Standard Procedure and Accessibility (500711)

Date: 11 July 1950

Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard

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I want to cover with you here, from here on till Saturday, Standard Procedure, and make you people so goddamned good that cases can’t stand up to anything.

Now, we have here Standard Procedure—Standard Procedure. This procedure, if followed, as a one-two-three proposition, going to give you results. Tells you where to turn each time you come up against a point that doesn’t resolve. These are being mimeoed and will be distributed to you probably tomorrow. This outline, by the way, was done by Mr. Hurt, an engineer.

Male voice: I understand it was a very good one.

Yeah, he took Friday night’s lecture notes and assembled them. And he couldn’t think of anything else at work—somehow or other just happened that way—and assembled the material. And he’s coming into the professional class. There’s quite a marked change in the gentleman by the way . . .

Male voice: Oh, there s a wonderful change in him. Ah, he’s just beaming he looks terrific. After the . . .

Very interesting.

He’s in the Monday-Wednesday-Friday class. Evidently, Dianetics sometimes, when you’re working it, does produce some small results. (laughter) One of the things that I attribute the gradual increase and success of the cases, however, is to the auditors in those evening courses having had their own cases opened and having had some charge and tension taken off themselves. People get brighter.

Of course, those present are an exception, (laughter) I’ve seen a couple, three cases of that in the Professional Course which is absolutely astounding. “Yesterday I was a failure. Today I get people stuck on the time track.” (laughter) The first step which we are going to take up as usual on this is accessibility. Now, if a patient is not operating well in any department, he is going to be inaccessible. If that mind cannot operate because of engrams, it’s a fact that the curve of accessibility will follow the inoperativeness of the mind to a large, marked degree until you get down into the psychotic states.

Now, right now when you’re shooting the bottom out of a psychotic so that he can get going, shooting the bank apart, you’re not equipped with the very best tools in the world. I understand that in institutions psychiatrists are faced with the problem of accessibility. They resolve this problem very neatly by making the patient completely inaccessible. They can’t do anything with the brain, so they take it out.

Now, this is a solution, I will admit, but it is not an optimum solution. In order for Dianetics to be very, very smoothly workable in institutions, it’s going to be necessary to increase the accessibility of patients so that they can be reached with great ease. Only in this way can we count upon the fact that Dianetics will clear the institutions. That, by the way, is our, as I’ve said before, our standard research step.

However, you’re going to be faced with lesser degrees of inaccessibility. You’re going to be faced with the degree of inaccessibility whereby young Robert is interested in Dianetics and he has talked his mother into being faintly interested in this. But Mother knows there’s nothing wrong with her; nothing at all wrong with her. And you know from the engrams that she’s implanted in young Robert, on whom you have been working, that she is doing Immelmanns, renversements and spins and snap rolls continually through life.

She has, let us say, a bad arthritis, a lame hip, can’t remember her own name and so on. She’s going to come down and she’s going to tell you that, well, there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s awfully glad that you did something for young Robert. He is interested because his younger brother gets beaten daily.

That is a case of a type of inaccessibility which you’re going to have to overcome. Now, as Dianetics becomes more widespread, better known, you’re going to have to use your persuasiveness and your native charm and personality in order to bring this about. However, any inaccessibility is broken quite ordinarily merely by running the patient with his eyes wide open without ever telling him you’re doing a thing to him.

First start in on straight line memory and by just talking to the patient, ask him, “Well yes, yeah, well now, what sort of a dress has she got on,” and so on. The patient wide open is going to go back down the time track and start working. Without any consent; you haven’t asked for any consent.

Most people are willing to answer a few questions and so on. But you have never essayed or pretended or advertised the fact that you are now working on him. I have had patients go through a two-hour session, pick up an awful lot of material, knock out a flock of locks, become much more accessible, thinking all the time they were merely having something explained to them, a little demonstration run.

Now, one of the gags used on that is, “Well, we don’t have to put you into therapy, but why not let me run a little diagnostic check on you.” At which moment you throw them right straight into therapy. And the therapy is proceeding and if you find the case is too closed down for you and it looks like young Robert never will be able to handle this and you figure there’s nothing much you can do anyway, blow a few locks, make the case feel better. Then you can say, “Well, diagnosis demonstrates . . .” and let it go at that.

It is, by the way, a good way to back out of a case if you don’t want to have anything to do with it. Mind you now, although you could do something with this case, you may sometimes find that you don’t want to. You may find that you were perfectly willing to devote fifteen or twenty hours of your time, perhaps, to knocking out the largest portion of her arthritis and you’ve walked into a case which is apparently one of these long, long, long, long cases. By using this trick of diagnosis, “We’re going to make a diagnosis on you,” you just enter them into therapy, you will know very, very briefly how long the case is.

Yes?

Male voice: On that sort of technique are you liable to get the case which doesn’t want to stop?

Yeah. But if you get a case that starts in so fast it doesn’t want to stop, you could do it in fifteen or twenty hours. You can take enough charge of it off. If the case takes the bit in its teeth and starts to roll like that, you get rather rapid results on them. It’s the case that is just plain bogged that is the roughie.

Now, there is the problem of accessibility. Right now that’s in your hands, your skill, your persuasiveness in getting somebody to either look at you, sit down, answer a few questions or, at the optimum, close his eyes and go straight on into work.

Male voice: Ron, would it seem to—word of caution not to try to force a patient into therapy?

Yes. Very definitely so. Don’t try to force a patient into therapy. In the first place, if the patient has been picked up somewhere around, he may be very resistant toward the idea that he isn’t all right. You’ll discover that you have an ally, for instance, in the police. Let’s say we’re picking up somebody from the city jail and we’re going to check them over. You’ll find relatives occasionally will bring somebody around like that. Maybe they know the judge, and they can prove he’s a little bit off and can be repaired, why, they’ll let him off.

I had that happen. And the fellow comes in and they’ve been “helping out” like, “You’re crazy All this is caused by a disturbance in your mind,” and so on. And the patient arrives on your doorstep completely closed down as far as you’re concerned.

It’s up to you, then, to ally yourself with the patient to turn against his enemies. The mere fact of turning against his enemies is usually enough to make you an ally of the patient.

Male voice: That increases accessibility That very definitely increases accessibility, particularly if you put it on this line of, “Well now, let’s find out what they’ve been doing to you. Let’s really get the goods on these people.” And the first thing you know the person will be working with you. You cannot work very long against a person.

It so happens in Dianetics that people are pretty cooperative, much more cooperative than they have been in the past in various forms of mental therapy. I suppose there are several of you who have already had experiences in this line, somebody who’s been in psychoanalysis for a long time and her husband was forcing her to do it or something like that, her husband was pleading with her to do it. She turns up on the reverie couch and we’re off to the races immediately. This is pretty common. Basic personality gets wind of what you’re trying to do and wham, off we go.

In such a case, the explanation of the basic tenets of Dianetics are very much in order. They may be falling upon, as far as you can see, salted ground. But they’re going on through to basic personality. Basic personality will match this up, find out it starts to track sometimes, and actually manhandle the individual in . . . [gap] The problem of accessibility is something that is solved pretty much by experience until we get something better. There is always something better than just experience.

So, we take up the next step. Now, from here on this runs on a one, two, three. We go so far on this list and if we haven’t achieved a definite, positive result at that point we do something else. We go to Step Three.

Step One is the diagnosing of the case and after this we go to Step Two. At Step Two, we open the case and run engrams. And if case won’t open or case bogs down go to Step Three, And Step Three is knocking out demon and valence commands, and after this go to Step Two.

In other words, this proposition here is just set up on the basis that if it won’t do this you do that. And the thing that you do each time the case bogs down is to go into this procedure: you put the preclear on straight line memory and look for demon commands and valence commands and memories of parents and possible allies. And then you try to establish them and find the emotional charge. You just keep repeating this third step. I’m going to cover this thing completely before Saturday, with a case. First—the first step is diagnose the case, just diagnosing, just asking the person questions is establishing communication with the person. You can establish communication just on the basis of “What is your name?” Now he gets into the groove of giving you information. You will find out that his method of giving you this information gives you an enormous amount of material. He may start giving you his name and his age and his weight and you observe his reactions. You see, for instance, that he is—some people are so closed in, so secretive, because of engrams and so on, that they think everything over very carefully before they give you such a thing as the name.

Yeah. They’re trying to look you over very carefully. And you find out about the foreign language background and so on. In short, you fill out one of those cards, just your straight card. That is the first step in the case. Now, remember that at some future point in therapy, that you may do diagnosis all over again and discover quite a bit of material which was not before available, such as the fact that the great-grandparents might have been alive, such as the fact that one case I had was completely blocked out on his first two wives. One of them had died and the other one had gone off with another man. And he’d just put these two—he was a psychotic—but he’d just put these two cases—wham. And as far as he was concerned, he’d been married for the first time, he’d sit there wide-eyed and tell you about a perfect life track from which about three quarters of the data was omitted.

In other words, after a case has gone for a certain distance in therapy you can now find out more about the case. So just because you’ve made a diagnosis at the beginning of the case is no reason to believe that you should not rediagnose the past of a case after it’s gone a short time into therapy, because the memory will have increased and picked up and become much better.

Now we enter the second step. The first step is sitting the fellow down and asking him questions. The next step is in two parts, A and B. The first part is opening the case, the second part’s running engrams.

Now, as you open the case, you simply ask the preclear—we don’t worry too much about straight line memory right here at this moment because we may have material all over the place and we may be just wasting time to do anything else with this patient. So we put him in reverie and we enter a pleasant incident. And this way we check for perceptics and find out if he’s moving on the time track. Get that sequence: we fill out the card, tell him to close his eyes, we run him into a pleasant incident and we check his perceptics and find out if he can move on the track.

Now, two things will turn up at this point. If he is not moving on the track we now devote an effort to get him unstuck. We see if we can get it—various mechanisms which you know already. We give him age flash; we give him, “What is your age?” and then “How old are you?” and then, “Give us a number,” and so on. Try to get the moment of the stuck proposition.

Quite often if a person has been there for a long time, the patient will not be able to tell you what the incident is. He’ll have circuitry built in that will give you his proper age and he will perhaps have an attention unit or two which will go down earlier than this age and you’ll get very unreliable material.

It may even appear to you at the moment that you may be talking to a demon circuit. But don’t jump to a conclusion on that. What you’re going to have is a shut-down which is different than demon circuits operating and so on. You’re not getting any protest from this patient, he’s not being recalcitrant, he’s not complaining to you about altitude and so on, he’s just plain stuck.

His visio very often, if he’s severely stuck, will be completely black. If he’s only slightly stuck he will get a little bit of visio. But the point on the track where he will have visio or where he will have the best visio now obtainable is the point where he is stuck. He will have perceptics at the point on the track where he is stuck. He may have some visio, he may have some sonic, he may have some olfactory. And I mean by this actual sonic and actual olfactory.

One chap had, returned on the track, kinesthesia. He’d just shut his eyes and every time he shut his eyes he could feel himself moving. And this had always worried him a little bit but he figured out everybody did it so it didn’t matter too much. He’d shut his eyes and he could feel in motion. And the point where a person is stuck, at the exact instant that he is stuck, the words “stay there” may be in sonic; very audible sonic. And so, finding this, you try to move his somatic strip, get the file clerk to give you something; you don’t get anything. Well, they’re right there. Here it is. That they’re already giving it to you—they’ve always been more or less locked up here and you must learn to recognize that.

Don’t try to take this case then and start charging him up the track and down the track and back and forth and start getting mad at him and scolding him or something like that because he’s not doing what you want to do. The engram is right there in sight, ready to be run in such a case. You can start to run this engram and you’ll have trouble, of course, because there’s going to be earlier material possibly on which this engram is latched up. But you’ll get some kind of an idea of what it is.

Here’s an example in point: ran Brad last night; he was stuck in an incident and he got a whiff of ether and he had a little bit of visio. Isn’t that right? A tiny amount. Otherwise perceptics up and down the track were shut down. Sent him to a pleasure moment; he’s got a pleasure moment all right—it’s a bright purple spot, wasn’t it? (laughing) Male voice: Yeah. Deep purple.

Second male voice: On a case like that, is it often sufficient to knock out the holder or holders?

Well, it is often sufficient—only necessary to do that as often as the person is only stuck that lightly. Sometimes it’s very easy to take a person off the point on the track. I’ve done it with direct memory, just talked to him for a few minutes, just explained to him what being stuck on the track is. And the first thing you know, he’s moving on the track; pretty simple.

Now, that is easy to locate. That’s the point I’m covering here. That is easy to establish, whether or not he’s stuck on the track. Perceptics are usually darked out, very thin, and right where he’s stuck we’re going to have some material. Going to have a little sonic, a little visio, a little olfactory, we’re going to have something there; we don’t have to have all these.

By the way, it’s an amazing thing. I ran into one chap who was stuck in a first-aid hospital in the war and the attendant was sitting there smoking a cigar. And this fellow had complained ever since that everything smelled bad. And well, how did it smell? He couldn’t quite tell you, but it smelled bad. And I told him to close his eyes and tried to find out if he was stuck on the track, and I didn’t have a chance to ask him any questions. He closes his eyes, I said, “Now, what do you see?” And he rears up and he says, “That’s it, goddamn it. That’s it. That son of a bitch!” “What’s the matter?” “Its that goddamn . . . he’s smoking a cigar!” He’d gone through with his olfactory on, turned on to this cigar.

Now, another case—and by the way, you should take note of this as an important datum in psychotics. A psychotic will often be so thoroughly stuck that he’s getting the perceptics only of the incident in which he’s stuck. And he will be getting these so strongly that they’re blanking out the perceptics of present time.

One psychotic—and I imagine it was this sort of thing which led to psychoanalysis—psychoanalism, this sort of thing—this chap was stuck in an engram whereby he was being knocked around by his mother and he was lying there with his diapers dirty. And Mama was telling him to hold still and batting him around and so forth, and was very angry at him. And talking about the overpowering smell and so on. And of course the odor was present. And this poor guy had been going through life with everything smelling like a dirty diaper. He was not psychotic. The overpowering odor—and somebody would say, “Well, smell this flower,” and of course he would sniff and he would get the odor of dirty diaper.

Now, this—you should understand this, this weird little mechanism. It’s very simple once you know what you’re looking at.

Now, the next point of course, then, is to get them moving on the track. That is the point that I am trying to stress here. You put them in reverie, no perceptics, somatic strip going noplace, file clerk giving you nothing—just start asking them what they see. You can tell them to go to basic-basic or something of the sort if you want to. They may even run you off a little chunk of engram. But by this you suspect what the score is with them and you free them on the track. Sometimes they’ll free on that track and start running.

Now, it also happens occasionally you can just start running some pleasant incidents and that latch-up on the track will click out. And they will be free on the track.

Just like you can take the person back to a pleasure moment—let’s say the person has a headache—you just return them to a moment of pleasure a short time before, year or two, and run them through it a few times, get them settled in it and their headache disappears. You’ve dropped the somatic at that point. You have freed the person, he’s moving on the track.

In other words, there are two ways to free a person on the track then. One is by running pleasure moments and the other is by just running the engram. Of course, the second one is—of running the engram—is the one that you’ll usually have to do.

Male voice: Ron, have you found that pain which is caused by actual pathological conditions within the body . . . [gap] . . . a person has cancer, a gallstone or . . .

I would say offhand if that happened then although pathology were present, although pathology was observably present, that the pain was psychosomatic—if that happened, A pleasure moment may have a distracting effect upon them so their mind comes off of it. But you’re not going to knock out pain that’s not psychosomatic for very long.

Okay. We’ve gotten this far.

Now, if he’s not moving on the track, as we say, we free the patient and we test again. Free him, now we’ve got him moving on the track, now let’s test his perceptics again, Perceptics on the next step are to be tuned up. You tune up these perceptics by running pleasure moments. You run a few pleasure moments in the case and run them pretty well and no matter how his perceptics are, they’re going to sharpen, Male voice: You do that silently or do you . . . ?

Oh no, you just run him just like he’s running an engram. That is the coitus jump there that you’re talking about down at conception. Yes, if he doesn’t want to tell you what pleasure moment he is running, let him run it silently. But get an incident that you can listen to so you know, because what’s important here is whether or not he’s seeing, hearing, feeling and so on.

Well, that step is just to tune up his perceptics, find out if he’s going all right. Now, if there are no perceptics here even then, and as far as you’re concerned he’s moving on the track but we’re not getting perceptics, we go to the third step which is straight line memory, I’ll go over this third step in detail.

Tune up the perceptics, we don’t find that they’re any good, he’s still moving on the track however, we go to Step Three, try to find out what’s the matter with his demon circuits and valence commands.

All right. But let us say now we’ve tuned up his perceptics and he’s doing pretty well on perceptics; he seems to be seeing and feeling and so on; he’s not doing too badly. And mind you, when you test for perceptics he may have two kinds of shut-off. One is computational, the other is mechanical.

The computational shut-off says. “I can’t feel, I can’t hear, I can’t see.” This may be laid into the case rather lightly. You’ll run into that in due time. The mechanical shut-off is valence and the existence of circuits which won’t permit it to rise. That’s a mechanical shut-off, then, as opposed to your computational shut-off. Your computational shut-off is usually much, much, much lighter than a mechanical shut-off.

All right. We tuned up the perceptics, now we’re going to check the file clerk. And this is our goal (I will give you these goals over again this morning): to get this file clerk cooperating, make sure we are running with the file clerk and to get the somatic strip under our command, under our orders. That we must do. What we’re doing with this system is to make a pianola case. And we’re going to make a pianola case before we run the case very far. We’re going to find out it’s going to pay dividends—good, solid dividends.

If the file clerk won’t cooperate, and if the somatic strip won’t obey, that is to say, if they go noplace, that’s taken care of on the business of not moving on the track. If the file clerk—you ask for something, you get nothing and so on, the patient’s not moving on the track so that’s up above here, [referring to drawing on blackboard] That’s one thing that shuts down the file clerk.

In other words, the file clerk has been holding this thing here patiently for probably years. The somatic strip is right at the beginning of it ready to start it rolling. And there they have been in frozen motion and ready to move, waiting for the auditor to say, “What’s the first phrase in the engram?” although they knew nothing about Dianetics, That’s the way it appears offhandedly.

That’s one way that the file clerk and the somatic strip won’t operate. But when we get down this far, we know pretty well, we’ve already checked the person for moving on the track. If he’s moving on the track you’re going to get some action from the file clerk, you’re going to get some action from the somatic strip.

How well do they work with you? If they work with you very well, you should be able to do just this: You should be able to say, “The file clerk will now give us the engram required to resolve this case. The somatic strip will go to the front part of this engram. When I count from one to five and snap my fingers, the first phrase of the engram will flash into your mind. One-two-three-four-five,” (snap) “I can’t see,” All right. Run that for a few times—“Repeat it please,” “I can’t see, I can’t see.” What you’re doing there is intensifying the front of the thing, really stabilizing the person in the moment with that repeater.

Now we start on through, he is having a hard time getting it, we ask him, “Is there a denyer?” (snap) “Yes.” “The somatic strip will go to the denyer. When I count from one to five the denyer will flash into your mind, one-two-three-four-five.” (snap) Bang. “I can’t tell” Run “I can’t tell” “I can’t tell, I can’t tell, I can’t tell, I can’t tell” “Can we run it now?” (snap) “Yes.” “Go to the beginning of the engram and let’s roll it on through.” And it’s just that kind of operation that we want. And when we don’t get that kind of operation, then we do these other things. And we’ve got good medicine now to cure them up.

Male voice: That brings up another point, Ron. In running an engram, is it worthwhile going over phrases that appear possibly more aberrative than the other phrases, perhaps going over them specifically a few more times than you do the more or less nonaberrative . . . ?

Yeah, well of course your whole engram will deintensify. You know on a reduction that you can reductio by absin——. Look. [marking on blackboard] Here we go. Here you have something that is—the somatic is very bad. Something very light here. Reductio in partum was what I was trying to coin. So we can go over here, we can start in on this, we can knock that out, and that out and that out and that out. In other words, we can go down the track this way. Or we could just start down the track and we can start here and we can just recount, and then we can recount, and then we can recount, and then we can recount.

You’ve got a three-day engram, knock it out like this. [marking on blackboard] We can knock it out phrase by phrase. I’ve never been able to get a person to pick it out word by word. They’ll knock it out phrase by phrase. And you knock it out phrase by phrase, go down the line. You can knock it also section by section. That is, knock out ten minutes of it and then knock out the next ten minutes of it and knock out the next ten minutes of it and so on.

Female voice: Ron, does that mean though that you have to get the first one out first?

Oh yes. Thank you, thank you. The lady is very much on the qui vive with that. [marking on blackboard] This is what keeps this in line and we can’t take this just because it’s a high point of intensity and slap it around because we’re not going to get the results which we should get. So what we have to do is knock out this first point. This first point in the engram is more important than this apparently more intense point. This is the important point in the engram: the start.

Male voice: Well then the denyers and the bouncers just—they’re all the way along the line, they might fit in—into . . .

Yeah. But if your file clerk and somatic strip are working pretty well, denyers and bouncers aren’t going to hurt you too much. All of a sudden you’re going to find out he’s not in the engram. Just say, “Is this the same engram?” (snap) “No.” “All right. Is there a bouncer in the engram?” (snap) “Yes.” “All right. Let’s return to the bouncer in the first engram there. All right. Name the bouncer.” “Get away.” Second male voice: Well, then there are two effects going on, I mean the denying effect of the denyer, which is reduced by repeating the denyer, whether it fits in the middle of the engram or not. That doesn’t appreciably reduce the somatic at that point, but it reduces . . .

It reduces the kick of a command.

Second male voice: The denyer effect, yes . . .

There arent two effects going on here, there’s only one; you’re reducing an engram. You’ve got to keep the guy on the line of the engram. He’s got to know about it.

Now, listen. The trouble which you’re going to have if the file clerk and somatic strip are working with you are so slight as to be negligible, in spite of all the denyers in the world, in spite of all the bouncers in the world. If you’re running the right engram in the case, that engram will go off and roll. And you’re not going to have a lot of trouble with it. We don’t need great art if this condition’s taking place. And if this condition isn’t taking place, you set that case up so it will take place.

Female voice: But Ron, suppose the denyer would be at circle three on that [referring to drawing on blackboard] Yes?

Female voice: Would it be to a bit of advantage to recount the denyer or . . .?

Well now, there’s—this takes place here, [marking on blackboard] This is “I can’t tell” Female voice: Yes.

Now, you can have the fellow go over “I can’t tell” three or four times till it kicks out. What you’ve kicked in there is a recognition, an analytical recognition of the fact—you haven’t reduced it—you’ve just put in an analytical recognition of the fact that “I can’t tell.” All right. The fellow says, “Well, the engram says ‘I can’t tell.’ To hell with it.” Female voice: Then you go back to the beginning?

It’s still going to hurt him if he goes through it, see?

Female voice: But then you go back to the beginning?

Yeah. Yeah. You go back to the beginning after you’ve done that, deintensify “I can’t tell” and “get away” and “leave me alone.” And then you start the beginning of it and run the engram. But don’t just shoot it full of holes and go off and leave it.

Female voice: No.

What you’re trying to do is reduce an engram and this initial step is nothing more than an effort to make it possible to go through an engram.

However, if you are bouncing off of this engram and this engram is raising hell in general, you want probably something else on the case. If you’ve been given the right engram to resolve the case, it runs off like honey out of a syrup jar. People don’t go off of it. If you’re running the wrong engram in the case, he’ll bounce and jump and all sorts of things.

Male voice: If the denyer or the bouncer is in circle three [referring to a drawing on blackboard] and you start at the beginning you wont—you wont bounce until you’ve reduced the front end of the engram with it in other words, you’ll work up to the bounce point and go back from there.

Female voice: Not necessarily.

Male voice: Can you bounce off the beginning of an engram when the bouncer . . . ?

Yeah, when the bouncer is later?

Male voice: Yeah.

Yeah, as an engram runs you have a sort of a scanner. Now, this scanner goes over and takes a look at the engram before it gets there and as it’s running along it says, “Get away.” Well, the person may bounce one phrase or twenty phrases away from that “get away.” There’s no establishment on this. But if you’re working with the file clerk and you’re running the engram you should be running and you’ve gotten the case into a workable situation, this is of no concern or worry to you. That engram will run, it’ll run well, it won’t have any difficulty with it. That’s the point I’m trying to make here. And it’s a point that you’d better take into consideration.

This trouble you will have when you’re shooting for circuitry. Now, you get all manner of strange manifestations. He’ll flop over into valences. You’ll have trouble one way or the other as you run through the engram. That’s when you’re shooting for circuitry. But if your case is really running and you’ve got it in running shape now, this sort of a thing won’t happen. You can go to the front part of the engram and run it through, front part and run it through, front part and run it through, erased. That sort of a thing’s happening when your case is going along. [gap] Male voice: Ron, it might be interesting to point out there—when you get a person who is bouncing ask the person, “Who says that?” He says, “Mother” And then ask him, “Does Mother say that in 1950 you ought to bounce out of this engram?” By so doing you sometimes get a little more analyzer turned on . . .

Yeah. Now, we’re handling—what he’s talking about is the art of application early in the case. Everybody gets eager-beaverish on this lecture. Doggone it, here we are taking up Step Three and I’m trying to run you through . . . (laughs) It’s a funny damn thing but every time I have tried to give this sequence, BP marches through and starts to tell me what the next step is. Every time. I often wonder why somebody didn’t write about Dianetics before.

What? (laughter) Male voice: I’d like to come back for a moment to the point that was originally raised and that was taking the steam out of an aberrative command by going over it Let’s say for the sake of example that you re rolling through from the beginning and you suddenly get to a phrase which comes out the first time, which happens to be “go to sleep” when you know damn well that in a case like that a person will about nine times out of ten start to drop off. Wouldn’t you pick it up immediately and start rolling it and rerolling it?

Will you let me get to Step Three, sir? (laughter) Male voice: Certainly! Yes sir!

We’ve got to take this up. (laughs) Now, your point’s perfectly valid.

Second male voice: Ron, supposing a mute gets in an accident. How do you run that?

Can be done. Look, that’s specialized. Let me go through this. That’s very specialized technique.

Second male voice: I’m sorry, but aren’t there perceptics in there that are not words that have to be . . .?

You mean a deaf person?

Second male voice: No, I mean in any person.

That gets in an accident?

Second male voice: The first part of an engram might be something else besides a word.

Oh, yeah. Calm it down, now. That I’m going to take up. The nature of the beginning of engrams. That comes up probably tomorrow. Okay.

Sure, there’s all sorts of things. As a matter of fact, very few engrams start out with words; usually they start out with splat or clink or tinkle or thump, something like that. There’s something ahead of what you’re running. People who have nonsonic don’t pick up this material too well. But it still comes through. All right.

Now, we’re tuning up the perception and we find out we can’t reach any pleasure. Now, if we can’t, we go to Step Three, as we’ll take up. But if we do find that we can run pleasure at this point—as I say, we check the file clerk for cooperation, the somatic strip for obedience and if they work well, we go right on running engrams. If they don’t, we go to Step Three.

Now, the next thing we try for is for an emotional discharge. Let’s see if we can find some painful emotion on the case and take it off. That’s the quickest way to make a case happy and knock it out and you can save yourself further trouble. So try to knock that out.

If we don’t get an emotional discharge, we merely go into the basic area; we go right on with the process. Failure to get an emotional discharge does not invalidate our process here because very often the emotional discharge cannot be discharged until we get engrams off the early part of the case. It is actually a fact that either painful emotion engrams are available or physical pain engrams are available in a case. One or the other is available. So we try for the basic engrams; we try to get into the basic area. If we got an emotional discharge we take what emotional discharge or discharges we can get and go into the basic area. In other words, it’s just the same thing.

Now, the second part of Step Two consists of directing the somatic strip, working with the file clerk, reduce all engrams contacted, compute at all times, detect and deintensify the holders and denyers and so forth.

Now, we’ve probably got to take tension off of this case. That means we’re going to have to ask the file clerk several times for the engram which we need next to resolve this case. And then we’re going to say, “The somatic strip will go to the beginning of this engram.” We’re going to roll that engram. We’re going to reduce it.

Now, after we’ve done this a few times it is going to require some urging on your part to get the patient into the basic area. In other words, you’re going to say, “The file clerk will now give us basic-basic—the first moment of pain or unconsciousness, the earliest moment.” And you’re going to try to run that out. But you’re going to have to indicate that you want that basic moment. The file clerk doesn’t get this too well. He, after all, doesn’t know his Dianetics until you show him that point of it. You want to get into the early part of the case and start erasing.

Male voice: Try and get basic-basic before you try to get the sperm sequence?

Call basic-basic the sperm sequence. Let’s not split up terms. Just call it the sperm sequence. It turns up often enough so that it would be, although I’ve gotten basic engrams out, and always used to in the past, that are above the sperm sequence and never considered the sperm sequence the most available thing.

Now, we want the sperm sequence—try for the basic area—you can use this trick: You can step the patient into a moment of sexual pleasure; he doesn’t have to tell you about it and we do a jump from that straight back to the sperm sequence. He very often arrives there. He arrives there often enough, let me say, to warrant the use of it. If you then can run off the sperm sequence, you run it off and reduce it. If it doesn’t reduce, you can ask the file clerk why is this failing to reduce? And he will give you phrases, the somatic strip will give you phrases which will.

In other words, we’re working now on a level of work in this case whereby you merely indicate what you want and you don’t try to foist off on the file clerk all sorts of computations of your own. You just work with the file clerk as long as he will work with you. You know you want to get early in the case, you know you want to get out the sperm sequence. The file clerk may not realize you have to get the sperm sequence off this case.

We work, in other words, at this stage to get unconsciousness off the basic part of the track, the first part of the track. We get the unconsciousness off that track, we can go into any engram up the track actually and get something off of it without lousing up the case terribly. But we’ve got to still reduce everything.

Yes?

Female voice: Is the sperm sequence necessarily something that’s always painful?

No. No, no, the sperm sequence is not always painful But when it is painful, it’s basic-basic. I should have made that more clear. If there is pain on it, motion and so forth. And by the way, pain or no pain, it’s usually there. Let me put it this way. I’ve never found it absent. Usually in a case that was hard to reach, quite often there was no pain on it so one couldn’t say that it was 100 percent the first engram in the case. I resolved the problem in a way which was not too clear to people I was trying to teach Dianetics to. Because the sperm sequence sooner or later in a case will pop into view. It always seemed to. You keep asking for the earliest moment, the earliest moment, the earliest moment and all of a sudden one of these times, bang, you’ll find yourself running the sperm sequence.

I called it the sperm dream because there’s so doggone much dream associated with it in many cases. Sometimes there’s all kinds of engrams piled up in the thing in a bundle. It doesn’t present a beautiful, clear picture but I have learned this, that on a case which is running the way we are talking about this case running, you can get it at this stage.

Male voice: Running a case yesterday, he was seeing pictures down there—smoke and fish.

Yes, sure.

Male voice: (laughter) Oh boy!

Yeah, sure.

Another case: Millions of little angels were flying in from the sky and it was a fish fry that everybody was attending and oh, my God. And then Joe used to have a lizard. He used to have a lizard down there and the lizard used to lean up against the—“You’d better not go past here. I wouldn’t do it if I were you.” Male voice: Direct quotation: “You’ll be sorry.” Second male voice: I ran one yesterday where the guy got terrifically excited and he said he felt like he was a rocket Mm-hm.

Second male voice: Pshew—like a rocket.

Yeah, sure. Well, this advance in technique of stabilizing the person in a pleasurable sexual moment—mind you, that means that you have to postulate that this is going to work in the case; you’re going to have to be able to find this pleasurable sexual incident. You shoot the patient back then to the sperm sequence and we run it. No pain on it, we run it anyhow Now, don’t be surprised if he comes up with an incident just before that is painful. Don’t be surprised. Because after all, you’ve got about, sometimes as long as two days, haven’t you? Something like that, before.

Male voice: Well, they found a sixty-hour embryo—sixty hours after conception. At that time it was two cells.

Mm-hm.

Second male voice: Ron, mentioning this thing this pleasurable sexual moment, use it going back to the sperm dream . . .

Evidently it just establishes the mood on the thing. The theory behind it—been kicking around for a while—is you turn on one type of emotion in a case and—you turn on rage in the case and you can find a rage engram. And you turn on a pleasurable sexual engram and you’ll find the sperm sequence.

Second male voice: Ron, where you have an occlusion on sexual pleasure, what the deuce would be at the bottom of that then?

Non-coitus chain, I should say.

Second male voice: Huh?

You may have an occlusion on all pleasure. What do you do? You go to Step Three. That’s right. I’m going to take that up in a moment.

Now, we start in the basic area and proceed to present time, erasing all engrams on the way and we keep at it until we have a Release or a Clear.

You’re going to find that as you go along you’re going to strike mis-filings occasionally. Find yourself soaring way up into the bank, unable to proceed with the erasure. Well, the file clerk has to give you, instead of the next moment in sequence, he has to give you some later moment which has tied up some of the early material. Well, you run that. But don’t let anything persuade you to run postpartum as a natural consequence of Dianetics. The incidents you’ll find later have got plenty of dynamite and tension on them. And after you get the tension out of them and you take the charge off of them, then you’ll get back early again.

Furthermore, the way you do this thing is to get from the earliest to the latest, erasing as you go. Keep up that erasing, that’s important. And you can just go up the track on a case that’s working well like you’re climbing a ladder.

Now, the third part of Step Two is: if the case bogs down—now, the fellows been working rather well—if the case bogs down, first you try for an emotional discharge. The file clerk is not very handy at handing out emotional discharges. And an emotional discharge might have become available while you were running the basic area. You might have run out a “don’t cry” or “I’ve got to control myself” or something down in the basic area or up the track someplace, and this was what was suppressing emotion.

Now, in other words, any time the case stops we just go into Step Three. We start Step Three all over again. That is to say, if we don’t get an emotional discharge, we go into Step Three at this point. Case stops working, or erasure stops, try for that emotional discharge; we don’t get that either, go into Step Three.

Now, this is the way you repair a case at any moment that it comes along, is Step Three. [gap] In Step Three we knock out demon and valence commands. That is the setup on the third step. That is what is important in it.

Now, mind you, the first time we picked this up up the line up here was—we tried to free the patient on the track, we couldn’t free him on the track and so forth on down the line. These are all marked in this outline. We’ll go over this outline. You’ll get used to it after you’ve gone over it a few times.

Now, the first thing we do is to put the preclear on a straight line memory and look for demon commands and valence commands in his memory. You try to remember his parents and possible allies and antagonists and so forth, we try to get him to remember, and we start knocking stuff out of a case on a straight memory basis.

Furthermore, if his sense of reality is poor we start in this Step Three too. Only what we start in there with Step Three is we try to find out what made his sense of reality poor and see if we can connect up with it. We’re asking him—you’ve seen me do this often and you know this method, based on the proposition that if a person believes something about himself or thinks something about himself or fails to believe in himself or fails to believe in reality, one of these things, somebody’s told him so—he’s overheard that, it’s in the engram bank. So whatever we find him saying that would lead us to believe he—for instance . . . We’re not taking it back to everything he says is engramic. There are people around here—Carl, the other night was telling me somebody had evidently been working him on the basis of every time he says, “I’ll lie down now,” they say, “Oh! Engram! Let’s go over that.” And then he says, “Well, I don’t think anybody else said that. I thought I was trying to say, I’ll lie down.” “Ah, run that. Run that.” And he says, “But all I’m trying to do is talk with you.” And somebody says, “Go over that!” (laughter) This is not good operation. However, we ask him what he’s thinking about, what he thought of his mother, what he thought of his father. And by the way, normally what he thinks of his mother and so on, a lot of this is actual, just his concept of it. But in too many cases it was what Mama thought of Papa and told the youngster he should think about Papa and so on. It’s a tangled picture with regard to this. But you can knock out enough locks on straight memory.

You would be amazed how, in working straight memory hour after hour on a patient, you can get along on this. I’ve done this in the past line, somehow or other. And recently when we suddenly picked this thing up into view and dusted it off and looked it over and said, “Gee-whiz, this damn thing is important,” why, we’ve been starting things that have been badly bogged. We’ve been getting information that was hitherto denied and so on. We’re going good on this. That’s why we can call this “Standard Procedure” and leave it this way for a while and go off into chemical research. So on this straight memory we’re trying to find out things about his life. Now, the second step of Step Three, the second part of it is to put the preclear in reverie—see, we’ve tried to find things out and we’ve tried to find out possible dramatizations and so forth—now we put him in reverie and we try to establish demon commands and valence commands by looking for and running dramatizations of parents, or his own dramatizations, as engrams.

There are several little tricks that you can use here that are very neat. For instance, let’s take him back to a time when he’s having a fight with his wife. What did his wife say that really affected him? What was the moment that he suddenly took off and chopped her head off with an axe? What was it? What was the exact phrase?

Now we can run through that engram which is maybe an engram or maybe just a light lock and we’ll find out what triggered it. And you say, “Yup, this fellow will go off like a rocket when somebody says, ‘You boob, you’re no good’ to him.” Or he goes off when somebody says, “Do you like strawberries?” Whatever the phrase is that we suddenly find him taking off on, you know darn well that that’s a restimulative phrase. So we just put him in reverie and try to establish demon commands and valence commands by running dramatizations of parents and so forth, or of himself, as engrams. We use repeater to reach and reduce the first engram containing this command. In other words, we’re looking for a “control yourself” Straight down the line we’re looking for nothing but “control yourself, control yourself” We’re trying to find the first time it appeared or the time that appeared which would show up an engram that has to be deintensified. We may find a “control yourself” well up the bank in something and find him wriggling all over the place. And if this engram looks hot, don’t content yourself with just taking the charge off “control yourself.” This engram looks hot like you can do something about the thing, run the whole engram.

Now, on the basis of demon circuitry, the file clerk has an interposition between himself and “I” The material is not coming through. Now, that may be just an occlusion demon; as such, it is serious enough. But it may be a lie factory; that’s a little more serious. But the only way, actually, that the patient can escape from under your Dianetic desire to have him cleared is to have a “control yourself” engram or some species thereof. Now, that is a whole species and that’s what you shoot for.

Now, if you’re examining this case and you went up above there and the file clerk started to hand you playing cards or model trains or you started to read in tapes or some damn foolishness like this and you weren’t getting any material and you really couldn’t run any engrams, this person is probably out of valence and you’ve got demon circuitry on the subject “control yourself” Furthermore, if this patient complains to you about your altitude, don’t worry about your altitude, look for the “control yourself” demon circuits. The “I’ll have to handle this myself” demon circuits and so forth. Knock those out.

Now, some people may object to having that great, needful, glorious, absolutely invaluable “control yourself” mechanism knocked out. What they do not appreciate is the fact that if a demon circuit exists in the mind which says “control yourself,” the chances of “I” controlling the organism are reduced.

In other words, the person who had the most severe “control yourself” engram would be that person who controlled himself the least in society because “I” is setting himself up as a demon circuit and he is actually overriding—that is, the “I”—it’s the false “I” over here which is overriding what the person really wants.

It’s actually somebody else in there controlling himself. Yet you’ll sometimes find this person telling you these remarkable things. But of course they’re part of “control yourself” mechanism. “If you don’t learn to control yourself and if you can’t control yourself, you know what’s going to happen to you. Nobody will have anything to do with you and nobody will like you. And now, Reginald . . .” That’s all part of the “control yourself” yak.

Female voice: Oh, is it also a “control yourself’ if there is a valence party involved in which that person s valence said, “I have to do this my self” or does that always have to be part of the person himself?

Well look, I think very possibly the chances of your getting a “control yourself” mechanism—well, by the way, I’ve noticed that; I checked myself on that: I know of cases which are not in valences which yet had a “control yourself” demon circuit.

Female voice: Yes. But that would be a “you” control, wouldn’t it?

That’s right.

Female voice: Well, but suppose if—I’ll be very direct—I think in my mother’s valence, I have a very definite “I have to do this myself” You will also have the “control yourself” engram present.

Female voice: In the other one?

Yeah, the carbon copy of the valence is also supported by the existence of the “control yourself” engram. So you’ve got two of them at work.

Female voice: Ah, the other one I haven t found yet.

Yeah. There’s two things at work there. In other words, this “control yourself” mechanism which interposes in there makes it very rough and this causes this sort of a thing. “The somatic strip will now go to a bouncer,” and the fellow gives you a denyer.

Or, “The file clerk will give us the next engram which we need to resolve this case.” And the fellow will say, “You know, I think we had better run that . . .” I didn’t mean to look at anybody now . . . (laughter) “I think we had better run that late-life emotion there that had to do with my losing my crystal condenser.” And at this moment you say, “Yup. ‘Control yourself mechanism.” Because the file clerk doesn’t put forth conversation. If he’s working, the preclear goes in to work and . . . By the way, you’re now working pretty close with basic personality and you want to get a job done. It isn’t the fact that he is now less able to control himself but the fact that he is more cooperative on the subject. And he is actually more self-deter mined. But he can now exercise the self-determinism of “I want to get rid of this pain.” That’s the self-determinism which he’s exercising now. So you say to this person, “The file clerk will now give us the incident which we need to resolve this case.” The file clerk doesn’t stall around or get upset or worried about the thing. He just, bang, you’ve got an incident.

You may not recognize it as an incident. You may want something spectacular to happen and you may think that it’s necessary for the instant the file clerk hands you something that you should see fireworks. No, hm-mm. Maybe the person is out of valence and the file clerk is still working very nicely. Don’t expect to see fireworks.

These people who come around and say, “I have been working for over six hours in therapy and we have not yet reached the prenatal area and I just think this is just terrible,” and so forth. What’s happening there is the person probably wants fireworks of some sort and isn’t using this trick, this mechanism. “The somatic strip will go to the first part of the engram.” Now, the person may be out of valence at that moment; a lot of things may be wrong. And they say, “Well now, all right, all right. What do you see? What do you feel?” The poor preclear, he doesn’t see or feel anything. The file clerk may have cooperated.

What you want here now is the flash phrase technique. This will bring that thing through. This will push it the rest of the way through. “When I count from one to five, the first phrase will flash into your mind: one-two-three-four-five.” Now, it may be the somatic strip will give you the first phrase which can be reached. Don’t say you want the first phrase which can be reached, but it may be that this is all the phrase you’re going to get. There may be six phrases before this, but the somatic strip can only give you this phrase at this moment. So, “one-two-three-four-five,” (snap) and a phrase will occur to this person. Run that phrase; it’s the right one. You run it a few times and all of a sudden the somatic will start to turn on and then you run the engram. But the engram is right there waiting on these people who say, “We just can’t reach anything in the prenatal area.” They’ve asked the file clerk, he’s probably presented trays full of engrams and nobody then took them. So finally after a while he says, “To hell with this jerk.” [gap] Now, the next point then. You’ve gotten your engram; you want that engram, you’ve got it. Okay You run this engram and you will find out if you’re running in the basic area the person will more or less automatically slip into his own valence, more or less automatically will do so. You don’t have to keep pestering him about it. And if you pull this trick you’re doing him a disservice, this little trick here: he starts to cry, getting off an emotional discharge that’s part of a painful engram or something like that, and he starts to cry because Mama was crying at the moment. And you say at that moment, “Go into your own valence.” He wasn’t crying but you still leave the charge on Mama’s valence. You follow me?

Female voice: Yes. So don’t interrupt that spill of tears or that spill of emotion or rage or anything else just because he isn’t in his own valence at that moment. This thing is being run this way because it has to be run this way. And you run the tension off of that valence and if there’s another valence —now, you know there’s probably another valence there—you coax him to pick up the other valence and then he will start running one valence and the other valence, and then as these deintensify—suddenly in many cases he will settle down quietly without any more ado into his own valence and he’ll run the engram on his own valence.

There is why and when sonic turns on in the basic area. He suddenly goes into his own valence. It’ll happen automatically. I used to do this on an automatic process. I was not quite aware of the mechanism taking place. It got results.

Female voice: Ron, if there isn’t any emotional display while a person would be in another valence, is it then all right to endeavor, by asking him what the other side of the conversation is, to try and, in effect, get him in his own?

Well, if he can run the engram—let me lay this down as a principle—if he can run the engram at all in the basic area, the first couple of times through, regardless whose valence he’s in, don’t disturb him on the subject.

Female voice: Even if it isn’t an emotional . . .

Yeah, you may not get any emotional discharge. Run him in that valence, any valence he’s in, a couple of times; you don’t care. But if he’s then not showing any great desire to go into his own valence and these others are not tense, his own may be tense.

Now, at this moment, rather than ask the person to “go into your own valence” at this point; he may be confused, he may be a junior case, and don’t ask him to go into his own valence because his own valence is Papa’s valence and somebody else’s valence, because anyhow, it’s Grandma who’s present . . .

Just ask him to see if he can contact the tactile of moisture. That’s a slickeroo because that is the one his own valence is in. And if he searches around and starts to contact moisture, he’s then damn well in his own valence without any further monkey business about it. So he’ll go into his own valence and he’ll run it in his own valence and you’ll get that moisture perceptic off and then you’ve got the engram in full.

Male voice: Sometimes I notice, Ron, you get a peculiar effect Very often a person will be rolling through something in somebody else’s valence, let’s say Mama, and very often Mama coughs so the person will cough.

Right.

Male voice: And in between each cough if you say, “Roll the cough again” it develops into one cough, then a yawn, then one cough, then a yawn, and the yawn is still rolling through the cough as . . .

Oh sure.

Male voice: . . . right after she rolls out, bang, they’re in their own valence.

That’s right. Another trick is, “Now, let’s catch her coughing. Let’s pick up her cough,” something like that, which a person, in order to pick up Mama’s cough has to slide over. This will resolve itself. You’ve got an automatic helper at work here.

I imagine nine-tenths of the auditing errors which are being made are being made because one is not trusting the automatic quality of his auditing tools. Because this thing is pretty automatic.

Female voice: Wouldn’t you let them continue to cough, then, Ron?

I generally set it down, if he coughs the fourth time through, something like that, this thing is too late. Let’s get a . . .

Female voice: Too late?

Yeah. Let’s get an earlier cough if that’s possible. Or if there’s a holder in that, something of the sort, I’ll run it out in Mama’s valence. Maybe he stays in Mama’s valence but I at least get some tension out of the thing.

Now, the fact of the matter is that when you get into the basic area people start to yawn. I never saw a sperm that yawned. But you can yawn it off as a sperm. Now, there is oxygenation in a yawn. A yawn has certain physiological characteristics. Never saw anybody doing coitus that really enjoyed it that was yawning. It just checks out that a yawn is a release of the body and it’s hand in . . .

Female voice: So is a yawn. So is a sneeze. Isn’t that right?

You better watch out or I’ll run the words “What a relief” Female voice: Don’t get any reaction, (laughs) Yeah . . .

Male voice: Ron, we might put it this way. You never get a basic area engram to lift without yawns.

Yeah.

Male voice: But you do get them to lift without coughs.

Yeah. That’s right.

Female voice: Oh, is that true?

Yeah, that’s true.

Female voice: It never lifts without yawning. I didn’t know that. Thank you.

Second male voice: What about a deep sigh? I got a lot of deep sighs yesterday but no yawns in a certain case.

Sighs—I hate to pass a stet6 opinion on this—but on the matter of a sigh, it seems like a sigh accompanies grief. You watch a person and his chest will start heaving a little bit when he’s getting near grief that he isn’t getting rid of. And he’ll sigh and (sigh) so on, nothing’s happening.

Male voice: That wouldn’t be equivalent to a yawn then?

No. Maybe the yawn is a physiological muscle tension release.

Male voice: Another thing too about this sighing though—that’s an indication of a bouncer.

Yeah. Yeah, but it’s also an indication of grief. And it’s also an indication of Mama sighing. He might be dramatizing Mama in that. I ran into one case that did yawn—here’s the data that fits this together: as John said, you never get one off the basic area without yawns, never, but you can get them off without coughs. Now, you run into coughs, you will find when the patient coughs, a cough is present.

Well now, one time I ran into a patient whose mama was a great yawner. She did a great deal of yawning. And the case got complicated because you’d strike at almost anyplace in the bank, why, Mama was yawning. She never got enough sleep and she just had to yawn all the time and when we got this off the case the person was much happier. The person had been going around wide-awake doing an awful lot of yawning too.

Male voice: You are considering that yawning is engraphic?

Yeah, at that moment, yawning was engraphic. Mama talked about yawning; it was a command somatic. I wasn’t talking about it being engraphic.

Male voice: But if it compares with an injury through a yawn . . .

No, but here’s the point I’m making. Mama is talking. It’s a command somatic. “Oh dear, well there’s another yawn, I just can’t—keep on yawning.” (yawn) Female voice: Well, wouldn’t a yawn produce enough interabdominal pressure . . .

No. If you really want to see something that produces a honey, an interabdominal pressure, it’s a hiccup. And Mama can go into a spell of hiccups, and I had one patient who did all kinds of hiccups. This patient all her life had been getting hiccups and more hiccups. She’d get startled or something and she’d get hiccups. And she would lie down to go to sleep and she’d get hiccups. Practically anything she did she’d get hiccups. And that’s exactly what the engram said. And all the way through the whole prenatal bank Mama was having hiccups. And people would rush in, very sympathetic you see, “Oh dear, what can we do for these hiccups? Poor Isabel.” And they’d rush in, “Now get a glass of water. Now count from one to ten.” I often wondered on this patient as I was trying to hypnotize her (because this was very early in the case and I was using her also for research)—I’d count from one to ten in an effort to install a pain shut-off and then see how it acted and I’d get a case of hiccups. And finally I concluded there must be some hiccups someplace in the engram.

If the patient is crying because Mama was crying—I’ve had somebody sitting there crying, boo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, right straight along and say, “Somebody’s crying; I don’t know who it is but it’s not me. Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo. These aren’t my tears. Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo.” Male voice: Well, that’s not getting charge off the valence there, as such.

No. No. But it’s getting charge off of the engram.

Male voice: I mean that’s still running the engram.

Sure.

Male voice: In his own valence.

Sure. Now get the patient into his own valence after a few boo-hoos. But let him cry that valence out. Don’t shake a patient up or annoy him. If you notice what you’re doing is annoying the patient—for instance, if you’re running an engram, even though it’s a long engram and this patient has the characteristic of not liking to be interrupted in the middle of an engram to go back to the beginning of it, let him run to the end of the engram. If the patient is talking very, very slowly, very painfully slowly, don’t try to speed up his conversation. If he’s talking too fast, don’t slow him down. If he’s talking in too low tone of voice, don’t try to pick up his voice tone.

In other words, don’t add a “control yourself” mechanism into this engram. Because if you do, you won’t get the rest of the engram. That is strictly a matter of exterior control which you’re throwing in there now. And you’re not going to get the results which you should.

That’s quite important. It will interrupt a case, will upset a person and so forth. Might even be considered a breach of the Auditor’s Code. I don’t care if the patient is running an engram and he starts in at the beginning of it and he’s saying, “(mumble, mumble, mumble).” “Go over it again.” He will, too. Perhaps on the third or fourth run, why, he’ll finally come out and you find out he’s reciting something out of Tennyson. But at the same time you’re getting an engram.

Male voice: After this engram has been recounted several times, is it all right then to ask for a slight speedup or . . . ?

Hnvmm. It’s never all right; never.

Second male voice: You can ask him to let you know what he’s saying, cant you, at that point, after you’ve gone over it several times?

What do you want to know for? Just curious?

Second male voice: Sometimes it’s helpful to get an idea of what the particular . . .

I said after about three runs if the patient is doing this, it’ll come clearer. [gap] All right. John runs off engrams, he goes downhill, downhill, downhill, rrr, rrrr, rrmmm, mmmr. He thinks he’s talking. When he gets to the end of the run he’ll go back over it again. And you’ll notice that there’s a peculiarity at work here—and let me make a mention of this—a peculiarity at work.

Here is the unconsciousness of the engram. [marking on blackboard] We start it out at the beginning up here someplace and we start to run it and the patient will start running in through the thing. When he really starts getting down into the engram and he’s actually running the thing solidly, he is being affected by the unconsciousness in this engram.

He may start out running the engram, “Oh, that’s my mother’s voice. She’s saying, ‘Oh, I don’t believe I would like any, thank you very much.’” But a little bit later he may add some, “Yeah, that’s what she’s saying.” “Now, what’s your father saying?” “Oh, he’s saying ‘To hell with you.’” The next time he goes through, well, “Thank you very much, I mmmr mmmm.” And then he’ll go through, “Mmmr mmmm.” And he thinks he’s talking out loud. “And now rrrrmm rmmm-mmm . . .” He goes through it again, his voice picks up a little stronger, and his voice will pick up a little bit stronger and then his voice will pick up nice and strong. He’s telling you all about it.

Now, if at the moment his voice dies out you say, “Now, what did you say? What did you say? Now, a little louder, please. Now, go over it again. Now, what was that phrase?” and so forth, you’re talking to a patient who is whaaa. And his analyzer’s off and he’s going to have to actually rouse himself out of the engram in order to give you any information. So, you want to know what’s in that engram, keep running it until you can hear it.

Male voice: Excuse me, Ron, sometimes when the charge is running off—on a woman, and the words become softer, softer and softer and they kind of die out.

Mm-hm. Well, that’s particularly when you’re running a psychotic. They may even get down to a point where you can take your fingers out of your ears, (laughter) Second male voice: In reference to speeding up the somatic strip, might it be possible to say that when you find a patient running through periods of unconsciousness, in other words, completely revivifying, minute by minute, you can control the somatic strip by . . .

I’d take over the time factor on him. You must be wary of using this technique so that you don’t upset him. But you can take over the time factor. If he’s trying to give you a contraction every fifteen minutes, you can say, “Now the next contraction is coming. Now the next one. Now the next one’s coming.” And you’ll find out (clap, clap, clap, clap) all of a sudden you’re hammering him through birth on that basis. But do it on a time shift basis. “All right. The somatic strip will go to the next somatic. (pause) The next. (pause) The next contraction; the next.” And you’re taking those fifteen-minute periods and knocking them out.

By the way, if that’s birth, if the contractions are that far apart, the middle content is usually very unaberrative. It’s when you get right down to the end and they’re just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang on the child that it becomes very rough. [gap] Don’t ever try to contract the somatic strip by saying so. The fellow may have an engram about there being no time and so on, and you can knock it out of the case so that all the engrams will close down and get balled up. So the less orders you give the patient and the less you have to say to him in general, the happier you’re going to be and the more engrams you’re going to get. Be very economical with what you say. Put what you say mostly on a question basis. “Is this the first engram of this kind in the case?” (snap) “Yes.” “How old are you?” (snap) You’ll have the most luck when you are assuming blandly, cockily, that the somatic strip is operating with you perfectly. You assume that it’s operating with you perfectly. Don’t give him, for instance, questions which seem to be questioning whether or not the somatic strip is there or what it is doing, like, “Now, is this really the right one? Are you sure this is the right one? Now, do you know that this is it? Uh-huhhh, uh-huh . . . Well—well, let’s try it again anyway.” At this moment, why, the file clerk says, “Well, I haven’t got any bazooka here, but I wish I did.” Male voice: If you pick a person up and say, “What’s the first phrase that comes to your mind?” and he gives it to you, does that mean his somatic strip is at some point . . . ?

I wouldn’t do that to you, buddy. Give me the first phrase that comes to your mind.

Male voice: Get out All right. How old are you?

Male voice: Seventeen.

I see. “Get out” was part of that. Is “get out” part of it?

Male voice: I think probably, yes.

Second male voice: What do you do in the case, Ron, where you got a person s running an engram, say it’s when they’re sick as a baby and Mom comes in and starts washing their face with a cold washcloth and there doesn’t appear to be any holders or anything in it but it just feels so darn good, they just want to stay there?

It’s latched up on something that makes this the computation. But I have seen people go around to various parts of the time track and be having such a good time they don’t want to leave. Someone’s run somebody and tried to pull him out of eating a lobster dinner, the guy got mad. (laughter) Third male voice: Ron, this business of leaving a patient alone, that’s sometimes a little difficult to do in a foreign language case because if you run the foreign language right along he might pass some other incident, so you have to check . . .

That’s right. But a foreign language case has usually got a built-in translator. He isn’t just being cooperative. There’s a built-in translator circuit between the two languages. And he has to go out and run off the other language for you all the time. Now, that’s an educational circuit. It’s built-in. And when the engram itself was being reevaluated in the new language in which he’s speaking you’ve got a circuit right along with it. So he’ll run it off bilingually, usually automatically. If he does not run it off bilingually, with two languages, there is something awfully wrong about this case. Mr. St. Georges is a case in point. He runs it off in French and won’t give you the hot dope. And then he says there wasn’t any engram there. Mama had her secrets.

Male voice: If you re working on that, if you get the preclear who’s never spoken the language, it was only spoken while Mama was pregnant, will this built-in translator still exist?

No. But in St. Georges’ case he learned both languages. You mean, you’re wondering whether or not you’re ever going to get to the Chinese?

Male voice: No, the French.

The French. Yeah, there’s a lot of languages that exist down in the track that way but I think they’ll come through. In a case like this you just really have to have a hell of a hard push on turning the guy’s sonic on. Now, those are not engramic commands if they have never been reanalyzed. So they are just sounds. So if the person never spoke the language, he has no indication of what is there, these certain sounds may mean a certain pain to him. But beyond that they haven’t been analyzed out by the analyzer.

As a result, the engramic content of them is not going to make the patient do anything. But if he learned the words later on in high school or something of the sort, he’s liable to do a reanalysis of them. At which moment, as he runs them, he will tell you what they are and what they mean.

The little kid who’s been in China up to the age of five, for instance, and he can still run that basic area in Chinese. He knew it. As he runs it, gradually it’ll return. Joe had a Dr. Weininger talking Yiddish that he could no longer remember anything about, in about a half an hour. It’s not too tough.

Yeah?

Second male voice: In the case where you get somebody running an engram which has no or very few real words with it, long sections with no words, is it a good idea to keep them a little jogged up on explaining what’s going on . . .

Mm-hm.

Second male voice: . . . so you can keep a check if they’re still running?

Sure, yeah. But you’ll find lots of engrams that are quiet. Well, you find lots of AAs that are completely silent outside of just the noises in the room, maybe the running of the bathroom water.

Male voice: You mean sometimes Mama doesn’t yak?

Everybody knows that when one is drunk his ears burn. That sort of thing. Yeah. That’s right, perfectly silent. Second male voice: Those are less aberrative though.

No great aberrative quality, but at the same time, every time one turns on the bathroom water on this guy he’s given a slight jump. I knew one fellow, by the way, who was very chary of showers. He must have had about twenty-five AAs in the bank and there wasn’t a word in any of them. Mama was all by herself, Papa was off, he never came home. She didn’t talk to very many people. Once in a while, you get the grocery—“Groceries!” Something like that. The thing had a few one-sided telephone conversations in it which were very puzzling. You run across them, there’s no dialogue in them. Finally you find out that Mama’s talking on a phone. But no AA chatter. The person was still quite aberrated because of these AAs. Because now there was no warning.

Female voice: No what?

No warning at all. You never knew at quite what moment; there was no signal. As a result, he never knew at what moment something horrible was going to happen to him. And I found these, by the way, by time shift, time shift only I knew there was something there in the bank. I couldn’t find out what it was. Repeater technique wouldn’t reach it, nothing would reach it. And finally did it on a time shift, “You are now one month, two days after conception; one month, three days after conception; one month, four days after conception; one month, five days after conception . . .” “Ouch!” And we got it. The somatic strip will run through any of this stuff on a time basis.

Male voice: A day is fine enough to go or do you ever . . . ?

Time of the day? Oh, sure. You sometimes have to fish around on it but, “At any time during the day that you had any pain,” you can give him this generalized command and then go up by date. That sort of thing. He’ll land on them.

This person, by the way, with all these quiet AAs was very, very spooky. Be standing with a back to a doorway or something like that. The doorway, symbol of entrance. And suddenly give a start and turn around. No sound. And, “What’s the matter?” “I felt something.” Well, there might have been some tiny re-stimulator. But it would be the restimuiator of a street noise or something like that. You know, very faint. Extended hearing clear to Halifax.

Now, we try to get the person’s valence computation, get it on a straight line proposition and so on, see what valence the person may be in. They might be in some very interesting valence that you don’t know anything about. Try to get by straight line who might have told them or commanded them into the valence. What were the parents’ quarrel on this subject? [gap] We’re just pointing up at this time an importance. It’s been reevaluated as being more important than before. This misidentification has been known in the field of mental healing for a long, long time. In Dianetics we have used this very consistently, straight on through. But it has not assumed the importance which it has assumed now. Because valence commands can be retroactive.

Joe and I had a lot of arguments about this proposition and so on. I’ve seen enough cases, done enough tests and so forth to indicate that a valence command, if held down by an emotional charge, can be retroactive. So the carbon copy can go all the way up and down the case, even though it might have occurred postpartum.

In other words, putting the person over into that valence is very definitely retroactive in command. So you want to break the valence commands where you can find them. Mamas the world over are prone to say, “Oh, you’re just like your mother; you’re just like your father. You are . . .” And I ran into one, now, I mention this again, where the command was, “You’re so different from me. I can’t understand it but you’re so different from me. You aren’t like me at all.” And we got this fancy tale out of the case at the beginning of therapy: that Mama had attempted to commit suicide when the child was six years of age and had been asked, “Well, what about your three children?” And she said, “To hell with the children.” Now, boy, this—this was a long time ago in Dianetics and I was more willing to buy a nonengramic situation and less into the actual anatomy of an engram. And as a result I thought, “Well gee, you know, that’s natural as hell; she says ‘to hell with the children,’ and so forth, that’s why there’s all this rejection, why this person will not be like Mama.” So I was willing to buy this, fool that I was. And I went plowing along in the case and I couldn’t understand it. This person would not cook, would not sew, wouldn’t prepare any parties for her own children, wouldn’t do anything that Mama did. So I went back and, “You’re so different from me,” you know; beating, and “You’re so different from me. You’re not like me at all.” More beatings and that sort of thing on this line. And the child was out, bounced not only out of Mama’s valence but out of everything Mama could do. And it was very interesting. The child was unable then to mimic what Mama could do and all of her domestic life was around Mama’s mimicry. So Mama couldn’t be mimicked and as a result, the woman was a terribly bad setup and a very bad liability as a wife; very bad.

As a matter of fact, her husband was practically in tears most of the time, and she was so bewildered about it. She would go in with the best of intentions, she was going to do something domestic. Mama, for instance, used to go down and help Papa at the office. And so she couldn’t do any typing. All of this sort of thing adding up to it, she couldn’t help her husband. She couldn’t, oh, my God. Just out of that one series of beatings.

Now, the beatings were taken up, “You’re so different from me, you’re not like me at all,” and that sort of thing—when those things were knocked out of the case there was a marked change in the case. Even then, fool that I was, I didn’t realize the tremendous importance of this valence command. This, by the way, left this person a little bit off of the sonic track. She had just skidded away from her own valence because the circuitry after all did say that “you’re not like me.” Well, me was me. And so that there was just a slight skid off of that but not into anything else, because not another person in the case said, “You’re like me.” The second somebody had said somewhere on that bank, “You’re just like me . . .” Instead of that—Papa meant the same thing but it didn’t go that way into engrams. “You’re a chip off the old block.” That’s not an engramic statement because it can’t be literally translated. She was a chip off the old block; she used to worry about being trees. That’s right, she did. So there was no call into the valence.

Now, these valences are pretty easy to discover, very easy to discover because they seldom have bouncers, denyers or any of the rest of the category connected with them. It’s just a matter of: “You’re just like me. You’re just like your Uncle Oscar. Why aren’t you more like little Edmund? Now, he is a nice boy. He is a nice boy and you’re such a bad boy. Why aren’t you more like Edmund?” that sort of thing. That’s typical valence commandary.

Female voice: Is it true that the name is a stimulus?

Oh, yes, Joe and I had a hell of a good laugh down in Washington there. A couple that lived next door to the place we were working in, had children all over the place and all was going along beautifully and smoothly and their name was Love. And . . .

Male voice: What about the name Haight?

Yeah, that’s an interesting name. That’s—people’s names get into the bank. Never suppose they don’t. You run across this situation: the fellow’s lying back in a dentist’s chair and somebody has taken him up there to be worked on and the person who’s taken him up there to be worked on is being questioned by the clerk or the nurse, “What is his name?” “His name is Jones.” And then, “What was it?” “William P. Jones.” This guy is out like a light and has a tooth about half pulled. “William P. Jones. Now, spelled with a J. J—Jones. Jones. William P. That’s right. Now, he’s twenty-eight years of age. That’s right. Born on . . .” and so on. “Now, his address is . . . Yeah, he’s a Private First Class. Mm-hm, that’s right, that’s right. Oh, he has lots of this tooth trouble. Yes, he’s had this tooth trouble for some time now. And he’s had a lot of trouble with his teeth.” And by taking up the information right there within hearing of the patient, you get this. And you’ll sometimes get in an operation, in a tonsillectomy or something: “Whose boy is this?” “Oh, this is Bill Snide’s boy.” “Oh, old Snide. He’s a son of a bitch, isn’t he?” Yeah. You get that sort of thing all up and down the bank. The name keeps appearing. As a result, with the name appearing in engrams you can sometimes make up a word out of the thing, like, “I am hurt.” “I am hurt.” In Jim Hurt’s case, his name is a terrible liability.

Female voice: Or an inversion, you could say—someone could be saying there in a moment of unconsciousness, “Hate is terrible.” Couldn’t that go into the bank then? And that might, in analysis, be translated as H-a-i·g-h-t.

Mm-hm. Sure. Oh well, hell, yes. “He rode a horse” and “he rowed a horse.” Yeah, “he rowed a horse.” Reactive bank statement.

Female voice: We had a fire on Sunday and by God, the fireman who came up said his name was Burn, (laughter) Yeah.

You know, they keep bringing these things up in . . . (a student coughs loudly and repeatedly) Come up to present time, (pause) Come on. Come up to present time, (coughing stops) How old are you?

Male voice: Six.

Now, you can remember when you were six. (pause) They keep bringing it up in Ripley’s “Believe It Or Not” and such places, these names like “Buryam” is an undertaker. And they don’t see that there is a reverse twist on this thing that has a tendency to make it inevitable. Mr. Killem, for instance, would have quite a liability there. I imagine he’d become a psychiatrist. Well . . . (laughter) All right. Let me go on to the last step on this Standard Procedure.

After you’ve run the valences, dramatizations and so forth, straight memory and returned them to it and gotten your material and you’ve reduced the first engram containing this command or the first available one, you’ve deintensified the case on the valence level or on the circuitry, then you try for an emotional discharge, a moment of grief, sorrow or loss and you keep repeating Step Three. This is Step Three until the case is opened and engrams are running.

You just try it down the line, you try it down the line again. You start out with straight memory, you try to get dramatizations, you try to run the dramatization, you try to find the engram. And you’re not getting anyplace with it and you finally get down to the bottom of it. You may get a little something off of it but the case isn’t running.

All right. Let’s go back up and get the guy with his eyes wide open again and let’s give him straight memory technique, find some more data, get down into the bank, run the dramatizations, run the first engrams we can discover on this subject. We can just keep running his Step Three here over and over until we’ve got enough on this case to bust it loose. And when we bust it loose, we go back up to Step Two and we go through Step Two again and when we’ve gotten it broken on circuitry or valence commands—Step Two includes putting him in reverie and running pleasure incidents, tuning up his perceptics and so on—and we go on and run the case. And we run the case as far as we can. If the case bogs down, we go immediately into Step Three again. We may find breaks of the Auditor’s Code. We may find all sorts of things in this case. But that’s the best way to find it and start running them.

These things are going to be corrected and printed up and they will be available for you tomorrow. Meantime, that is the standard technique, you’re going to get away with it. If you can’t solve them this way, why, too bad.

Okay.