Spectrums of Logic and Emotion (501121)
Date: 21 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
. . . very, very important in processing—is so important that if you could take off of a case the painful emotion, all of the painful emotion—just that—you would have a Release. Now, that’s important. Of course, on a practical line, it is very hard to pick up all the emotion without picking up physical pain engrams as well. It so happens that every painful emotion engram sits on a physical pain engram. But nevertheless, if you could take all this emotion off the case, you would have a Release. Very few people in processing are sufficiently aware of the great importance of emotion.
Now, as I said, we have these various factors and they were not coordinated until we got the triangle—affinity, communication and reality. And at this time we were able to coordinate the problem, the various factors, and get some solutions.
The front part of the book has in it a Tone Scale. That is a two-dimensional Tone Scale, if you will notice. There’s a change on this because that Tone Scale is actually three-dimensional, not two. It is actually a stack of triangles. Beginning with the base triangle, [drawing on blackboard] here we have the first line, you know, and your second line.
This is one, two, three, four—going up on a sort of a geometric progression. And here was zero—death—and infinite survival. You know that diagram in the book. Now, that’s the two-dimensional scale and by making this into a three-dimensional scale, it suddenly becomes much more useful to us—great deal more useful.
So, we have a problem here of triangles. Now, that’s a triangle lying down flat there and here we have another triangle and another triangle. Back here we have affinity and affinity and affinity and affinity. Here we have reality, reality, reality, reality, reality. Over here we have communication, communication, communication, communication, communication. There is the stack of triangles.
Now, by examining this closely, we can begin to understand a little bit more about emotion, and I will show you about that in a moment. This Tone Scale was one figure we had lying around. Now that became developed by making it into a stack of triangles.
Now, the next figure we had was a figure which was the most prominent part of a subject known as Dianometry—the measurement of thought. How do people think? What is logic? And in order to understand this one, I’ll have to tell you a little bit about the history of logic.
Once upon a time, man functioned on one-valued logic. You can see immediately that one-valued logic would be highly reactive. Be cause and effect, that’s all. But cause and effect was not determined by man to be within man. Cause and effect were exterior to him, as far as he could tell. This was one-valued logic. Sum it up to the will of God, Anything happened—that was God’s fault. That’s some savage in the jungle and so forth—he gets his feet wet, that’s God’s fault. And if he eats and dines too well upon slightly decomposed whale and gets a stomachache, that stomachache’s God’s fault. That’s one-valued logic. This is a fundamental in reactive thought. So, we had one-valued logic.
Now, a fellow by the name of Aristotle came along and codified logic. And he said in effect, “Man has a right to think.” That was a very great advance. He said, “Man has a right of decision,” Of course, men had realized this long before Aristotle, but he said so—and he gave us two-valued logic. Now, there’s no reason to look down our noses at Aristotle, because he made a considerable contribution to the field of logic. So here was two-valued logic: right and wrong. In other words, an absolute scale. There was no in-between about this. The thing was absolutely right or it’s absolutely wrong. We go on the system for a little while and we find out that this fits in with law and religious connotations and so forth very closely. That is to say that an action is either good or bad.
Now, in a practical world you really can’t deal very well with two-valued logic. And yet you will find today, I think, as you look around, that most of the peoples—particularly the illiterate peoples of the world—have advanced in the culture up to two-valued logic.
Right and wrong, God and the Devil—it’s either constructive or it’s destructive. A girl kisses a boy—is that right or wrong? Now, you would say, “Well, it depends.” No. Wrong! See? And you would say, UA girl gets married and has children,” you would say, “Well, I—ha, I don’t know. Some of these things don’t work out too well, but . . .” Uh-uh. Not in two-valued logic: That’s right! You see? Now we have just these two values at work.
Well, the engineer in recent years found himself unable to work with Aristotelian logic, and as a consequence he changed it around—a little more workable. In the first place he had staring him in the face a mathematics—Boolean algebra. Boolean algebra figures out all answers—as a matter of fact, you can evolve all mathematics just in terms of yes and no. Yes—“Is yes greater than no? No greater than yes?” And the brain, by the way, particularly by engineers who are accustomed to working on switchboards, is supposed to work wholly on this basis of the yes is greater than the no. In other words, it’s hotter than it’s colder. It’s redder than it’s blue, you know. Yes, no, yes, no.
Except the engineer, in actual practice, doesn’t use that. He uses three-valued logic. See, we’re coming up where we’re getting more values in logic. That’s in direct ratio to the advance of the culture. So the engineer says, “Right, wrong and maybe.” That middle one is maybe. He’d gotten up to the point where he felt that you didn’t have as many absolute values in the world. This car could be a good car, it could be a bad car or maybe it wasn’t a good car and maybe it wasn’t a bad car. Media-media. Maybes. As a matter of fact, it’s very hard to think without using a maybe occasionally.
Well, this evolved along to this point and we find out—the second we really begin to regard the human mind we find out that it’s absolutely necessary for us to regard logic in infinity values. We just take a jump from three-valued logic into an infinity of values. And actually we come upon, then, a highly workable system of logic.
Here is a series of lines, [drawing on blackboard] Combined Spectra of Logic and of Survival Indecision Over here, a series of lines. Here’s about zero. And these lines just go on and on in that direction, they go on and on in this direction.
What we’re dealing with here is a spectrum, you might say, a graduated scale. There are lots of these graduated scales in Dianetics. It’s one of the basic principles of thought that we use, is that there is no such thing as a completely sharp value. There is a graduated scale. Here for instance is a more or less graduated scale, as I will show you in a moment, you see?
All right. Here’s this graduated scale, and over here is right. That has infinity value and that is survive! Right. If anybody got all the way over on anything and got completely, absolutely, infinity right, he of course would live forever and so would the universe and so would the whole universe of thought and everything else. That gives you an idea of the incredibleness of being completely and absolutely right, without a single wrong factor anywhere in the book. An infinity value of right would be immortality, if a man was just right on one solution. You’ll see this better in a moment.
Here, all the way over this way, is “wrong.” Now, this scale goes out more or less to infinity in this direction. Actually you can argue about the infinity over on this side because you can say, “How wrong can you get?” Well, how wrong can a person get?
Female voice: Dead.
Dead. That’s right. That’s how wrong he can get. That’s on anything.
All right. So, here we have “succumb.” In other words, this arrow goes that way; this arrow goes this way. So that from zero on this ladder of lines to the right, we get a tendency toward immortality—a tendency toward survival. And we go left on this infinity of lines over here, and we reach being wrong.
Now, the reason there is an infinity on the wrong side has to do with the whole universe of big theta and the universe of little theta. A man isn’t terribly wrong, as far as the universe is concerned, when he’s dead. He’s awfully wrong where he himself is concerned, and where his own race is concerned, his own group, his own family. Yes, he’s wrong in all those things. He’s even wrong where mankind is concerned. But of course, he is also partly composed of MEST. And if he was completely and utterly dead, this MEST would be dead, too. And if the MEST ever got down to a point where it would be dead, you see, you would’ve imposed a stop there because if MEST died out like that, that would be the universe stopping. That would be the end of the universe.
I mean, if one man was completely dead . . . You know, after a person is dead—a person dies by degrees, by the way. First he dies as far as little theta is concerned, major, and then he comes in little by little. Cellular death sets in—and the last living thing in him probably are his fingernails. And finally they die; you can say the person is all the way dead. This takes, by the way, about a year and a half normally. I don’t know whether you were aware of that fact or not. But it gives you some sort of an idea of where this zero is located over here. It’s not quite where you thought it was. And as those cells, composed of energy—so the energy, if it died off, why, boom! There’d go the universe.
All right. Now, all I’m trying to tell you—I’m, as a matter of fact, salting this down with a few little philosophic imponderables. But this equation is very valid. We have here a thing which will graph logic and shows, more or less, how the mind operates.
You could call this the central board of the mind; the central board. This would be fed literally by thousands of such evaluators. This is the computer, in other words, by which all the data of the problem is summed up.
Did you ever see a Chinese abacus? They knock the little wooden pellets around on this board, and you watch one of these Chinese and you say, “Well now, what are you doing? Why—you’re adding up there . . .”By the way, this is not a child’s toy. You will see these things in Chinese banks and so on, and mathematicians building ships and figuring out all sorts of things. And they’ll pick up an abacus and they’ll start knocking the wooden pellets around on the thing and they will say, “Well, the square footage that so-and-so . . .” And you look on this thing and they say, “The square footage is 928 on this.” And you look at it, and there isn’t anything on there that’s 9 or 28 or anything else. It’s a wonderful thing. They give it to children to play with in this country. But what it is, is something to keep tally on the brain. The mind does the computation and all the Chinese does is use this thing to keep tally on what he’s thought of before. In other words, he is using the human mind as a servo mechanism in his mathematics—a servomechanism.
The mathematician, you know, he tries desperately to tell you that the “mathematics is pure.” That is, some mathematicians. As a matter of fact, to this day and age, they’ve been beaten so on this, very few of them say this anymore. “Mathematics is absolutely pure. It existed before man got here, it will exist while he is here and it will exist long after he has departed. It is a pure science.” Well, it’s an interesting point. It doesn’t happen to be provable. We have this fact. We know this, as far as we are concerned, that mathematics do exist and they can be used. And when we try to put a mathematical formula down on a piece of paper—it’s actually the hope of some mathematicians that piece of paper will stand all by itself.
Well, that’s fine, you could put this thing in the middle of an Egyptian tomb. And sure enough, there’d be mathematics in that Egyptian tomb. It wouldn’t be any good to anybody till a human mind addressed it.
We cannot escape the fact that the human mind is a servomechanism in all mathematics. We can’t divorce any of man’s activities from his mind. And he has this sort of an arrangement there, and when he examines any problem, this central board you might say, of the mind—somewhat on the order of an abacus—will go into work. It goes to work and it keeps tally, and this is the way he makes a decision.
One could say that he feels perfectly null about things, his mind is sitting about zero (the mind never does, it always picks up from where the last problem left off) and he isn’t quite sure what he’s going to do. In other words, he’s sitting there about zero and suddenly he decides that he is going to eat dinner. Well, that’s fine. “Eat dinner.” That’s something to do, it’s a decision. So he moves over here. The value of just eating dinner on time, let us say, is two lines. So this little arrow will start to work and you move over to two lines right, about eating dinner. But he thinks about it for a moment and he’s not hungry. He doesn’t want to eat now. This will pull him right straight back to zero again. Should he eat dinner? Shouldn’t he eat dinner? Indecision.
Now, the next thing that he thinks of, perhaps, is the fact that he wants to go to a show at seven o’clock and it’s now six. So if he wants to eat dinner before he goes to the show, why, he’d better eat dinner. So that moves out there to two values right again. And then all of a sudden he thinks about this place that serves this beautiful duck— gorgeous duck. And he thinks to himself, “Gosh, that duck. The last time I ate that duck, oh boy!” That’s some more values over here. So that’s a few more values right. Then he reaches into his pocket and he finds out he’s only got fifty cents. So to eat duck and so forth is pretty wrong, and to eat duck that way, and he comes back toward an irresolution again. Probably he comes back about this far. Where is he going to eat? And he can go on this way. In other words, is it right? Wrong? Well, that’s one of these little indecisive, undramatic problems that a man solves all the time, and he just solves it by these lines.
All right. So, let’s take two people who have had a quarrel, a lovers’ quarrel, and the man thinks he ought to call the girl and apologize. Well, he hasn’t made any big decision about the thing, till he starts thinking about it. And he says, “I think I’ll call up and apologize. After all, I love her dearly and that’s what I’m going to do, because apologizing, everything will come out fine.” And this action is one, two, three, four, five, six—six values right. Eventually he would solve the thing. But then he thinks, “But she told me I was a cad!” And that really, really affects him and he thinks about it for a moment. “A cad, yes, she said that.” So that’s eight values wrong to call her up. This is the problem that’s being solved, “Shall I call my girl?” So that’s eight values wrong, so one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. You’ll notice, we count back from the last arrow. And then he thinks, “But you know, Oscar is liable to call her up and she’s liable to start going out with him, and I couldn’t bear that. I think I will call her up.” This thought of Oscar, that’s pretty bad. That makes it immediately ten values right to call her up. So—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Well, he’s getting up there to a point where he is going to call. As a matter of fact he would call at this moment and make a decision and he does call and make the decision but he finds out that her phone is busy. So he doesn’t call her, you see? So he immediately says, “It’s that Oscar. It’s that Oscar.” Now he gets a little bit more upset about it and here we’ve got some more values right. And this means, by God, he’s going to call her or else. As far as he’s concerned the right solution is to call. There is the way it works.
Now he calls her and he finds out that she’s already made a date with Oscar, that she is off with him for life, and that she was just sitting there at the phone waiting for him to call, just so that she could show him up. So immediately, as far as this problem was concerned, he recaps after the act and says, “You know, that was about twenty-five values wrong.” So he comes back here: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen . . . boy, is he wrong!
Now, you can add up all of these problems in this fashion. You have a new factor enters in. Now, it’s how many values right and how many values wrong? We must, then, include something in all thinking: the evaluation of a datum. What is the value of the datum? How many values right and how many values wrong, in relationship to the importance of the problem? And the mind goes and works these things out all the time. The mind can assign values. You see, it’s got subcomputers that are handing up values to this, continually.
All right, how many values right and how many values wrong? Back and forth the little arrow could be seen to travel, and he will arrive at a decision. When people are indecisive, their computer is sitting dead center and you’re getting no action; no action. And a computer which continues to sit dead center with no action gets an accumulating energy level behind it, and something is bound to happen. There is something going to break with this sooner or later. You could actually have an engram which says, “You can’t possibly make any decision, you don’t have the power of decision. You don’t have any willpower. You never can make up your mind” — that sort of an engram—which would actually force the evaluation to sit in the center indecisively. A person, then, couldn’t think easily, could he? This thing is not in continual restimulation, of course, so he has to think a little bit, but he has an awfully hard time.
Yes, Gene?
Male voice: Or could you have too much action, Ron?
Oh, well, I’m going to get into that!
This one says, “I am always right, no matter what I think of.” He’s got an engram that says, “I’m always right, no matter what I think of, I am completely right; I’m all right all the time.” This freezes the computer over here, all the time. He doesn’t have a chance to evaluate. In other words, he can’t evaluate his problems because he says, “I’m right.” He thinks, “Well, the thing to do is to take this Ford3 car down and drive it off a cliff.” Well, he’s right, so he does it. Of course, that would be psychotic, wouldn’t it? And that’s what’s the matter with a psychotic. When a person is completely psychotic, his evaluation scale is stuck on one place. He can’t think. He can’t evaluate problems. He can’t make decisions.
So, here you have this person who has this engram that I see kicking around every once in a while, “I’m wrong, I’m always wrong, I’m never anything else but wrong.” And he starts to think out a problem very logically. And he thinks it up, and actually there will be entered into such a problem, sometimes, enough false data by the computer itself in order to make him wrong because he has to be wrong, you see? That is an interruption of thought.
In other words, what we could call fixed values. Fixed values can enter into this computer circuit, and as soon as a fixed value enters into it, the person cannot evaluate his information properly and at that moment stops thinking well or easily. And engrams assign fixed values to practically everything. You see?
You take the fixed values. This fellow says, “I’d like to get married. She’s a beautiful girl.” And the engram says, “You hate women, you know you hate women. You don’t want anything to do with women!” So he doesn’t get married!
Now, supposing he has data in there that says, “I can’t believe it.” The poor guy. Every datum that comes up to be added into this sort of thing has to be distrusted completely. So he could never have a sharp assignment of value to any datum which he has. He can’t believe it.
Well, he wouldn’t be over on the right side and he certainly wouldn’t be over on the survive side if he had an “I can’t believe it.” The funny part of it is, is the fellow who has “I have to believe everything” of course has the same trouble. It’s just as much a fixed value. Fellow says, “I have to believe everything”—boom! everything he adds into the equation and so forth . . . Somebody tells him black cats are always green. He has to believe it!
You ever see people who had an awfully hard time with their sense of humor? They may or may not have an engram that says, “You have no sense of humor.” That is not what causes that. The thing says, “You have to believe it!” And humor is actually a rejection of material. The material comes in, it is thought to not compare with the real world, and one rejects it—boom! Out it goes again. But the fellow has to believe it. You tell him a joke, and you say, “Well, Pat and Mike4 are walking down the street,” and you go on down and you tell him this joke and the fellow looks at you fixedly and you give him the point about the thing. You say, “Well, they step in front of the jewelry window and then Pat says, ‘My, I’d like to have my pick.’ And Mike says, ‘Begorra I’d rather have my shovel.’” And the fellow looks at you. “Pick? Shovel? Were they workmen?” Like the Englishman that laid awake all night trying to figure the joke and it finally dawned on him. Anyway, when you get—when you get—that’s terrible. You see? Just giving you an example. That’s so bad you reject it, you want to get rid of it!
All right. Here we have a fellow who can’t reject it, he has to believe it. And he will finally, if—when you start to give this fellow a release (you’re giving him processing) you’re liable to trigger this thing, and observe the strange process of him laughing at all the jokes in his life that could never be evaluated or laughed at before as far as he’s concerned. They will actually come up on a whole chain. Literally thousands and hundreds of thousands of jokes and funny quips and sayings and so forth, he’s read in newspapers and so forth.
Now, because socially he learns—you see, he learns that it’s socially bad not to have a sense of humor, this is something for which he may be indicted before the court of his group: “Has no sense of humor.” So he will watch fixedly and he will watch the people out around him, and when they start to laugh, he’ll laugh. And you can catch a guy that way by telling him a story and you say, “A fellow walked into the restaurant with a big dog and he sat down at the table and the dog sat down at the table alongside him. The waiter came up and the fellow said, ‘Now, I want some apple pie and a bowl of milk for my dog/ And the waiter says, ‘All right, sir.’ And he goes away.” This fellow will be watching, you know, very earnestly. “And later, waiter comes back and he says, ‘Well, sir, we have a bowl of milk for your dog, but we have no apple pie. Would peach pie do?’” And you look very bright at this point, you see. And this fellow looks at you distrustfully for a moment and then laughs and laughs and laughs.
If you want to find a “You’ve got to believe it” engram in anybody, spring that joke on him. If they laugh, they’ve got one! Yeah, because the fellow has had to learn to laugh at jokes socially although he doesn’t think any jokes are funny, actually.
What has happened to him is strictly this thing [tapping on blackboard], click, he’s got to believe it. So the second he has one of these “I’ve got to believe it” mechanisms—by the way—and he’s got it very thoroughly, completely aside from a sense of humor—somebody comes along and tells him, “You know, for your own good, I’m going to tell you that you actually should wear purple ties all the time, nothing but purple ties,” he has to believe it. The fellow has moved purple ties over here into the right column of survival, and then somebody else comes along and he says, “The best thing for you to do is to divorce your wife.” He begins to think this over for a while, and being married is wrong. “All right, being married is wrong. Shall I divorce my wife? Well, I have to. Being married is wrong.” In other words, that’s an exaggerated level of activity, but you will find that there are people who go around—we call them impressionable and suggestible people.
That is exactly what hypnosis actually is: somebody else coming along and taking the point up here on the fellow’s computation scale—his computations—and somebody else moves them around. In other words, the fellow doesn’t think, he has somebody else moving the thing around for him. When that approaches complete fact— whatever he says, you believe; or whatever he does is adjudicated by somebody else, he is either in an amnesia trance, in hypnosis or he is insane. There are certain catatonic states, for instance, that are very remarkable states.
Now, you see, we have a computation board. In order to arrive at correct solutions a mind has to have the right to make decisions. An engram is fixed data; it does not allow evaluation. For instance, a forgetter such as “It is not to be thought of” sends intelligence down, and a man gets more and more wrong in his decisions. And how wrong can a man get? Dead wrong. An engram is a datum that can’t be evaluated.
In other words, we take this board here, “right and wrong,” and we put it here with this Tone Scale — the stack of triangles—and we find out that they’re the same thing. In other words, this Tone Scale we’ve been talking about all this time, of evaluation and so forth, is actually this board in operation.
Now, in other words, this board, you could see, could have an immediate value — that is for one datum—or it could have a value for the whole person. A person could be, let us say, consistently and continually wrong. This would mean he would be rather depressed, wouldn’t it? And if he was continually wrong and nobody would let him be right, he would be in a state of apathy—tone 0 to 1.
Now, we postulate the zero there. This is not the same zero. Actually this zero is over here and this says—at this point, is finite death for the individual, for the group, for the future, for mankind. You see, this scale could operate for anything or anybody or any collection of beings. So here’s finite death, and here would be the zero, you see? So your infinity would go on down. But this would be talking about universal survival. We’re not interested in universal survival, because we use it in this category and it’s rather impractical. We know that when a group is dead, it’s dead. We know when a man is dead, we bury him. At least sometimes we know. According to Edgar Allen Poe6 they have a hard time telling. So we won’t worry about this infinity scale on down toward wrong, because as a group or a man or mankind and so forth, if we were dead, so what? So we’re dead! I mean, the rest of the universe can go happily on. It has no further bearing on us. That is to say— that’s if you consider death in that light. All right? This has to do with emotion. And we make next another thing that I have to give you with regard to emotion. And believe me, all of this is narrowing right down the groove toward emotion. It’s also narrowing down the groove to computation. It’s also narrowing down the groove to perception. I’ll show you how it comes about.
Here we have a series of values. If a man is almost wrong, he becomes rather fixed as to what he thinks he should do. In other words, he is so close to dead, he actually begins to approximate death. It has proven a certain survival value all by itself—the pretense of death. There’s the opossum—he goes into a natural one. It’s just a trick with him. But he has borrowed part of this Tone Scale. Everybody says he’s dead, so he’s dead.
Now, a man will go into the same state. On the field of battle, a soldier will very often fall down—not be hit at all—and he is in a complete fear paralysis. He just can’t move or anything else. Call these people catatonics. There are various classifications of insanity that come into this bracket. That would be a permanent state on the scale. Permanent state for the whole being.
Let’s look at it for a moment and we find out that a person who is in a fear paralysis would hardly be able to perceive very much around him, and he certainly wouldn’t be able to communicate with you. That is the trouble that we find with the catatonic in the institution, is we can’t talk to him and he can’t talk to us. See, he’s out of communication. So, communication is down here, very close to zero.
Over here, reality—as far as reality is concerned, when we get on this scale, we know that we have agreed upon certain realities in the field of the mind. So actually, this reality all the way down the line is agreement. This is an agreement. We have agreed upon a reality as far as the world of thought is concerned. We have agreed that this is real, and so it goes on being real. We can see that nobody in a state of fear paralysis has any great sense of reality. He’s not dead, but he is dead and he is certainly not going to agree with you or anybody else. If you could just get him to agreeing with you or get him to sense the reality of that fire which you have just built under him, he’d move, you see? But back here along the line of affinity, if you can’t talk with this man and he doesn’t know you’re there evidently and there’s no concourse or anything else, he can’t feel any affinity for you. And if he can feel no affinity for you, you’re not going to pull him up, either.
Sometimes you can get this stuff sort of regenerating. You can feel affinity for him and he feels affinity for you somehow or other. But it’s up by the bootstraps because he’s down there at a point where you can’t communicate with him, can’t establish affinity with him and he can’t agree with you—he has no sense of reality. As far as he’s concerned—this fellow who fell down on the battlefield and is now being lugged off to a hospital—as far as he’s concerned, he’s right there at the instant he fell down on the battlefield—sense of reality. He has no concept of the actual reality of his situation. He’ll be lying in an institution there, day in, day out, no change, so forth. He’s still on the battlefield.
So, there we see about what this is here. And let’s look at these affinity lines and let’s find out back there something that’s very interesting about those affinity lines.
We have come down to apathy. And here is apathy. Apathy, you know, is this first band here. That’s the lowest state down. And when you get somebody in an apathy engram you’ve really got something. You’ve got something to contend with.
You get this fellow, he works all right in other states, you can get him terrified and so forth but all of a sudden one day you trigger one of these apathy engrams and he’ll just go bomm! “What is the use? How could I possibly . . . ?” You say, “Well, go back over it again.” “What’s the use?” Nothing. All is lost as far as he’s concerned; he just plain won’t go through it.
Of course, a fellow can feel a slight, slight despair about things sometimes, but that’s not a real apathy state. That is a top order of that state. When a fellow gets into a real apathy state, you’ve got something on your hands. Grief—aw heck, a guy will sit there and cry. But in apathy he won’t do anything. He has approached this level of fear paralysis and death. Now do you see where that emotion starts to fit in on this Tone Scale?
Well, right above apathy, we get grief. Grief is actually the upper part of the apathy band, so you have to call it the grief band. So this 0 to 1 scale here has been named the apathy band. Actually, about 0 to 0.5 is apathy, but 0.5 to l.0 on the Tone Scale, the upper half of that band, is actually the grief zone. There is where grief is located.
Now, right above that, right above grief, we have fear. Grief is that emotion which is felt when loss has taken place. And fear is that emotion which has to do with an imminence of loss. Imminence of loss of one’s own life. Imminence of loss of a friend by death or departure. Fear. In other words, a cut-down of one’s survival potential by a loss—the threat of that is fear, the fact of it is grief, the accomplishment of the fact is apathy. You see how it would be? Right down the line. Grief, it has taken place and so forth. But if it has taken place with great magnitude and so on, the fellow will go right on down to the bottom of the scale. And if he has nothing in his vicinity to pick him up, he will land in an apathy state and he’ll stay there.
There is how a person is moved up and down the Tone Scale. Well, let’s get up a little bit higher. Now we’ve got to fear, haven’t we? Fear is getting into this 1 to 2 band. And we find fear . . . And by the way, we don’t differentiate. You know, there’s two factors involved here. There is the kind and the magnitude. There is the kind of emotion that we’re talking about here, such as grief, apathy, fear, and we can just consider those that way, but there are other words in the language. There is terror. Well, terror is just magnitude of fear. You could say grief, you could call it sorrow; grief has to do with a greater magnitude of sorrow. You see this is the same thing, but there is just more of it, that’s all.
All right, now, here we have fear, and we start to get up above that into covert resentment. Covert resentment evidently comes just above fear. And then we get into anger, which is the solid center of your 1 to 2 on the Tone Scale. We get anger. There a person is still fighting. Something comes in and it says, “Hmmm, I’m going to threaten you with a loss,” and this fellow says, “Hrmmph!” and he tackles it back again.
Isn’t it a strange thing, though, that when that anger is beaten back and defeated, that the fellow sinks into fear, grief; and if it’s broken too thoroughly, he will sink into an apathy. And that is what is known as the breaking of an abreaction. The breaking, in Dianetics, of a dramatization. You break, for instance, an anger dramatization too thoroughly, and the fellow is shoved back down the scale because anger is a breakthrough point.
You will never be able to release anybody if you fail to reach a point of his complete tone where he’s mad.
One has to go up this scale if he is at all below it on any subject. You see?
There may be a point somewhere on this—in this case, where he’s saying, “Well, Mother—Mother was after all just Mother and so on, and yeah, I love her, I love her very much . . .” and you’ve just run through all the series of knock-arounds and beatings and so forth. Sure, he shouldn’t stay mad at his mother for the rest of his life, but he’s never been angry at his mother. You’re lying below the anger belt. And this case is not going to recover until he comes up to and through the anger belt on the Tone Scale. Because every case will come up the line one right after the other on these emotions.
So, he’s run across this one where his mother denied him this and did this to him and did that to him and so on, and he’s still telling you, “Oh, I love her dearly, yes, I love her dearly, I love her dearly.” He’s down below. That’s propitiation. And that comes down below the anger belt. Propitiation starts in down right there in the neighborhood of apathy. If you get a guy who is propitiative, that is very bad. As a matter of fact, you can tell the point, in lots of cases, where they reach that point on the Tone Scale. You know it, because the person will bring you presents, as an auditor. That’s propitiation. That’s, “I’m buying you off, don’t kill me.” But here is anger, and he can never get mad at his mother. And then one day he says, “Oh, if I could just get my hands on that woman, I’d kill her!” And he goes around and he says, “I’m going to write her a letter, that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna fix her—hru, hru, hru, hru.” And he mutters around about it. You restrain him from writing the letter, but don’t make it too positive that you are restraining him. You accomplish the restraint of the writing of the letter, because in a few days he is going to say, “Ah, well, Ma—she had her troubles.” And if you permit him to get that angry at that period when he arrives there on the Tone Scale, if you permit him to get that angry, he is going to have a lot to patch up afterwards. This is very embarrassing to most preclears, is when they sound off as they come up the Tone Scale and pass through this anger band and they start telling people off. They’ll find out a few days later that they weren’t that brutal about it, they didn’t feel that bitter about it and they have to—well, I don’t know, they’ve actually broken an affinity and so on. Whereas if they’d just left Mama and Papa and Uncle Ezra and so forth alone during that period, why, when they get up above it, they won’t give a darn about what they’ve done. Papa shows up. Papa used to beat him with a club or something like that, why, “How are you? Sit down. Have a cup of coffee.” Whereas if he’d caught him just at this moment, he’d probably bust Papa’s nose. You see?
Nearly everybody has had their abreactions broken by their parents. This doesn’t mean, by far, that all parents are terribly nasty to their children. This is not true, very far from true.
Your worst cases have had some upset this way. But most parents in this society have broken the dramatizations of their children, and having broken those dramatizations—for instance the child gets mad. Papa has got him sitting there at the table and the kid is supposed to eat his spinach and he won’t eat his spinach, and he says, “I’m not going to eat my spinach.” And Papa says, “You’re gonna eat your spinach, young man, or you’re gonna march right straight to your room.” Well, after all, this guy is only about so tall and Papa is about so tall, and Papa wins.
It was a bad thing for Papa to win, by the way. You’ll find it in processing. It will probably come up as a lock because it’s not an actual engram but it’s done something to the affinity scale.
All right. We come up the next point there—we had anger—and now we get overt resentment as above the anger band, just above the anger band—overt resentment. And just above that we start to get varying degrees of “Oh, well, what the dickens is the use? Ah, I don’t care about it much anyhow.” Boredom with the subject. And above that you get relief. There is a surge point.
Now, it’s an odd thing. The reason this is in a geometric progression is because actually that relief point is about halfway up. But you see, there are so many degrees of pleasant emotion above the relief point that we don’t recognize how high and how varied that relief point is. We just say, “Well, that’s happiness” and we kind of let it go at that. But that’s not the case. There’s a great many degrees of being relieved and happy and cheerful and ecstatic and so forth. They go on up the line. And the happiness end of this band is bigger and longer than the depressed end of the band, below the relief point. So then we’ve got boredom and then we’ve got relief and here we have happiness.
Now pleasure, all the emotions of pleasure fit above this point of relief.
All these emotions are actually, in other words, a spectrum, where you take the same thing, which is to say, little theta, and you start to walk in on it with MEST, and start reversing its polarity. And the more its polarity is reversed, the more it’s reversed, the more MEST there is and the less theta, until you get down to the bottom where the person is all MEST and no theta; he’s dead. And you start up the line again and you get a little bit more and a little bit more little theta and a little less and a little less MEST until you finally get up clear up to the top of the thing, you get pure survival, pure life, pure little theta.
This is what the Hindus were talking about when they talk about what real saintliness is.
A real saint, by the way, gets up to a point on this Tone Scale, according to the Hindu, and he becomes so much “all thought,” he becomes so utterly and completely pure that he sort of nebulizes on the spot and takes off for heaven in his own body. That is a very ancient one. I consider it very interesting in view of the fact that we—you know you can just choose thousands of these concepts, it isn’t just that one that’s important, but I think it’s rather amusing that as we look at this thing hypothetically, oh, very hypothetically, that happens to be true! You see? The fellow would become—here he’s all earth and clay—dead. And here he is resenting being overcome, that is to say, he’s angry about it. And up the line he starts to win. At that break point there, he’s about 50 percent little theta and about 50 percent big theta. And up above that point, the amount of big theta starts to fall away and the amount of MEST would, theoretically, start to drop out of the picture.
Actually, what happens is that he is more and more able to control the material universe. He’s more rational, he can think more easily and ably, he doesn’t make mistakes, and as such, he begins to control the material universe more and more and more and more and more. And he has no residual physical error, so that probably his longevity increases markedly.
I could tell you quite a bit on the subject of what little progress has been made in the field of psychic phenomena in Dianetics. We have made enough progress to raise the hair of the whole society I think, at this time. Not that we’re not doing enough to it now, just on the subject of processing. But it does seem to be interesting to me that some of the past concepts of what life is and so on, seem to be very antique at this time.
You can choose, if you want to, because we haven’t had time to look up some of the confirmations thoroughly enough—but there is just a little bit more evidence in favor of immortality and the individuality of the human soul than there is against it.
I think that’s interesting that the more returns come in, the more it tends over into this—not from any religious data whatsoever or any religious conviction, it’s just solid scientific results as you come in and it’s turning up—seems to be turning up more and more the point that an individual is a continuum of life and activity regardless of his own body. That’s very interesting stuff.
We’ve got a boy back East who is doing nothing but slug into this right now and he’s working hammer and tongs. All he’s doing is assembling evidence.
The preponderance of the evidence is in favor of individual immortality. I never thought that would be the case. I, all my life had supposed that when a guy was dead, he was dead. He looks awfully dead!
Actually, that was all the scientific evidence the society had on that basis a few short months ago: “He looks awfully dead.” So we look back here and we find that this affinity line is the emotional scale of the individual, and that is what you are addressing. Now, we find out something very important, and you can write this down: that when you are unable to get any grief off of an individual, you can even go to a point and start running relief—I mean, that high. You can start running boredom—moments when he was bored. You can then run a few moments there when he was angry. And then you can march in and find some periods when he was afraid. Fear. And pick up a lot of incidents when he was afraid. And the first thing you know, you will be able to pick up an incident of grief.
Now, you’ve been just going into these cases and saying, “Well, we want some grief. ‘The file clerk will now give us the grief incident necessary to resolve the case. When I count from one to five and snap my fingers you’re going to get the grief.’ Well, this guy doesn’t cry, let’s go to basic-basic.” That’s not good processing.
Where you will actually enter this, by the way, is probably in the field of fear. If you can get some incidents where the person was afraid and particularly where you can get an order of magnitude that would be called terror—if you can get an incident where the person was terrified, why, you can move down into grief. Because a person’s emotions can be locked up anywhere on this Tone Scale and frozen. Here is your computer board on the thing. We could get a stet emotion, in other words, and it could be set somewhere on the Tone Scale, and there is some incident in his life where the bulk of his emotions are wrapped up. And it’s not necessarily grief. It can be terror.
You see the interrelationship now on this scale. You see what I have been talking to you about. Over here, we have the Tone Scale on the reality level. That has to do with a person’s ability to compute, to agree, to get into agreement, to get into his standard bank and so forth, data on what reality is and so forth, and find out how this data may agree within the world and with others and so on. There is reality. He settles reality. And reality does one of these reversals right straight down the line until you get down to zero, reality zero. In other words, he starts converting reality over into other things.
It starts to get very erroneous, very erroneous, below the anger level. What would be anger level over here would be an error level on the reality scale, which would be the logical scale, the logical concatenation.
Over here on the communication side of it, his ability to perceive. Did you ever hear of anybody being blind with rage? Well, believe me, they are, because right about that point they start to break off and stop perceiving. They also stop communicating. They just sort of put out ergs and they go on down the line and they communicate less and less and less and less until they don’t communicate at all. And up along the line, they can communicate more and more and more.
Actually, that communication can be terrifically aberrated. And let me put this annotation in here for you. Communication can be terrifically aberrated. A person can have an engram which tells him that he has to talk continually, if he has such an engram. That has nothing to do with communication, does it? Because, is that fellow in communication? No, he isn’t. He’s talking, sure, and he may appear to listen, but he isn’t. He’s out of communication.
Communication is a two-way affair. It’s whether or not a person can receive communications, also, not just whether or not he puts out communications. That is a little mistake that people might make on this.
Now, as this goes down the scale, his ability to put out communication and to receive communication deteriorates. His sense of reality, for instance, goes down over here, at the same time his perceptions will go down over here. They don’t go down evenly. But a fellow who, for instance—well, he doesn’t have any sonic and doesn’t have any visio and he doesn’t have any of this and he doesn’t have any of that and his sense of reality about all this is very poor, and now we’re walking into this triangle again. We’ll find out that his affinity level is bad as well. The three things are poor simultaneously. They all work one with the next. And this affinity scale—we have the emotional scale. How does he feel toward his fellow man? And you would be absolutely amazed to find out that most people are in that bracket right there. As far as their fellow man is concerned, they’re a bit afraid of him. Whereas, the only real, proper protection that a person could have would be way up the scale. The higher you can get up this scale, why, the less danger men are to you. That’s a fact.
These have been pointed up as philosophic, metaphysical and mystical principles through the ages. They’re pretty simple when you take a flat look at them. Naturally, if a person is afraid, he’s going to do things to protect himself and to protect himself he’s liable to hurt somebody else, and if he hurts somebody else they’re liable to hurt him.
What is the least optimum method of surviving? It would be going around to protect oneself all the time so that he wouldn’t be hurt, so that he has to hurt other people so they won’t hurt him; only they do, because he does. You get an interaction on the thing.
In other words, here is computation, here is perception and here is emotion. Computation over here, communication, here’s perception, and affinity or emotional scale. There is the triangle and there is the Tone Scale.
I don’t ask you to digest all this at one fell swoop. As a matter of fact, I’m feeding it to you rather heavily.
Once upon a time, I was down at the Washington zoo, and I saw a big boa constrictor they have down there. And they had a big machine at work on him, and I said, “My God, what are you doing to that snake?” And they said, “We’re feeding him. We feed him every six months.” And so—actually it was a sausage stuffing machine of enormous magnitude. And was that boa constrictor getting swollen up! So let’s not worry about being overstuffed, huh? I’m not inferring you’re boa constrictors.
Here we have some data which you can use and you can use it in this fashion. You can see immediately that where a person actually is on the Tone Scale, both as to an incident and both as to the whole being. You can look over his computational ability, look over his emotional scale, his affinity level or look over his ability to perceive and you will see where that person is on the Tone Scale, because we have an interaction like this. We have some sort of an idea because of the performance of this man, what his possible dynamic is. One of these days we’ll have a fine way to measure a dynamic.
If this person is all shut down—because here we’ve got to enter in the dynamics and after all this is a dynamic scale—if this person is all shut down on perception, you know darn well that his affinity level is low, too. You know also that his computational level is fairly low. But if this person is still being successful, boy, you’ve got a man. But here you have the individual whose native Tone Scale is very high. You add the reactive mind scale to his endowed scale and divide them in half and you will get your average Tone Scale between the two. And you will get about where the fellow is seen to ride as an average. It is usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.2, 2.3, somewhere up there. And that is the whole tone of the aberrated individual. That’s the way you compute it. Now you’ve got his whole tone.
You see, a person would vary on this Tone Scale by endowment. It just doesn’t mean that the blank, unaberrated, uneducated individual would just simply have, automatically, an infinity value on this whole Tone Scale. He doesn’t have. His lifetime has been modified. He’s modified by his genetics—other things. But there would be the individual. And then you would have where his reactive mind lay on this Tone Scale; between the two of them, you get where he actually is in relationship to life.
When you pick away this scale, that is, of the reactive mind, what you have left will be the fellow cleared. And you will get the thing lifting all the way across the board.
This means that people natively are able to communicate, some better than others. Some think better than others, some feel more affection and so forth than somebody else. You get the position on there has to do with endowment.
This should interest you very much, because there is a tremendous difference of personality from person to person.
Okay. You see, this fellow would be able to look at the real world around him, measure present time and be able to think and remember and so forth. That would be what the average between the two is able to do. That is the whole individual plus his reactive mind. But you start him into processing and you are inspecting just one thing, you are really inspecting his reactive mind Tone Scale. You follow that, because you’re after engrams. And the engrams, as you start down the track, will become very, very apparent to you. You will find out that his sonic is probably off. That’s normal.
You’ll find out that—his feelings of affinity and so forth. This is why you should be very, very careful to balance every case at the last part of your two-hour session. You bring him up and run a pleasure moment and run it very thoroughly. You bring him up to present time and put him on straight memory for the whole session. You want him balanced out as the average individual.
You don’t want your reactive scale showing up and having more weight in his life than it ordinarily would have.
Okay? Let’s take a break.