Introduction to Dianetics (500923)
Date: 23 September 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
I have a few things to tell you tonight about Dianetics. It takes quite a little while to tell everything there is to tell about it. After all, it was fifteen years in the development.
Perhaps I’d better start in by telling you how it came about that it was developed. People ask me these questions: “How did you ever think about Dianetics?” Well, it doesn’t seem to me that it required much more than the cultural question itself—it has been with man now for perhaps fifty thousand years: “What makes man tick?” “Why does man act as man does act?” These questions are found in the oldest literature we have. One looks back into the days of more modern times, let us say, ancient Greece, and he finds there in ancient Greece a school which is attempting to answer the problems of the mind: the Aesculapian school.
Man had already become very conversant with the problems of man by the time Greece was Greece. The Aesculapians, for instance, were trying to cure insanity with convulsive shock. They used a drug called hellebore, and it produced much the same results as the electric shock which is being used today.
The various methods employed, the efforts employed to cure insanity, of course, form only a small part of mans efforts. Man isn’t wholly concentrated upon insanity. In Dianetics, we certainly aren’t concentrated upon insanity or neurosis or even psychosomatic illnesses. We’re trying to do something about the activities of the normal man, something about conditions which in the world today are considered to be normal conditions. For instance, it’s quite a normal thought that the Russian people have a perfect right to atom-bomb the United States. And we in the United States—it doesn’t give us any great shock to think of killing off a few million Russians with atom bombs. I mean, what we conceive to be the normal course of affairs is very far from optimum.
Dianetics is mainly leveled at the solution of the problems of man’s activities, not just at the problems of his psychotic and psycho-somatically ill brethren.
However, we have to start somewhere along the line and it is a terribly important thing that here in these United States, according to the figures issued by President Truman, there are very close to two million human beings in institutions. There is another half a million human beings in criminal institutions. These people are held out from society because they might damage society. And so we have to start along this lowest echelon.
Then, I believe you will agree, that the people are not as healthy as they might be. We have such things as the common cold; we have arthritis, bursitis. Everywhere we look we see glasses on people’s noses. The current level of health in this society is not what you might call optimum. And it is at this stage of attack against aberration that we find our main objective to be mental and physical health. I merely wish to bring to your attention, however, that this is not the end product of Dianetics.
Now, man has been thinking for an awful long time about man. I was in the Orient when I was very young. Of course, I was a harum-scarum kid; I wasn’t thinking about deep philosophic problems, but I had a lot of friends—such a friend as Commander “Snake’ Thompson. He was a very interesting man. He signed his name Thompson by drawing a snake over the top of the T. He was quite unique. I think the man is still very well known by repute in the navy today, but he has been dead, I regret to say, these very many years.
He had studied under Sigmund Freud and he found me a very wide-eyed and wide-eared boy. He had just come from Vienna, and his mouth and mind were full of associative words, libido theories, conversion and all the rest of it. He was a fascinating man. He had been out into the Polynesian group and he had dug up ancient skeletons of a race nobody had ever suspected existed before. He had served in an intelligence—as an intelligence officer in Japan during the First World War. He did his job so very well that he was court-martialed.
The old man had a tremendous influence upon me and I’m sorry that he is not alive today.
I was brought back by my father very summarily from my wanderings; I had neglected to go to high school As a matter of fact, practically the last formal school I attended was here—that is to say, where somebody patted me on the back and gave me a certificate and said, “You’re it,” was Grant School in Oakland.
My father brought me back and he said I had to go to university, so he sent me down to a prep school down in Virginia, and I studied for about four months and took the New York Board of Regents and got into George Washington University. I think that the registrar must have been blind that day or had a sonic shut-off, but he let me in. They regretted it from there on because I never seemed to stay with the curriculum. I took my mathematics—I didn’t know arithmetic but I learned calculus very easily When it came to studying to be an engineer, I’m afraid that Artie Johnson5 down at George Washington University right now would hear my name and throw up his hands in slight horror. At last they said, “Well, after all, you’re not going to practice engineering; we might as well pass you in a few of these courses.” This was a great relief to me since my father was bound and determined that the only measure of excellence was “A.” My only measure of excellence was whether or not I learned anything about what I wanted to know.
Fired initially by Commander Thompson, I took up a search for life force. Now this is a rather strange and esoteric thing for a young man to take up. But we had to hand, there, Professor Brown, an excellent man. His pupil, Gomez, is the man who catalyzed the entire atom-bomb project. Young Gomez was there then, but he was just a kid, too.
Now, old Professor Brown was teaching, for the first time in the United States, atomic and molecular phenomena. Now, that’s very much of an ear-cracking subject. We didn’t even have a textbook. We had nothing there but the old rules and so forth that Halley had laid down. People were still talking—they’d say—they wouldn’t say Einstein; they would say Einstein!
The people were very much impressed with atomic and molecular phenomena. And I took the course and of course flunked it. But the point is that the atomic and molecular phenomena might possibly give us some sort of a clue to life force. After all, we were studying rock-bottom energy. What was energy? What could it do? For instance, occasionally in class, somebody might hazard the fact that someday somebody might split an atom. Well, this was unheard of but—they called these people wild radicals.
In just as much a radical way, I was trying to find out what is the fluid flow along the nerve channels? What is the memory storage device of human cells or of any cells? Can they remember? Obviously, they must remember. But how do they? I used an old Koenig photometer with a gas flame. Today they have oscilloscopes to do this work. Professor Brown thought that I was utterly mad puttering around there but another man didn’t and that was Dr. William Alanson White. And he used to be—Dr. William Alanson White—used to be Doc White, and now he is William Alanson White. He is the departed member of Saint Elizabeth’s, after which the William Alanson White Foundation is named.
The old man was very skeptical that a man studying atomic and molecular phenomena would ever come up with any sort of an answer about human memory storage, until I showed him one day that it was impossible for existing knowledge of structure to be accurate because the mind obviously could not store memory. There was too much memory and it required too much storage space. And there were no known waves or sizes of waves which could in themselves come into the brain and be stored in some fashion. For instance, rather recently, within the last year, Dr. Claude Shannon—I am not a part of the cybernetics crew; I know several of them. But Dr. Claude Shannon was trying to figure out this problem. He was building a machine for the navy, I think, which was to figure out strategy—one of these big electronic brains—and he had to do some figures on the human mind to find out how much memory it stored and he found out that even if it remembered only the most important things, it couldn’t possibly store more memory than is contained in three months.
In other words, every three months, the whole machine, standard bank, would have to be dumped in order to make room for the new. So, consequently, we don’t know very much about structure. We know practically nothing about structure.
In spite of the fact that I started out in the beginning trying to isolate life force, I find myself still balked at a barrier. Perhaps we will be able to sense, measure or experience this thing life force—to put it on a meter, perhaps pump it into a corpse. Who knows? There’s something there about life force. It seems to me, the further I go into the problem, however, that religion has a lot to say in its favor. I don’t know where memory is stored in the mind. I don’t know where the personality is stored. I don’t know how these things come about. But I do know the error and the various errors and their mechanics which cause the human mind to think incorrectly, aberratedly.
These things we know in Dianetics. We know, in short, the bug that gets into the machine. We can troubleshoot the machine. There is the state of Dianetics at the present time. That falls far short of knowing all there is to know about man. But I believe that it is far in advance of what we did know before.
Now, the whole problem of therapy, down through the ages, has kept falling over a fact that the human mind could record when it was unconscious. That fact was not known. As a matter of fact, that’s the first thing which people seem to contest in Dianetics.
I thought that I was the first one that had discovered this, until a very short time ago a psychiatrist, Dr. Rosenblatz, from New York City, was sitting in my office and he said, “You know, I’ve been searching the literature and I find out that a psychiatrist in 1914 did some experiments upon an unconscious person and recovered the content of that period of unconsciousness through hypnosis.” He made a report in his official journal, which I believe was the American Journal of Neurology. I’m not sure of this journal—Dr. Rosenblatz wasn’t, but he had just got through reading it—he didn’t have visio recall. And so here was a man who did an isolated piece of work—1914, thirty-six years ago. And it had lain there forgotten. I’m finding, by the way, as I go along in Dianetics, reaching here and reaching there, that material which was predicted to exist had, in most instances, been discovered already and forgotten.
People write me in and they . . . Like I found out the other day that tremendous amounts of work had been done in the field of morphogenesis. They had found out that a five-weeks-old embryo, when touched on the back by a hair, would do a complete flexion: straighten up, and then curl up in a ball again. In other words, there was nervous action. This is Hooker. You can look him up in the scientific papers; he’s very well known in morphogenesis. But that particular piece of work was, in itself, unknown, except to a few biologists.
What I’m coming down toward, now, is the fact that Dianetics is an organization. It is an organized body of knowledge. According to scientific definition, a science is an organized body of knowledge which, proceeding from certain definite axioms, is able to predict knowledge where, when you look, knowledge will be found. That is a science, an organized body of knowledge. It doesn’t have variables in it. In Dianetics what we do know doesn’t have variables. Therefore we can call it quite legitimately a science. But out in advance of it is a tremendous field as yet utterly unexplored: a philosophy. Philosophy, one might say, is the great unknown of knowledge. Science—as Will Durant, after others, said—is the advancing front which is catching up with philosophy. Philosophy always seems to lose ground; science always seems to gain ground. Dianetics came straight out of the realm of philosophy, actually, since none of these facts could have been—possibly have been integrated, none of them could have been, if we had not had a central pivot on which to hang them. And that central pivot was the word survive. It seemed incredible to people that man could only be surviving until one begins to realize the utter abundance necessary for survival.
It isn’t enough, you know, to raise one bushel of wheat per month if one is only going to consume one bushel of wheat. One has to raise enough bushels of wheat to take care of all emergencies. And if he raises enough, then he survives. But raising enough wheat and having a great enough abundance would in itself be a pleasure. We find out that survival, then, proceeds into pleasure; that infinite survival as a—an organism, a personality, a spirit, however it is that he survives, through his children, that is a pleasure. And the attaining of that goal is a pleasure. The act of trying to attain that goal is a pleasure.
On the other side, of nonsurvival, we have pain. Pain, the warning light that says, “Don’t go in this direction any further because there lies death.” In other words, the rightest one could be was infinite survival for himself, for his children, for his group and for all mankind. And the wrongest one could be would be to be dead. It works out into a simplicity.
The basic mathematics of Dianetics are actually considerable. They are causing a considerable headache right now to a mathematician—a graduate mathematician from Columbia, who is going over my notebooks (and finding arithmetical errors here and there) and who is trying to integrate it, and had to study topology in order to integrate it further because the work is done with symbolic logic, with transfinite cardinals and topology. It leads an enormous distance but actually, when you look at the whole problem, the distance is hardly any. We have advanced a few inches perhaps into the great unknown of philosophy. Out there still waiting—still waiting for me particularly because I’ve really been looking for this for a long time—is life force; what is it?
In the problems of Dianetics, then, we now have to hand the captured territory. We know that man—because this can be subjected to very, very definite laboratory proofs—that a man when rendered unconscious by anesthetics, injury, illness, delirium, that man records everything which goes on around him.
He has an analytical mind. We can call this, as well, the conscious mind. The only trouble with calling it the conscious mind, though, is that the conscious mind is the only mind which is ever unconscious. So we had better call it the analytical mind and be a little bit closer to our late Count Korzybski, whose work is used in Dianetics—as whose work isn’t? The analytical mind, then, shuts down and what we call the reactive mind, although we might as well call it the unconscious mind— although again, calling it the unconscious mind is rather bad, since it’s the only mind which is always conscious.
The reactive mind, then, is comparable to that thing which— well, Freud and others were looking into and trying to get past the censor toward. We don’t find any censor there; all we find are these recordings.
Now, once we know of the existence of this mind and know its modus operandi, we can do tricks with the human mind. We can make it run more efficiently, we can enhance and preserve the native personality of the individual and, more importantly, the reactive mind content has a perceptic which the conscious mind, the analytical mind, doesn’t have. And that perceptic is pain. That is the essential difference between these two minds. They are separate minds. They react biochemically independent of each other.
It’s interesting how fast we go in Dianetics and how far these things extend. They do extend very far beyond where we chopped off Dianetics—where I had to cut it off in order to write the book. That book, for instance, is Dianetics as of January 1, 1950, and this is September of 1950. And in these intervening months so many things have been discovered, integrated and so forth, that although all the facts that are represented in that book are quite true and quite applicable, and the therapy works, we have gone way, way, way beyond it. For instance this fact was not known at the time the book was written: that biochemically one mind reacts entirely differently from the other mind. We can affect the analytical mind, in other words, with chemicals, which leave the reactive mind in full power and working order; and we can affect the reactive mind independently of the analytical mind so that it leaves the analytical mind in full power and working order. They’re two different minds. They work on a different bioelectrical-chemical system although they are both performing more or less the same function.
Apparently man as he came up the evolutionary scale once depended exclusively upon this reactive mind. But the more sentient he became and the more rational he became he had to have a mind which would differentiate. The reactive mind does not differentiate. That is an unconscious reaction. And it doesn’t differentiate its actions or thought. It says everything is equal to everything else. It sees no essential difference between the sentence “He rode a horse,” r-o-d-e and “He rowed a horse,” r-o-w-e-d. It sees no difference there. It is perfectly willing to conceive any identity. It’s thought processes can be written with the equation A = A = A = A. And, of course, that’s insanity.
In the same engram we have a skyscraper and an ice-cream cone and it’s nothing to the reactive mind—this moronic survival from somewhere in the deep, dark past—it’s nothing for this mind to say that the skyscraper is the same as the ice-cream cone.
It takes the analytical mind to make these differentiations. Every animal has some tiny, little bit of an analytical mind. Man has a fairly big one. I believe, next below him, the elephant has a fairly large one and then they fall off rather rapidly and become less and less sentient.
Now this analytical mind is in itself a very highly complex organism. It is the most magnificent thing in the world, actually.
If we tried to duplicate the analytical mind by building one out of electronic tubes and wires and dynamos, we would wind up with something which required as much power to run as the city of New York requires to be lighted. If—we’d, of course, have to cool such a machine; it would require as much water to cool it as flows over Niagara Falls. And in addition to that, if it were made—had vacuum tubes in it, a million dollars’ worth of vacuum tubes, each tube would cost one cent apiece. The total time it could run would be about an 18/20th of a second without a breakdown. This just to accomplish what you do every day— think: to pose the problems, to resolve them, to imagine and to solve the various problems related to your own lives and survival. Every day you’re using a machine which, if built by electronics, would be that big and yet your machine is portable.
It so happens—it so happens, then, that we really can’t call this thing a machine at all and it isn’t a machine. It is something so vastly wonderful that when we try to reduce it to machine terms it immediately goes astray.
You know many of my engineering friends are fond of saying, “Ah, yes, but the human mind makes lots of mistakes.” The analytical mind, itself, does not make any mistakes. It gets its solutions on the data it has. Its solutions are no better than its data but it makes a very good job out of that and within that limitation makes no errors. And that’s quite a computing machine. We don’t build any computing machines that good as far as accuracy is concerned. But the reactive mind, unable to think, lying on a substrata of this, can act against the analytical mind like an adding machine would act if you always held down a 5.
Let’s take a computing calculator and you put on the computing calculator 1 times 5. The proper answer is 5. But supposing we had an electronic short in it and it’s—always multiplied the answer by 5. So we’d say 1 times 5 equals 25; 1 times 10 equals 50; 1 times 2 equals 10. That would be if you had a held-down 5.
And, incidentally, don’t think this can’t happen with these electronic computers. Up at Harvard, a friend of mine up there was tremendously intrigued with my first use of this held-down 5 because he had a held-down 5—up at Harvard. And it had taken them about four days to tear this machine to pieces, trying to find out what was wrong with it. It was giving wrong answers. Of course, it was giving answers in terms of high mathematical values; it was doing fantastically complex problems, like the place the moon would be in 1958. And it was doing these problems and it started to give wrong answers suddenly. They couldn’t find out what was wrong with it. They got into it and found out that a small drop of solder had dropped across the leads and 5 was being multiplied into every answer. So he was enormously intrigued by my example. It had happened.
The machine, of course, to all intents and purposes was crazy. It was a psychotic machine because it didn’t give correct answers. The same thing happens in the human mind when the reactive mind is restimulated so that it puts some of its erroneous 5s into the computation. For instance, we’ll take the question of black cats. Somebody’s superstitious, he says black cats are unlucky. He has an engram that says black cats are unlucky. Well, black cats; cats are unlucky; his wife buys a cat-hair coat; he gets allergies. I mean that’s insanity! It has nothing to do with black cats being unlucky, if there is such a thing. And that mind now has the held-down 5 of “black cats are unlucky,” if that’s in the engram.
All right, in such a way the engram bank can move in on this beautiful calculator, the analytical mind, and can thoroughly ruin it as far as its computations are concerned. But the analytical mind is so good that although enormous numbers of people have enormous numbers of engrams, it can still turn out solutions, and this world somehow still goes on. Every once in a while somebody comes up with a beautiful solution: the thing to do about the political and ideological situation of the world, of course, is to wipe out everyone in Russia. I mean that’s a good, sound solution. The—it’s gruesome!
We, for instance, are victimized in this society by many of these engrams. There are certain standard ones that run through the society. People confuse these things with morals. Morals are something else. There is no place in the world where something which is moral here is not immoral there, and there is nothing which is immoral here which is not moral someplace else in the world. But there is a high code of morality possible. Many people try to adhere to this, ethics and morals. They know what’s best. Optimum solution—maximal survival, minimal pain; an optimum solution not just for number one, but for posterity, for the group and for mankind. When we talk about war, we are immediately knocking out the fourth dynamic—mankind. We’re forgetting it.
Now, it should be apparent that the engram—the engram in Thomas Jones down the street who is driving his car—can influence us, because he has—he has an engram that says, “Whenever I get drunk, I can’t see.” That’s an engram. When he was unconscious, sometime or other, somebody around him said that. It doesn’t matter what period of his life it was, somebody said that. He had the liquor in him. Now when he takes some more liquor it restimulates that engram or somebody says one of the words and the next thing you know, he drives down the street, he can’t see, he turns sideways, he goes into your car and there goes the repair bill and maybe hospitalization.
We’re living in a very close-knit society and the aberrations of one affect very strongly the aberrations of the other. In fact, all of society, any one society, can be considered an organism and that organism can be said to have its own engrams. The Republicans say that the Democrats are an engram in the society, and the Democrats say a Republican is. But this is a matter of viewpoint.
Now, that should give you some sort of an example—just a rough, cursory glance at the background of Dianetics.
I should be able to show you now . . . These are very, very nice signs. They were made down in Los Angeles and the first time I saw them was a little while ago, so if I have any trouble explaining these things, blame it on John. All right?
We have here something that every human being has. Sometime or other in his life, he was born. According to our findings—and believe me, I certainly didn’t want this! In researching Dianetics, we have been harnessed with many things, very many incredible things. I thought the first engram, when I first discovered this, would appear in here someplace, maybe at two years of age. And then I found somebody who had a real valid engram at about six months of age. Now, this harassed me. And then I found a fellow, one day, running birth, and I said, “This is incredible! This can’t happen to me. Nobody can do this to me.” I went out and found his mother. I brought his mother in and put the—her delivery of the child on a tape and I had a recording of his birth and the two of them were side by side, word by word, all the way down the line. Word for word, instrument click for instrument click and the story which she had told him about his birth was a complete lie. In other words, he thought that he had been born at home. He was not, he was born in a hospital. Father recalled this immediately it was called to his attention: “Yes, he was born in a hospital.” We had the data, in other words, on this birth. Well, I wasn’t going to buy birth just off of one person. Maybe I was dealing with telepathy or something. So I ran five of them and got comparisons, one to the other, and then I said, “Well, this is very wonderful. Now we can have people who have no aberrations, because everyone has a birth. All we have to do, of course, is just find everyone’s birth and erase birth and then everybody is happy.” And then I started running a fellow one day and he started running something down the track, here, in his mother’s womb, and it started on back earlier and earlier and earlier; and these engrams, by the way, won’t reduce. I was working on a proposition that late engrams are the hardest to reduce and the earlier you find an engram, the easier it is to reduce, until we get down to conception, down here, we find out they erase very easily. And once it’s erased here, then these later engrams start to pick up.
It challenges my imagination as much as it does yours. If it hadn’t been for the work of Hooker and several other biologists and some of those people quoted by Count Korzybski, I would not have been able to credit the sentience of a single cell. Evidently a cell is sentient in some degree; it has some method of recording. Or if we want to become mystical (and I don’t know any reason why we shouldn’t become mystical, all other answers fail) maybe the cell has around it, as somebody in—I think it was Harvard—not too long ago, he was measuring an electrical field at some distance around a cell. I don’t know what he was measuring, but I would say offhand that if he was measuring anything, and if it were there, it must have been the human soul because, good heavens! how in the name of common sense, one of these little cells, microscopic in size, can retain . . .
Well, think of a cat. All cats get born and wash their faces. Now that cell is being asked to keep the pattern of washing faces and growing whiskers and all the rest of it. Now, that’s hard enough. But when we take and add to the cell the burden of carrying forward remembered pain—when a cell is hurt, it records. Evidently, that’s right. Or something around it records. When it is hurt, it records. And then it does something very strange. A cell, when it divides, hands to its progeny all its own personal identity and memory. So that we have cell A dividing and becoming cell A prime. Now, cell A prime knows everything that cell A knew. Now, cell A prime divides and we find out that cell A prime prime—it’s the third generation—it has the personal identity of cell A and cell A prime. It records everything, in other words.
This is fairly easy to prove, fortunately. You can go into a biology laboratory—I don’t even have to quote my work on this; its around too much. You can take cells and you can condition them—that is to say, you can give them engrams—and they will pass along the information.
A biologist I ran into lately was doing a paper which was duplicating my work but he was basing it on some work done in 1925. I didn’t know this work existed when I did this work initially. If I’d just known all these things, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble.
Anyway, here—here, then, in this area evidently come in the first recordings. Challenging to the imagination but here in this area is also a person’s personality, genetically. Here is the cat washing his face. Here is the fact that the son has the blond hair of the father or the grandfather. All these characteristics are carried along and right along with these characteristics come any moment of injury.
So, as these cells come forward, as they grow, keep dividing, fill out more and more and become a whole body, they have as their content everything which they need not only to build but to alert the body in times of danger. They have certain signals. Now, this is all right unless an analytical mind is going to be built there, too. And as soon as the cells started to build an analytical mind, they sort of held back some of the power, so that when this organism started to go into danger, the cells could clip in with pain and force the analytical mind to do something else: to run away, to avoid the pain, to become angry, to attack it, to do something like that.
The cell, in other words, kept the whip hand. And if we are going to go over into any newer, higher form of evolution, it will be with the cell dropping off its command power on the analytical mind. The analytical mind will become more and more in charge of the organism. Actually, in Dianetics, we have the artificial severance, an actual step of evolution.
Now, the person gets, let us say, operated on for tonsillitis. Everyone stands around this young person and says, “Well, there he is unconscious. He can’t hear anything. He can’t see anything. That’s all right, don’t worry,” they say to his mother. “He’s just writhing. They all have convulsions,” something like this, you know. And then they say, “Well now, wake up! Wake up! We’re all through. You’re all through now,” and take him off and somebody feeds him some ice cream. And they say, “Well, you poor boy. You poor boy. Well, that’s all right. Now, you’re going to be okay.” This whole thing is unremembered by the analytical mind but it is very definitely part of the reactive mind.
This should tell you some of the content of an engram. Here’s this tonsillectomy, let’s say. Here’s the analytical mind running along here up in this area, doing fine, and then there’s the pain. First, we get a little unconsciousness, let’s say. Unconsciousness and pain come together at the same time, but in this tonsillectomy we complicate it by adding ether. All right, so we put him out with ether and we already get the unconsciousness. And he sinks down, down, down and unconsciousness fills in. And then somebody starts to cut him up, cut his throat up. And here we start to get pain coming up into this. And we get a full recording of everything, way down, buried underneath unconsciousness, obscured by the pain itself, we get everything that is in this engram.
This is an engram which has to do with a blow. And the child then falls down. A bell rings. Perhaps the child is told that he is very naughty to be running around and falling down. Maybe he’s still unconscious, you see — a little bit unconscious, very groggy, just a little bit of unconsciousness. And the touch of the rug under his hands, the smell of dust, household dust. (I wonder why household dust is so allergic? Children are always falling on the floor.) Here is the temperature recording. Here’s the pain in it—the headache that he got when he hit his head.
That’s all recorded. It’s just like on a tape. It’s like a recording tape that you’d have in any sort of an injury. Any—well, if we could take all these things, like you take a movie, the engram would be about as sentient as a movie itself. In other words, it wouldn’t think, it would just lie there. Then one of these days, a little later—this hidden thing down there below the analytical mind just waits; it’s not active—and one day he falls maybe and hits his head again in the same place and he maybe smells some of the dust. And it didn’t hurt him much this time, but it keyed in the engram. It keyed it in. Now it can wait. It’s alert now.
When the headache starts in, these things are all bad. He is driven away from these things. The cells are trying to tell the organism, in a very insentient way, a very crude, irrational way, the organism is in danger and it should move out.
So, here’s this engram. It can be restimulated by the environment, time after time after time. This mechanism of engram demonstrates— it’s very easy to demonstrate it. It accounts for hives, headaches, common cold. Common cold, by the way, usually comes from birth.
In other words, supposing this contained the words “I can’t think, I’m stupid,” Supposing somebody said that around this unconscious person. Well, when he hits his head a little bit, all of a sudden these words will reactivate as part of the engram and he has running through his head now “I can’t think, I’m stupid,” because it’s now inside him. In other words, there’s an interior world of these things and an exterior world which he confronts, and the analytical mind doesn’t know this was there. The analytical mind wasn’t there to edit this when it went in and file it properly, and so it doesn’t know it’s there. So it sees one thing in the environment and it catches something else back of the environment and that is the way it functions.
The analytical mind sends orders down to the body. Actually along about in here someplace, there is a somatic mind. It records training patterns. And this somatic mind with its training patterns is what you use when you drive the car and are thinking about something else. In other words, that’s a learned training pattern. You’ve learned how to drive the car—that was painful on an analytical level. And you had to do this and that, and so forth, and finally you knew how to do it so well that the analytical mind could just file this thing as a training pattern and it would go in here. Now it’s in the somatic mind and it’ll activate any time the analytical mind says, “Well, let’s go drive,” then the somatic mind will pick it up and do the driving.
Now, the analytical mind can change this. It knows it’s there. It laid it down. It can shift a training pattern with great ease. It can put in a new training pattern. In other words, it’s no trick for a man to learn how to drive a Model T Ford, as we used to do, and then maybe shift over to a gearshift car and then go back and drive the pedal Model T Ford again, one to the other, and then maybe drive one of these old Buicks with a reverse shift. It could do all these things very easily because it could select the training pattern and activate it and then it would run. But that is not what happens with the engrams. These came in when the analytical mind wasn’t there. And if it says, “All cars are driven by pushing pedals,” a person is going to have an awfully hard time learning how to drive. Supposing it just says, “I can’t drive. I just can’t handle a car.” Supposing this person was knocked out in an automobile accident and the cop came up on the scene and he says, “You blunderer.” He’s talking to another driver. “You blunderer. Now, what do you mean, running down an automobile like this, causing all this trouble? You can’t drive. You’ll never learn how to drive.” And here’s this innocent bystander lying there unconscious and this goes into the engram bank and he wakes up and maybe a year or so later, why, he gets a key-in and the next thing we know, he’s having an awfully hard time driving.
You see, the reactive mind is pretty stupid. It didn’t know who the words were addressed to even, and it doesn’t even know where the commands are coming from. Dianetic processing—we can pick those up. But there is how the thing operates.
If he thinks he can drive when the engram bank is saying, “You can’t drive,” he will get a restimulation of the injuries he received in that automobile accident. And maybe it had to do with a crushed hip. And that means that sooner or later he’ll start to pick up arthritis in the hip. The blood flow is cut down in the hip. There’s pain present in that hip. He’s driving and his analytical mind tells him he has to drive and the reactive mind says he can’t drive. And he’s going directly counter to a command in the reactive mind because of the pressure of circumstances. The reactive mind says, “No, you can’t.” And so it puts on a little pain. And he still drives and it puts on some more pain. In other words, it’s trying to throw him away from driving.
The animal, perhaps, operates fairly well this way, but a man doesn’t. The cells built the analytical mind too well. So the engram bank has a large influence upon the body. It—the analytical mind in an optimum state pretty well handles the body, you know. It handles endocrine system and heartbeat— it can be forced to. If you don’t believe this, you can look up some of these Hindu fakirs that so bemused the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins a number of years ago, until the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins found out that they could put a person into a light hypnotic state and do this same thing.
In other words, this engram bank handles—handles the endocrine system, fluid flow and so forth on a bypass circuit and so it can cause psychosomatic illnesses, suspension of flow, overgrowth, undergrowth and the rest of these things that can happen.
It’s an odd thing how stupid this mind is. A recent case—a fellow had—he had a very bad pair of legs. The circulation was very bad in his legs, and so forth, and his mother continually said, “I can’t stand it.” Of course, Mother meant that she was unable to bear it. But it said, “I can’t stand it,” and you stand on your legs, don’t you? So, therefore the engram bank shut down circulation in the legs. These things picked up—and the proof of this pudding, of course, is in the processing—you pick up one of these things and the fellow can stand it.
The proof here is the proof of doing something to a person and finding out what your results are. This isn’t postulated philosophy. This is as thoroughly testable as whether or not this is wood.
This life regulator function here is what I’ve been talking about. This life regulator function handles the endocrine system, handles it—handles heartbeat, respiration, and so forth. It’s acting there in conjunction with the somatic mind. This engram bank can really influence this thing and cause disruption of optimum function in this body. These points are quite demonstrable.
The whole point in this system here is that the more engrams a person gets, the less able he is to combat life and survive. In—we go out here, we try to get a job, we work. There are certain things like concrete, the weight of concrete, that make it hard to perform the job if one is in the business of pushing around concrete. Concrete, to that effect, is sort of a suppressor. And then there’s the irascible temper of the boss. That’s a sort of a suppressor to one’s doing one’s job. There’s the hot day and other things. They make it difficult to do a job. That would be your suppressor functions.
The engram bank lets these suppressor functions get inside. So the engrams are acting as suppressors to the survival of the individual. The thrust of the individual is up. Here would be death. Here would be infinite survival. Here’s death, on up the line here, until we reach what should be normal, which would be in the tone 3 band or right around here. This would be anger, savage anger and rage and so forth. And down here would be apathy; the person is apathetic. And down here we have the catatonic schiz, amongst other things, complete apathy. And here we have death.
Here also we have the possum, the opossum, who has turned this one into a survival mechanism. It merely says, “I’m dead. Go away.” So these things have rational uses too. But sanity and so on persists in this band and above this band and, when suppressed below those bands by engrams, the person is, on a Tone Scale, insane.
This is, of course, time plotted against the tone band. A person, of course, has a very high tone when he’s young, usually—normal course of affairs. And then he goes along into his teens and maybe his tone is still pretty high. And then maybe he gets married and . . .
The reason why marriage, by the way, is so bad, is nearly everybody has an engram, a lot of engrams, about being married. You know, Papa and Mama, they talked about being married, and so forth, and if they have had a lot of trouble with their marriage you can be absolutely sure that in the earliest part of this bank you’re liable to find engrams about marriage being so horrible. So the poor fellow goes along completely unsuspecting throughout his teens. He meets this girl who is absolutely gorgeous, his life is going to be a beautiful dream and then he gets married. There’s nothing wrong with this girl. There’s nothing wrong with being married. But there is an enormous amount wrong with having an engram which says, “I hate marriage.” All of a sudden this thing clicks in and after that he can think about nothing but the divorce court.
Just before I leave this, the time track here is a continuing moments of now. For instance, when you came in here, we were on one level of now and now we’re on another level of now. Consecutive moments of now. That’s the time track coming forward. That’s all it is, actually, except if we were to put a magnifying glass on it, so to speak, we would find out that what we know of now are the perceptics. We know about now in terms of seeing it, feeling it, hearing it and so on, in other words, our sense messages. Now is communicated to us and we are communicating to now via certain channels—hearing, seeing and so forth. So the time track is actually a bundle of perceptics. And here it is, from the beginning to the end are these perceptics.
People, by the way, get some of these things shut off by engram commands, so they don’t have sonic recall and so forth. They are sort of put out of phase, so that he might be able to see something but he wouldn’t be able to hear it as he goes back down the track. Sometimes there’s such utter occlusion that the person doesn’t even know where he was day before yesterday. You find such people in the insane asylum.
I hope I have given you some sort of an idea of what Dianetics is. I know, probably, the bulk of the people here have read the book. I wanted to go over it again. There are a couple of little things I brought up tonight, such as this bundle of perceptics, which don’t happen to be in the book.
Thank you.