Questions and Answers (501130)
Date: 30 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
First question here is: “Is an ally computation or sympathy computation absolutely necessary to produce a psychosomatic illness?” No. The preponderance of psychosomatic illnesses, however, do seem to fall in that category. The reason why a psychosomatic illness requires considerable time to reduce in processing sometimes, however, is because a sympathy computation is quite usually the last thing to come up in a case and be eradicated. As a consequence, we have a situation there where the real cause of the psychosomatic illness lies in an engram which will only be picked up at a hundred or two hundred hours of processing. However, by use of Straightwire and the techniques which I’ve been giving you, you can expect about 20 percent of the psychosomatic illnesses which you address to disappear. This is quite incidental, the fact that these things disappear.
They are called psychosomatic illnesses. Well now, I don’t know anything about a psychosomatic illness to tell you the honest to goodness truth. I’ve read in some medical texts that there are such things as psychosomatic illnesses and that’s as far as I know.
I do know, however, that there is such a thing as a chronic somatic, which is caused by thought taking over some of the function of a human being. Has nothing to do with an illness, it’s just a chronic somatic. Somebody gets stuck. If it’s very bad, he’s stuck someplace on the track with a number of attention units and it’s very, very bad. That thing has a holder, a call-back, a denyer and a grouper in it, all of which have been activated. That’s a very serious chronic somatic. But it is just the somatic of some old injury. I don’t know anything about psychosomatic illnesses.
People say that they compose 70 percent of men’s ills and so forth. Well, I wouldn’t know anything about men’s ills. You see, in Dianetics we treat exclusively the field of thought and this has never been investigated before and we’re on a completely new field and we wouldn’t think of encroaching upon medicine. Psychosomatic . . . (laughter) So, you see, that’s very simple. All right? I hope that answers the question. “What is the Tone Scale for affinity?” Will be published. There is this handout which is being made up and that chart. will be available.
This is more or less a group question: “Is it detrimental to a case to push an engram into recession when it will not deintensify, or merely useless? Is this practice ever desirable?” A recession, of course, is that state an engram is in when one has not reached the basic on its chain. And by going over an engram twenty, thirty, forty times, trying to just wear it out, somatics still stay there, content still stays there: that’s a recession. Doing this is very foolish and hitting that engram and doing this sort of thing with it is not particularly superdetrimental, you might say, to push an engram into recession, but an auditor who would stop right there after pushing an engram into recession had better go see Gene Benton. Because the basic on the chain is what you want, and that is what you are trying to reach. And if that engram is that accessible so that you can run it at all, you can certainly run the basic on its chain. There’s no excuse for doing it, but it’s an interesting thing. There’s lots of data about this sort of thing that hasn’t even been put out. It’s data found out two, three, four years ago.
It’s interesting that if you run an engram into recession and then you wait for about three days, it’ll come back up again into intensity. You can run it into recession again at that time and then you can bring the engram to present time and you can run it out. And then you wait about three days and then you run it out again in present time. It won’t give you any trouble anymore — think you might find that interesting, but don’t use it. That’s not part of standard technique. There’s no sense in it, but it’s just a comment on the behavior of these things and it’s an endless procedure, actually, because it takes thirty, forty, fifty recountings to knock one of these things into a recession. And then it just finally sort of gives up and disappears and comes back in about three days.
Some of the people who make comments about engrams that suddenly reappear after they’ve been erased and so forth just don’t know when a person’s out of valence or they don’t know what a recession looks like. It’s very easy to tell these. “In contacting and trying to break locks and controls using the method of ‘seesaw on the arc,’2 is one apt to stir up a lot of rather unrelated but restimulative material?” You don’t stir up material with Straightwire. That is the beauty and safety of Straightwire. You do not restimulate a case by using Straightwire.
Everything which a person remembers is definitely deintensified just by the act of remembering. Now, it’s an interesting thing that—by the way, preclears, when they are run a great deal without any Straight wire and without running any pleasure moments in them, pick up the habit of returning instead of remembering. Now, the difference between returning and remembering is sending back, let us say, 50 percent of the available attention units of “I” down the track—that’s returning. But remembering is only sending two of them. So the preclear who is worked a very great deal will get into the habit of sending fifty just to remember what he had for breakfast.
The mind most efficiently operates and most swiftly operates, not by returning, but by remembering. The reason one returns is to make it possible to remember. So therefore, you use Straightwire after every session. And you run a pleasure moment and then use Straightwire after every session to help him stabilize in present time and also to return to him the habit of remembering, rather than returning—an educational pattern, I should say, rather than a habit. So using straight memory is all right, but make sure that you’re using straight memory. Some of the people that you will run into will do this trick. They have been worked quite a bit, let us say, and their file clerk has been worked quite a bit. So instead of remembering the actual incident, they’ll use their file clerk. That’s right, they’ll get their file clerk to hand them the data as a flash reply. Well, that’s an interesting thing for them to do because that is not the standard circuit on which memory comes in and, for instance, you’ll notice this: “Have you run off any engrams about your father leaving your mother?” and he’ll say, “Yes.” He got that yes as a flash reply. He isn’t thinking about it. Now, what you want him to do is remember whether or not he has. And you check people to make sure they’re not using the file clerk on a flash reply basis. This file clerk proposition is an interesting mechanism; it’s very useful in processing and is part of the system of remembering, but is not the standard system of remembering.
The other thing is that he is liable to go back down the track and look. Now, you’ll find people, particularly people who have heavy control circuitry, will go back down the time track and look at something to tell you rather than remember it. Of course, if they are doing this—that’s very obvious when they start doing this, by the way. They kind of look blank and they shut their eyes and so on. They go back down the track. They’re not remembering. So Straightwire requires remembering; and if the person remembers, anything he remembers will not be restimulative. The act of bringing it into view, bringing light on it, puts it back on the time track and restores attention units to “I” and it is not a restimulative process.
You can make a person remember everything. The person who wrote this, by the way, should be processed by his auditor into the early period of his childhood to find out where Mama was afraid of remembering things because they were just too horrible, “One shouldn’t remember these things; they should be put out of the mind,” and so on, I don’t even know who wrote that.
It says, “Can any amount of processing be given safely to a woman during the later months of pregnancy? If so, what is the effect on the child?” This question comes up continually. It is a thing which the auditor must judge, I’m not talking about later months now, but the whole process of processing a pregnant woman—if the mother is so furiously morning sick or so thoroughly aberrated on the second dynamic, or if that child is in considerable danger as a result thereof, mother’s miserable, if birth is going to be really too terrible to bear and all that sort of thing, yes, it’s better to process a pregnant woman who is in that state of affairs. But if Mama can possibly starve through one way or the other, this pregnancy and so on, educated into what it takes in the field of Preventive Dianetics, cheered up with some Straightwire used on her (hardly any more than that), brought through to the end, the processing should be done afterwards. It is easier on the child, A grief discharge or a terror discharge or an apathy discharge will transplant, not through the umbilical cord; it transplants just directly on the basis of convulsions and tightening of the abdominal muscles, tears, the words used and so forth. Keep processing out of this reactive bank of unborn children because it’s going to be very hard on a future generation of auditors. “Let’s run over this engram. Go over it again.” So the fellow says, “Go over it again.” “Let’s go earlier now,” the second that’s triggered, so that he will actually auto-audit himself—his engrams will start auditing him. Auditing circuits have been set up in him.
Now, it’ll be necessary for the auditor, at that time, to use entirely different terminology. In fifteen or twenty years you can expect Dianetic terminology to be entirely different than it is now. It will have to be.
There are some other systems of how you can describe time tracks and so forth, by the way. Rather than “going back to” and so forth; you can consider them as concentric circles, so forth. In other words, we can get around this dodge. But the point is, keep these engrams out of a child’s bank because they’ll transplant. Use your own judgment on it, in other words. Is the child more in danger from processing or more in danger from Mama?
Just gave you some pointers on Child Dianetics. “Assuming the preclear has sufficient ‘I’ in present, may he enter occluded areas in late life without the aid of an auditor? What are the elements for and against this procedure?” There is a statement which can be made, a statement which can be made mildly and so forth: anybody who audits himself is so heavily control-circuited that he isn’t auditing himself and the first sign that an auditor looks for, actually, in his inventory—”Does this person audit himself any?” It means heavy control circuitry.
One never, under any circumstances, permits his preclear to go in for self-auditing by sending himself down the track and trying to run out his own engrams. Any time he finds his preclear doing this, he should take every possible measure to make him cease and desist. There isn’t sufficient “I,” ever, in order to run out an engram by oneself, because the attention units get into the engram, they all of a sudden get fuddled up and the person wanders off to another engram. There’s a blank-out because that area of the engram is a blank-out area. It means analytical attenuation. When “I” gets down into the area, the analytical mind experiences analytical attenuation, boom! It shuts off, the attention units—some of them are captured, the engram’s restimulated and he goes and wanders off and he gets into another engram and there’s no auditor there to send him through these things. And he’ll never reduce one; he’ll only restimulate them.
There is a method of self-auditing. This method of self-auditing is very easily explained when I tell you that there is such a thing as self-straightwiring. And a person can be taught rather easily how to straightwire himself. And the way he does this is to refrain completely from the use of repeater technique on himself.
It’s a gruesome thing to watch one of these people who uses repeater technique on himself He all of a sudden has a headache and he says to himself, “You know, I think that’s probably from an engram where I have a headache. Yes sir, I bet that’s the phrase, ‘I have a headache, I have a headache, I have a headache, I have a headache, I have a headache, I have a headache, I have a headache, I have a headache . . .’ (sigh) I wonder what I was running. Must have been something . . . boy, I sure don’t feel good, I have a stomachache, I wonder if that’s the phrase, ‘I have a stomachache, I have a stomachache, I have a stomachache, I have a stomachache, I have a stomachache,’ Oh, my head! Oh, my leg! Well, it couldn’t have been those. It must be ‘I am sick, I’m so sick,’ Yeah, all right, I’m so sick, I’m so sick, I’m . . . ”’ (laughs) So he puts himself in the hospital and sends for an auditor. Because, you see, right next to “I have a headache” you may have the phrase “Well, hold still dear and I will stroke it away if I possibly can,” Holder, bouncer. “I won’t leave you,” Or no, Mama says, “Come back to me, dear— you . . .” Well, the fellow says, “I’ll be right back, I won’t leave you,” Call-back, holder. Only he’s not getting any of these phrases. He’s just getting this one comment. And the whole engram—the scanner, you see, just travels ahead of the contact that one makes with the engram, scanner goes ahead on the thing and restimulates all the way up the line. But supposing this horrible thing happens. Supposing that happened and Mama said—when he was running the “I’m so sick” engram, right next to the “I’m so sick” was “Everything happens at once and everything happens to me.” (ascending whistle) Time track comes right into a bundle, boom! And then the auditor goes into the case and has to sort out a case which is all bunched up and he has to get flash replies and so forth, if he can get them, if control circuits haven’t been activated. But there are very heavy circuits on this case because this case wouldn’t do this unless he had. And he somehow or other manages to untangle all this and he gets out of the case the groupers, and able to run off earlier engrams off the chain, and sometimes an auditor (and this is for your information, strictly) will get a person who will do this and it is just a race between the auditor and the preclear. The auditor has to clean up as many things as the preclear has restimulated and, in addition to that, has to pick up enough control circuitry so the preclear will stop doing this. And it’s a rough one sometimes.
You don’t put a person like this, by the way, on freewheeling. As a matter of fact, you shouldn’t put anybody on freewheeling and then ask them for answers. If you put somebody on freewheeling, put them on freewheeling and then leave them alone. And if the fellow gets stuck and the freewheeling stops, so he got stuck. When you audit him, just use Standard Procedure, Stop the freewheeling by bringing him up to present time and then start Standard Procedure on him again.
This problem is an interesting one, but you can tell anybody who is doing this how to do it. He wants to make himself better and so forth; you teach him how to straightwire himself. Make him remember things about himself, give him the sorts of things to remember, teach him about the triangle, set him up with a graph—as a matter of fact, you can—and make him remember specific things, I’ve sent people off to straightwire themselves who were heavy control-circuitry cases and—I made a little experiment when I was back East—and they work it out.
Now it says, “Please clarify the distinction between recession and reduction.” That is done ably in the book. May I avoid the questions which are answered in the book, I’ve just given you a moment ago the definition of recession, A reduction is something off of which, on a few recountings, the somatics disappear and they go away, the word content is left. That is a reduction. “Can you get a satisfactory reduction of a prenatal engram circuitry case if the person doesn’t get somatics?” Well, you can try to take some tension off one of these things if it’s low enough in the basic area, A person doesn’t have somatics, there’s a pain shut-off, or the person is out of valence, or mechanically the whole case is so supercharged that the person can’t get next to the engram. Those are the three ways that somatics are shut off. They’re shut off by a feeling shut-off, and they are shut off by a person being out of valence, and they are shut off by the case being so heavily charged—you know, secondary engrams, locks and so forth; this sort of thing’s happening. If a case is that heavily charged and so forth, you’d be using Straightwire on it anyhow or running off grief. You wouldn’t be in the prenatal area. Okay? “Please discuss how to attack a chronic psychosomatic.” Let me give you a warning, I tell you, I don’t know what these psychosomatics are, I know about chronic somatics, I want to give you a little warning about this: never under any circumstances go into a case to reach a chronic aberration or a chronic somatic. Always work the case as though you were carrying it on through along the line. I give you this warning. Maybe after a tremendous amount of experience you could go into a case and potshoot it. You could actually knock out of the case its heart trouble or something like that, but it’s not a safe or easy thing to do. It isn’t something which I would do. I’d just start following the case.
If this case has a chronic somatic, you can be absolutely certain that the file clerk will give it to you the earliest moment he can. The easiest way to look at it is, you just work with the file clerk and follow Standard Procedure. Don’t go after these specific aberrations. This fellow thinks he’s a goat; don’t go after the engram which makes him think he’s a goat. Go off, get enough charge off the case and get him to the basic area and erase engrams. It’s an interesting thing that as you start straightwiring a case, chronic somatics very often will fold up, and after you’ve run a few secondary engrams on the case and so forth enough tension will come off the case so these chronic somatics will deintensify themselves even though you didn’t touch the engram in which they occurred.
This, by the way, often produces the strange phenomena of a person who has recovered suddenly. You have touched no engram that would explain this sudden recovery, you have not even touched the somatic that would explain it, and all of a sudden the person recovers and just feels fine and six weeks later has a slight reexperience of the illness. You can count on any very severe, chronic somatic to restimulate from time to time on a case in lighter and lighter and lighter fashion until you get the actual chain of engrams that it’s locked up in. Most chronic somatics are caused by a whole chain, not just one. So that should give you the idea that you should not go after specific engrams or aberrations in a case, as a matter of precaution and acts, incidentally, as a matter of efficiency.
Yes?
Male voice: One little point there of an assist on something . . . [gap] That is in First Aid Dianetics: on assists. It’s an interesting thing that the last engram hasn’t had a chance to gather any locks and is normally lying there for anything the auditor wants to do to it and it can be run out, usually, without touching anything earlier in the bank. That is a happy and fortuitous fact and it requires, all of this requires a lot of laboratory work, you might say. We’re going to set one up in an emergency hospital, post an auditor—and we’ve got one back East that was all primed up to do this; I don’t know whether he started on the project yet or not—in an emergency hospital receiving room and catch them as they come in and knock out those chronic somatics and compare the ratio of recovery, the periods of recovery to any other period in the past for the same period of time, just to get how swiftly this could be done. You can usually reach the last one.
An interesting thing occurred back in Elizabeth a short time ago. A child was hit by a bumper, was still unconscious; didn’t know Dianetics, this child didn’t. But an auditor hit him; the auditor got out of the car—the child had hit his head on the bumper, was unconscious— auditor got out of the car, picked the child up, put him in the car, said, “The somatic strip will go back to the beginning of this incident”—child was still unconscious—“and will continue on through to the end of the incident.” Waited for a moment, said, “The somatic strip will go back to the beginning of the incident and go on through to the end of it. Somatic strip will now go to the point where the head was hit by the bumper, will continue on through to present time.” All of a sudden the child became conscious, woke up.
Now, that is not remarkable because this child could be expected to wake up in a very short time. And the auditor continued with this and ran the child through with the content, but the somatic was already very definitely deintensified. And he ran it out so the child did not have a headache after it. The child was perfectly fine, comfortable and so on.
There’s an interesting fact. Now, that is an isolated datum. I give it to you as a little experiment which was performed by one auditor on one case. There’s a lot of data waiting to be found out in the field of First Aid Dianetics.
Now, next one here, “When a preclear is close to the bottom of the dwindling spiral of accessibility, how can one prevent . . . [gap] . . . locks from his environment for every one lock the auditor blows?” Well, an auditor that couldn’t blow more than one lock per session ought to have his head examined. Generally run on the ratio, if you’re going on the affinity-communication-reality business and he’s being worked fairly well by an auditor, you should be blowing out twenty, thirty, forty locks on a session. “What is the value, in attention units gained, of yawns or boil-off alone, when the engram itself is not yet accessible for reduction?” That would be a very interesting question all by itself. The value—you can’t assign a monetary value, but believe me, the boil-off and material of that character is the thing which is suppressing the analyzer. There is the unconsciousness, and getting the unconsciousness off the case always returns attention units. But it’s an interesting thing, the condition which is put here—“the engram itself is not yet accessible for reduction.” Believe me, if you get a lot of boil-off on a case, there’s engrams underneath that boil-off. They can be contacted.
So, “Can key-ins occur before birth?” I have never been able to audit a fetus yet. Actually, I couldn’t answer that question with any honesty—give you a lot of theory, but you make that up yourself. “In yesterday’s lecture, you said not to concentrate on one subject too long Is this not apt to restimulate many . . . [gap] Female voice: Meaning Straightwire.
Well, this is very interesting. Yes, I recognize this is Straightwire. I’ve just answered this question a moment ago. You don’t restimulate people by using Straightwire. If a person restimulates when you’re trying to straightwire him, that person is going back down the track. He’s moving into engrams. And he is moving on the track, he’s not being straightwired. And you cure this by keeping him up in present time and having him remember. “After key phrases are found as to control, breaks and so forth, in which way are these phrases used to the best advantage?” There’s a trick by which you run the dramatization. You’ve found the phrase; in other words, you’ve found the dramatization by straight memory: Mama using a control circuit or something of the sort—go back to the time in reverie and run . . . [gap] . . . whole thing and run it a couple, three times in order to get it in full view and then tell your preclear to go—just tell him sharply to go to the earliest time this occurs on the case, or the earliest engram in which this appears. And quite often he’ll skip on down the track.
Of course, remember that when you’re running a control circuit, when you suddenly hit a control circuit . . . [gap] . . .in a case, the auditor has the preclear sort of go out from his own control. By restimulating a control circuit, the preclear’s control circuit takes over and more or less away from the auditor. And also the file clerk shuts off and all sorts of interesting things happen. So the thing for the auditor to do is to be very persuasive through these control circuits. You’ve got to be very insistent to get the things because the preclear will dream up all sorts of reasons why not.
Why, you tell him then to go to the earliest time this occurs in the bank, engram in which that occurs, take the engram, run it, ascertain if there are any earlier ones, run those and get on down to the bottom of the chain on this circuit, in other words, and run out the full engram at the bottom of the chain. That is the way that is done. . “If a grief charge is continued in a day or two, will it be lost?” If you get the preclear into a grief charge you ought to be shot if you don’t run it all out. If you get a terror charge run it out. It would be very difficult to get him in it again. It is very hard on the preclear to bring him up to present time. The great crimes in processing are invalidating data and failing to run every engram presented. This includes secondary engrams. “Is it absolutely necessary for a grief engram to rest on a physical pain engram?” It happens to do so. There is an area of turbulence between thought and matter. That area of turbulence has to be addressed again by thought before it means anything. The secondary engram takes place only when the analytical mind is influenced by this turmoil and turbulence. A person goes all through the Tone Scale, reacts, and recovers. If a persons own child dies, even a Clear would feel grief, but it wouldn’t fix him up so he would have a bum leg for the rest of his life. “When should we run late-life accidents, or late-life physical pain engrams?” Avoid them like the plague unless the file clerk hands one up. If file clerk hands one up, the person is stuck in it. Run it and reduce it. If it doesn’t reduce go to the basic on its chain.