time.
PC: Mm-hm.
LRH: All right, how old are you? (snap) PC: Thirty-two.
LRH: Okay, cancelled. When I count from five to one, your eyes will open, five-four-three-two-one. (snap) Wake up. Okay?
PC: Mm-hm.
LRH: Thank you very much. And so that is reverie.
Now, I want to show you one thing before we get out of here, just one thing only. The goal of Dianetic therapy is the Clear.
The psychometry on a Clear demonstrates him to be without aberration. Now, I would be very pleased if you would give your attention to a young lady whose case has this great interest to us. She was cleared by an auditor who knew no more of Dianetics than the book. She was a relatively easy case, this is true, but all he knew was the handbook. He took the handbook and he ran out the engram bank. And as a result, this case checks out as Clear.
Now, the technical definition of Clear is merely a case which has been returned all the way up and down the time track; we don’t find any engrams. Psychometry on the case demonstrates the person to be without aberration.
Tomorrow morning a well-known psychometrist in this city is going to give this young lady complete psychometry. It was set up for this morning but things mixed up so I haven’t the data to hand here. And any of you who would be interested in this young lady, if they seem interested in this psychometry (which I assure you is disinterested psychometry, so signed, by somebody wholly qualified) or actually is interested in meeting this young lady (if that person is a professional like a psychiatrist who wishes to examine her in any way), arrangements will be made for that tomorrow at the office. It would be tomorrow afternoon—she has to take this psychometry in the morning.
Now I want to introduce to you a young lady of Boston, a Dianetic Clear who has come here tonight to show you that there are such things. Miss Sonia Bianca.
How are you, Sonny?
Sonia: Fine.
Well, I was sorry to keep you back of the wings all this time but I’m sure that now you’ve walked out, that people like to see this. Now tell me something about yourself here. Are you in a university? (Of course, I know all of these answers.) Sonia: I’m at Wellesley College graduate school.
Wellesley College graduate school—what are you doing now?
Sonia: I’m now in Harvard summer school You mean you’re now playing hookey?
Sonia: Yes.
That’s right. As a matter of fact I kidnapped her out of Harvard. Now did you used to have any psychosomatic illnesses?
Sonia: Yes, I had hay fever, several types of allergies plus chronic sinusitis.
Yes, and were you happy or normally . . .
Sonia: Well, I was considered rather a moody person.
Moody?
Sonia: Mm-hm.
Were you ever nervous?
Sonia: Oh, very. And by the way, was this a record of psychometry which is available?
Sonia: Yes, at the university.
All right. And how do you feel now?
Sonia: Fine.
Fine.
Sonia: Certainly.
Who gets the credit for this clearing effort?
Sonia: Well, Mr. Frank Hulswit.
Mr. Frank Hulswit of Harvard. The university campuses are quite hot on Dianetics now and I suppose we’ll have to give him a gold star or something of the sort.
Sonia: He deserves it.
You think he deserves it?
Sonia: Yes, I do.
Well, do you feel cheerful these days?
Sonia: Certainly.
How do you think your life may have changed through being Clear?
Sonia: Well, the biggest help, I think, of all has been the improvement of my psychosomatic illnesses.
Mm-hm.
Sonia: Because they would certainly drag me down all the time.
Mm-hm.
Sonia: I had difficulty attending classes and I couldn’t study, and in the future I’m sure, without these, I can accomplish many more things.
Oh, that’s fine. Do you feel your life has been changed a great deal in any way?
Sonia: Well, my tone level is certainly quite a bit higher. I find that I don’t worry about many things that I had worried about before. In fact I don’t worry at all. In fact that’s one of the things that’s worrying me.
Oh, it’s worrying you! Well now do you think you’ve come to a great deal of harm by being cleared or otherwise?
Sonia: No.
You don’t think so.
Sonia: I’m sure there s no harm in it.
Mind you now, in view of the fact that a psychometry is going to be on file by this, I would very dearly love to have you people ask me questions and ask her questions—but a Clear—I think there’s going to be a lot of Clears sort of disappear from sight as soon as they’re cleared because they have a tendency, the public does, to sort of tear them to pieces just about. We’ve got four police officers out here protecting this young lady.
Male voice: Mr. Hubbard, one question please?
You bet.
Male voice: You say in your book that a Clear has eidetic memory, sonically and visually. Is this true of this young lady? Does she have eidetic memory?
You say I say it in my book; yes, it is true that those things which a person has actually looked at are recorded. The photographic type of memory where one looks at a page, a whole page, and has that whole page then on record is a trained process. But what a person has looked at, that is, actually has read, has done, is a matter of record. [to Sonia] Now can you do these things?
Sonia: Yes. I can.
How do you feel about them?
Sonia: It feels wonderful I don’t spend hours studying and learning things, I just go back to it All right, now let’s see.
Male voice: Can this be demonstrated right now?
Well, I suppose it could be to some degree. [to Sonia] What do you normally study?
Sonia: Physics.
All right, shut your eyes. (Of course, this type of examination actually means very little.) Read me something out of the physics textbook—something complicated.
Sonia: Very complicated?
Yeah, very complicated. Just look at the physics textbook and read it.
Sonia: Which one?
Well, which one do you want to read?
Sonia: Well, let’s look at Electromagnetic Theory.
Electromagnetic Theory. Now, that’s a nice book for a young lady to have been studying.
Male voice: Author.
Second male voice: By whom?
Sonia: Hugh Skillings.
Okay, and let’s read something complicated out of it.
Sonia: Well, when you open it up there s the Chapter One.
Chapter One, well there usually is. Well let’s go over to the middle of the book and read something.
Sonia: All right.
Male voice: “Thirty-six.” Sonia: I’m sorry, I can’t do that because I’m not conscious of page numbers when I read.
Open it up to the middle someplace, the moment you’re reading it. Now, what are you reading? (pause) Anywhere in the middle of the book.
How about Newton’s formula of gravity, something that these people know.
Sonia: In vector notations?
Yes, in vector notations.
Sonia: All right, yup, there’s a vector notation in the book I’m using It is written in darker ink—is equal to M, which is M which is not in dark ink, times A, which is also in the dark ink Do you see the page number on it?
Sonia: This is my mechanics book.
Oh, this is a mechanics book?
Sonia: Yes, Okay, actually we could probably do a lot of that sort of thing. Your eyes are closed there, what color suit do I have on?
Sonia: It’s sort of grayish blue.
Okay, and what’s the color of my tie?
Sonia: I’m afraid I didn’t look at it.
Okay, when—as you walked in here did you take a look down front? Now keep your eyes closed.
Sonia: Yes, You looked down front. Who’s sitting down here in front—can you name any of the color of the clothes at the moment you walk in and you look? What do you see?
Sonia: There s a black and white print dress in front of me.
All right, and what else do you see there?
Sonia: Oh . . . (pause) I don’t think I looked at people very directly.
Who are you looking at as you walk in? Let’s walk in. Who are you looking at?
Sonia: You, All right, what do you see?
Sonia: Your red hair, (laughs) [to audience] Yeah, see, she’s got a good recall. Recalls I have red hair.
I would very much like to give you a very flashy demonstration on this sort of thing. The best way this is done is by letting the lady read a page and then reading it back and so on. That can be best done by a competent psychometrist whose word is beyond question, because like anybody else we could be accused of rigging something. And that will be done tomorrow morning.
Male voice: How about the young lady’s IQ?
That will all be established tomorrow morning and will be on record, certified by the highest authority for you to inspect. [to Sonia] Do you think your IQ’s up?
Sonia: Yes I think it is.
Do you think it’s up? You think you’ll be able to make out these flashes by looking from cards?
Sonia: I believe so . . .
You believe so.
Sonia: . . . otherwise I wouldn’t have come.
All right.
Male voice: Recite a page from Dianetics.
Sonia: I read the book only once and was—afraid it was quite a while ago.
All right.
Sonia: I’m afraid I couldn’t do it.
Afraid you couldn’t do it? Okay, let this young lady get tested tomorrow. We’re not going to use her up tonight. Okay.
Thank you very much Miss Bianca. And thank you very good people for coming here tonight. I hope I haven’t bored you too terribly.
Dianetics is here in Los Angeles now. We have a department, we can answer your questions, we can give you all the help we can. There will be professional auditors in the area and a lot of the questions that you have now can be clarified and classified for you.
Now, I want to thank you very, very much for coming down here this evening and you have been a very splendid audience.
Good Night.