Straight Memory Tone Scales (501127)
Date: 27 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
All straight memory is based on these computations: that an aberree is repetitive, in that the aberree, in dramatizing an engram, will not dramatize it only once but will ordinarily dramatize it many times so that you get an apparent consistency there of statement from an aberree.
This has often been mistaken for personality and was used by Charles Dickens 100 percent as characterization. Dickensonian characterization, of course, depended upon picking up out of some individual that he met in the streets of London some dramatization and then causing the individual throughout the story to repeat this dramatization very often. And this was characterization and this was literature.
The point here is that if an aberree has an engram which is keyed in, he can count on dramatizing it many times. Therefore, if we find Mama saying, “I am a goat,” we can be sure that Mama has probably said many times, “I am a goat.” The aberrated pattern of the parents reexpresses itself in a varied pattern in the child.
In straight memory, then, what we want to find is the first key-in of the engram. We may find the engram being dramatized many times by Mama during the childhood of our preclear, but there was a first time. If we can find that first time by straight memory and recall it in full view, with full memory in the preclear, we will knock out the key-in of the engram.
Straight memory has this additional benefit: anything which is actually remembered is validated to the preclear. This is not true of something he picks up on the track in reverie; that is not necessarily validated. He can run an engram with sonic and visio and still be unsure of the fact of whether it ever happened or not. But if he can be caused to remember, by straight line memory, the incident, one can be fairly sure that it will be validated to him. He will be aware of its reality. Straight memory has this advantage, then, of having a greater reality than running engrams themselves, normally.
The reason one might call it Straightwire or straight line is that the auditor is acting more or less as a telephone linesman: He is actually stringing wire. He is stringing the wire between “I” and the standard banks. He is stringing a wire there in such a way that material will become out of occlusion and into full view.
In Dianetics, straight memory is distinctly different from free association or any such technique because it is directed, it is controlled by the auditor. It is very precisely directed and controlled. The auditor must know the laws of operation of straight memory because they are very precise.
Now, knowing these things, the auditor can recover the exact material, the specific material which is assisting the aberration in the preclear and which is the material of the supercharge on the bank. He’s lightening up the charge on the bank and toughening up and making bigger the “I” of the individual.
This has about as much to do with free association as ice skating has to do with running a streamliner. The point here is controlled memory. The auditor is actually stringing communication line between the preclear s “I” and the preclear’s standard bank and is recovering moments of the past which, when recovered, will be valid to the preclear, and their recovery will take some of the charge off of the case and restore attention units to “I.” This technique, on about 20 percent of the chronic somatics which it reaches, will actually knock out these chronic somatics—in about 20 percent of the cases. This figure is the same figure as psychoanalysis finds.
Psychoanalysis, in free association, occasionally stumbled into a straight memory technique and, stumbling into it, was able to recover attention units to “I,” just like that. That’s why free association works. And if you want to go on and free associate for five or ten years with the preclear, by free association, that’s all right but it can better be done in fifteen or twenty minutes in Dianetics. If you’re going to get it by straight memory and if you’re going to improve this person by straight memory, you will be able to do it rapidly by knowing these various laws.
Now, I’m not talking against free association; that was the best they had. Free association offered itself up as a technique, I looked for the push button which had to do in free association. I knew there was something in free association which would suddenly bring about a release, a changed aspect of the preclear. And looking over free association and knowing about engrams, I tried to find what factors there were in free association that matched it up, and the results of those factors are straight line memory You can accomplish anything—and more—with straight line memory than can be accomplished by psychoanalysis and free association.
I want to demonstrate to you the difference of the technique. Straight memory is a very precisely refined technique which was built up because one figured, quite logically, that if he knew about engrams and knew the basic material of aberration, he could certainly devise a straight memory technique because he knew that there was a straight memory technique that occasionally worked. And trying to find out why it worked brought about the laws which are straight line memory.
You can go out into the society with straight line memory and with that alone, all by itself, make a terrific name for yourself on being able to knock out diseases and aberrations and everything else. But it is very pale compared to actually knocking out the engrams because it will only . . . [gap] . . . 25 percent of your aberrations in cases, for various reasons. But just by knowing that, you will be able to produce results. And being able to produce those results—they’re not mild results, either; they’re sometimes very spectacular. They will sometimes result in the shut-off of hay fever after you’ve worked on somebody for fifteen minutes. They have turned off three out of five cases of Parkinson’s disease, on an average, in the hands of a medical doctor in New York City.
In other words, if we just had straight memory all by itself we’d be very rich in terms of being able to administer therapy. I don’t want you to overlook it, then. The only reason I’m emphasizing it here is don’t overlook it as one of the tools of therapy; because there’ll be many patients that will come along that you won’t want to put into reverie, that you won’t want to have around for a lot of processing and so on. There will be many times when people around you are uncomfortable and you see no reason to put them down the track into reverie and go through this and that. You only want to spend five or ten minutes and cheer them up. You can: straight memory.
Quite ordinarily it turns off acute somatics. You can turn off little temporary somatics with straight memory in almost anyone. An acute somatic is one which has just taken place in the last day or so. That is to say, Bessie gets up this morning with a headache. She doesn’t ordinarily have headaches. And the auditor says so-and-so and so-and-so, just straight memory, and “Remember this and that” and so forth, and all of a sudden the headache’s gone. Now, that’s because it’s an acute somatic, very temporary. What it touches 20 to 25 percent of the time on the chronic somatic basis are somatics that are with a person year in and year out. In other words, this person has terrible migraine headaches; use straight memory on this, 20 percent of the migraine cases and so on, about 20 percent of them you’ll be able to turn them off with straight memory. But there’s 80 percent you won’t be able to touch. So straight memory has, as far as acute somatics are concerned, terrific value; as far as chronic somatics are concerned, a very limited value.
Now, it validates the material. Where straight memory goes wrong is in a case which has one set of personnel in the prenatal bank and early childhood and then another set from there on. A change of personnel in the early part of a person’s life will of course knock all this out because the new people that the person is with of course aren’t dramatizing the engrams which were laid in. And so you get a very strange selective pattern of restimulation. And such a case is not as easy to work, but straight memory still applies to this case; still applies, it’s just a little bit harder.
You get into the childhood, you start making the person remember things in childhood and you try to put the person into a dramatization of somebody’s dramatization. You tell him to go to the first time this occurred and you find yourself still in childhood. And you keep doing this and maybe this person didn’t know. And this is not unusual; quite common for somebody to have different parents, to have been raised in a foster home and not to have known it. People are very chary of telling children that UI am not your real papa and that’s not . . .” [gap] . . . they sort of let the kid coast on this way. Well, you’ll find it out as an auditor fast enough.
If this sort of thing happens, that your straight memory doesn’t do much for the person and that every time you get into an early dramatization in reverie, you try to skip down into the prenatal bank by running this dramatization you just get noplace—and you do this consistently and so on, you should start suspecting that the dramatic personnel of the prenatal area has altered after birth. It is very seldom that the mother is killed until after the child is born, so—but it is not too awfully rare for mothers to die in childbirth. It is getting more and more rare. The younger people that you treat, you won’t find this as many times as the older people that you treat.
Now, in working straight memory you are looking for very specific things. The preclear—all those nonoptimum thoughts the preclear has about himself, about society, about the future, about children, about mankind, are out of engrams—nonoptimum, non-survival thoughts. For instance, this fellow says, “I—I—I just know somehow I am doomed. I can’t face it. From day to day I’m just unable to face life. I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” and so forth. The auditor at this moment wants to know whose dramatization this is. And he tries not to be so blunt about it that he convinces his preclear that everything he thinks is bad, because an actual review of preclears will demonstrate quite adequately that oh, way up there, 90 percent of all the thinking and talking they do is not out of engrams. But these nonoptimum, worrisome things, these things with emotional connotations, so forth, they are out of engrams. And you’re trying to hunt those things down and pin them on somebody else. Or you’re trying to hunt down identities and pin them on somebody else.
This fellow, for instance, thinks of himself as a mean, rather wicked person and he doesn’t like himself for it. You’re going to try to find what valence he has been forced into unwillingly. Who was the person he thinks he is?
Now, one case of ulcers comes to mind immediately. This fellow who thought of himself as bossy, overbearing, rather mean . . . [gap] . . . very bad ulcers and stomach upsets. And by straight memory—I checked on this case, by the way, many months later—by straight memory over a period of one half of one hour we located the dramatization of his father concerning his stomach upset. Now actually, the pain—the actual hole in the stomach—was an administered injury of some sort. We didn’t bother to contact that; all we contacted was the fact that this was Papa’s dramatization. Papa used to stand around and worry about his stomach. We contacted that, and then we contacted a specific moment when Papa was worrying about his stomach, and then we contacted the earliest time that could be contacted when Papa was worrying about his stomach and this sequence, one, two, three—no ulcers. And months later, still no ulcers. He’d identified that part of the valence which he’d been forced into, and having identified that part of it, abandoned it immediately. Just differentiation and that was enough. So you see the power of just straight memory.
This person, by the way, was worked in reverie afterwards, and this stuff didn’t pick up again in reverie. Once in a while a valence shifter would get hit that would throw him into Papas valence, and he got everything that Papa had in the way of habits and so forth when he got thrown into Papa’s valence, but he didn’t afterwards get the ulcers or the stomach upset. This had belonged to Papa and did not belong to the individual himself Straight memory, then, individualizes a person by separating from him all the nonoptimum characteristics of the individuals around him. Differentiation—the analytical mind differentiates. If you can get a person to remember conditions about other people in his vicinity all during his life, differentiation has taken place. Engrams are built on identity thinking: A = A = A = A. This person has said, “I have a stomachache,” so the preclear has a stomachache. It’s a command somatic. If you can just make him remember who used to have stomachaches, there it is.
You’ll find somebody, for instance, when you’re locating circuitry. Oh, this straight memory is absolutely invaluable to locate circuitry. You’re trying to sort out circuitry and you say, “Well now, who used to say ‘control yourself in your family?” And the fellow will say brightly, “I did. I tell myself that all the time.” And you say, “All right. Well now, somebody else might have . . .” “Oh no, nobody else, just me.” And you say, “Well now, who . . .” Of course, if you go along the line just asking him the same question over again, maybe in a few days he’d finally fish up an answer but he’d probably get mad at you because you’re doing a contradiction with him, and you want to stay in affinity with him, you know, why, keep an agreement going. So now let’s ask, “Well, who was the most supercontrolled person in your vicinity when you were a child?” And sometimes you’ll get this: “Why, that was Mama!” “Well, what did Mama used to say?” “Well, she said so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so,” and all of a sudden, “She used to say, ‘Control yourself.’” “Can you remember a specific moment?”—because you’re trying to get up a lock, you see—a specific moment when Mama said “Control yourself.” And the preclear thinks and tries to postulate it. Now you help him out. You say, “Where was she standing?” You try to get the scene built up for him. “Where were you standing?” This person says, “Oh, I can’t remember a specific moment at all but I do know that she said it.” “Well, when she did say it—” see, you don’t take no for an answer— “when she did say it, where was she standing?” “Oh, she wasn’t standing; she was sitting. Yeah, Yeah, she was sitting.” “And where were you standing?” “I wasn’t standing either. I was sitting.” Now you’ve got the scene built up. “Well now, was it in the kitchen or the living room, or . . .” “Oh, it was the kitchen.” You’ve got the scene built up that far and all of a sudden you say, “Now, what exactly was she saying?” And “Oh, it’s something like ‘control yourself or something like that.” And then you go on and talk about something else for a moment, and all of a sudden the fellow may kick through with the lag; this thought has been quite a while coming through; all of a sudden say, “Oh, she used to say, ‘I can’t stand people who can’t control themselves.’ Yeah, that’s right.” Well, there is the source of a circuit. You’ve actually knocked out the efficacy of that circuit in that person’s mind by just making him remember it.
Yes?
Female voice: Can a “control yourself circuit be installed by example, without words?
No, I wouldn’t say so, not a serious one. A good, serious circuit takes the example and the words; it takes everything that’s there. There could be such a lock, and as such a lock, why, it might be of some efficiency. But you’ll find out that the real tough circuits take everything there is—that is to say, the mechanical aspects of the engram plus the statement.
Now therefore, you can see that in the use of straight memory you can accomplish quite a bit in the line of therapy. Your goal, however, is not so much accomplishing it in the line of therapy except in this wise: you’re trying to turn over to “I” the attention units which have been caught up in these locks. If you can turn enough of these attention units which have been caught up in these locks over to “I,” “I” will be able to move on the track, will be able to perceive better, will be able to interiorize instead of exteriorize, and so forth. It’s all a matter of getting charge off of this case. The first and easiest method of getting charge off of it is to pick up these locks by straight memory and break them. Now, the specific locks that are the worst offenders along the line are the affinity, reality, communication locks. And this, by the way, gives you a terrific amount of stuff that you didn’t have before in straight memory. You could have asked for this and that. There is more stuff here now that you can ask for.
A typical one, for instance, is a fellow who has a chronic somatic of a bad arm, and we get by straight memory, bad arm. We finally get the fact that his grandmother died with a bad arm or something like that and we see, by separating out and so on, all of a sudden, why, he comes out of his grandmother s valence. Sometimes we find people telling him that he is like his grandmother or something like that, and we can break that lock. We can get this stuff into view, but there are other things that you can ask for.
Now, we know already the scale on affinity. Here is your affinity—we draw this vertical line, and I’m going to draw this stack of triangles again which is also the Tone Scale, [drawing on blackboard] So here would be tone 2, tone 1, tone 0. Tone 2 at the top, but right above tone 2 at the top we have indifference. This is the affinity line. Below indifference we have boredom. Below that we have resentment, expressed. Below resentment expressed we have anger. Below anger, which is just getting to the lower band of 1 now, we get unexpressed resentment. Below that, unexpressed resentment, we get fear. Below this we get grief. And finally we run into apathy. And of course at the bottom of the Tone Scale here is really 0, which is death. This is the Emotional Tone Scale. It begins just above death with apathy, then grief, then fear, then unexpressed resentment, then anger, then expressed resentment, then boredom and then indifference; and of course it goes on up the line into a tone 3 which is happiness. Right up above this is relief and then above that’s happiness. All right, we get this Tone Scale here; we’re working on the affinity line.
Now, sometimes it’s necessary to unburden a case of the lighter emotions before one gets to the tougher ones. Sometimes it’s necessary to hit a tough one before you can start getting the lighter ones.
If a person is caught on the track someplace in an apathy engram, “just no use” and so forth—if you’ve ever seen anybody inaccessible, it’s not somebody who is just walking around in circles screaming a dramatization or something like that; you can often get them to stop. Try and work on somebody who is in an apathy engram, who is just there solidly. If you try to get them to talk or do anything, it’s just no use, they’re just dead. You try to get some response; very hard to do. Apathy. Very bad sort of an engram. It is worse than grief.
Now, any one of them on this scale here, as you go lower on this scale, we get them worse and worse. For instance, an anger engram, we can reach that more easily than a covert hostility engram. But these aren’t hard to reach; these are easy to reach. Then below that we get fear, and below fear we get grief, and below that, the hardest one to reach is apathy.
Now, these are all in order of magnitude so that, for instance, we get fear: a big fear lock or secondary engram, a big fear secondary engram or lock, something like that would be terror, you see? Terror isn’t arranged elsewhere up or down on the scale, it’s just greater magnitude of fear. Grief starts in by merely being sorrow or sadness and then in greater magnitude becomes grief. In apathy it’s just a fellow who has a feeling he just doesn’t care what happens next, something like that, or “My God, he’s dead.” You see, it’s just order of magnitude as part of that, now. So we’ve got this Tone Scale. We start to work on this person on an emotional line, we’ll run into this factor in the society immediately. This Anglo-Saxon society, mores and so forth, is built out of the old Teutonic codes. I don’t know why it wasn’t built out of the Latin codes and so on, but evidently it was built out of the suppression-of-emotion codes.
The English, for instance—we’re just that much divorced from the English that we aren’t quite as suppressed as they are, but take a look at how they handle emotion: “It’s just not gentlemanly, you know, to carry on that way.” Look at what we do to our little boys. The man in the society, in other words, is supposed to have an emotional suppression. He’s supposed to be able to control himself.
This is one of our major aberrations in the society. “Little boys don’t cry.” “You mustn’t cry.” Yak, yak, yak—suppression of emotion. “You mustn’t feel that.” “I can’t stand this emotion.” “You mustn’t be so emotional.” We have even got it up to the point where if a person is irrational, people say, “Well, he’s talking emotionally.” Not “not rationally”; “he’s talking emotionally.” Actually, when we look at the scale that goes on up the line to Clear and we look at our Tone Scale, and we look this thing over in real life, we find out very easily that a person cannot be rational without being emotional.
Male voice: Question.
Yes?
Male voice: Where does acute embarrassment come in on the scale?
Acute embarrassment? Shame? Shame in on the scale, and so forth—it is a “degree of.” It would probably be down here along the apathy line. Shame: it would be a specialized form of manifestation. It would certainly be haunting the vicinity of grief. And I might say in passing that very often shame acts as a suppressor (just as apathy does), a suppressor to grief. I would say, then, just by empirical test, that the thing belonged just below grief, and shame was a special kind of an apathy—a self-negating apathy; it’s computational.
All right, here is a society, then, which suppresses emotion. You look in any society for that thing which is most suppressed and you are looking for that thing which you will most have to unsuppress in order to get therapy done. For instance, if wearing hats was the most suppressed thing in the society of the Bunglejulems3 and you went in there as an auditor to do something, you’d have to make up a scale like this about wearing hats. That would be the thing.
In this society, emotion has been mixed up with sex, enjoyment and so forth. These things have a certain evilness, according to statement. So emotion is all bound up with the second dynamic, and oh boy, is it suppressed! The whole society seems to have sort of combined into a belief that if we just suppress the hell out of this second dynamic, why, we would all be well and happy; but if you can show me any society which would continue well without treating its progeny well, I will have it atom bombed. Okay. (LRH and audience chuckle) Here is the most suppressed thing in the society, is emotion. We even have this aberration, as I said before, that a person cannot be emotional and rational. Whereas an examination of it demonstrates completely, as you come up the Tone Scale, one cannot have a fluidity of emotions, he cannot be emotional unless he is at the same time rational. For instance, the arts are best appreciated, you might say, by rational people. But we have another one which is part of this same thing. We say, “Oh well, that fellow is so coldly rational, he is so coldly logical that of course he couldn’t be expected to be emotional.” Well, that’s another aberration: “the fact that people are logical means that they’re cold.” I don’t know where anybody picked this up unless it must have been in the dark forests of Germany It was some very dank place, believe me. But it came in on us and we’re stuck with it. So right away we see that this assumes a great deal of importance in this society, and this one has lots of suppressors on it. Therefore you can work with this one and probably will be working with this one more than the others. In fact, this one is so suppressed in this society that even up to very recently, in Dianetics itself we had overlooked that communication has a special one all by itself which is not necessarily joined up with emotion at all, and that reality has a special one which is not necessarily joined up with emotion. Those are two different things and two different Q quantities are suppressed. Two new things are suppressed—not emotion, but reality and communication as separate suppressions. Now, how they come off of a case and what they release off of a case, you can witness.
We are so nutty on the subject of emotion in this society that we haven’t even got a special word for this Q quantity over here that has to do with reality or the one which has to do with communication. Now, that is really wonderful when you stop to think about it. Here’s two-thirds of the rationale of life and we haven’t even got a label for it. So we’ll have to take these things up as two specialized things.
Now, you see that looking down the scale for emotion with a person that you’d try to get some grief, you’d try to get some shame, you would try to get some apathy and that you’d spring locks on this subject . “When was the last time you felt apathetic?” “Oh well, that was when I—I don’t know, I—my mother-in-law came to visit me.” “Oh, yeah? By the way, did your grandmother ever come to visit the house?” “Oh, yes.” “Well, did anybody feel apathetic then?” “Yeah, my father used to go all to—hey, that’s right. My father used to go all to pieces when my grandmother came; that was his mother-in-law! Ha! Yeah, well, to hell with that.” We’ve all of a sudden got a whole chain up, see? And if you don’t think this can be done rapidly, I did it one time by telephone. One time? I’ve done it a half a dozen times. Giving Straightwire by long distance phone call with somebody hanging at the other end some thousands of miles or hundreds of miles away saying he was going to commit suicide or he had just decided—one of them was most interesting—he had just decided that he was going to murder his wife but he thought he’d better call me first.
Now let’s take the reality line. Now, I give you this very positively here. I have not, at this rendition, completely refined what the Reality Scale is. I’ll expect some help on that; somebody else has got to do some thinking on this too. I’ve got the thing broken down to its general form, but it’s going to be refined further, probably in the very near future. And the same way with communication; I haven’t gotten it completely formed as to its scale. We’ve got the emotion scale of the triangle pretty well refined, but it still had holes in it. He says, “Where’s shame?” So this next one I’m going to give you has to do with reality. This is going to be the Reality Scale. Now here, of course, we have your tones—Tone Scale. Here’s 3, 2, 1 and 0 on the Tone Scale. All right. The top one up here above 3 would be—you understand that we have an agreed-upon reality in this society. Agreement and reality can be considered synonymous. We agree upon something, it becomes a reality. If we haven’t agreed upon that, it is not a reality. That’s very true in the society and it’s quite workable.
Additionally, reality is part of the computation of an individual. Actually, thinking has a role. You get communication, affinity and reality, and the three of them there, combined up together, demand this thing called computation and thinking. But it’s heavier over here on the reality place than anywhere else.
Reality Scale Tone 3 Selective agreement with reason (Actual agreement) Tone 2 Indecision Tone 1 Disagreement (Compares with anger on emotional scale) Tone 0 Unresponsive So we get, right up above here, we get agreement with reason. This is selective agreement. This does not mean just willy-nilly agreement. This is actual agreement, with reason. If, when you have thought it over clearly, not aberratedly, but when you’ve thought it over clearly and you agree that this thing, so on, with this person, or you have reasons why—it isn’t just an instinctive or a critical type of disagreement—that “agreement with reason” is your top level of that.
Now, right down the line here on the 2 band, or in boredom, we start to get indecision. Below 2, into the 1—which compares with anger on the Emotional Scale—on the Reality Scale we get disagreement. And down here at the bottom of the thing, on the apathy scale, we get unresponsive on reality. In other words, actually, a truck comes running down the street, it’s a reality. And the fellow stands there and gets run over. Unresponsive: he would be there on the Reality Scale. He doesn’t agree with the reality of this truck, so he dies. Do you get the idea?
You have seen this happen in dramatizations. The husband won’t work. He consistently drinks. His wife tells him she’s going to leave him because she has to do something on her own and so forth, and he’s said, “Oh, well, she won’t do that anyhow, because actually I’m just a put-upon character and I have perfect justification for doing all of this.” In other words, he isn’t looking at the reality of the fact: she isn’t eating. That’s the reality of it. She’s going to leave him. That’s reality. But he says, “Oh, no, yak, yak, yak, and there are ninety-five reasons and I’m over here in the next pasture about this whole thing anyway” and so forth, and then all of a sudden she’s gone. “How could she do this to me?” and so forth. He has just completely failed to look at the reality of those facts. That would be up in here. Probably covert resentment would be the same place on the Affinity Scale. He hasn’t looked at any reality on it. He’s not responding to the reality on it but he’s arguing with it a little bit.
Now let’s take him a little bit further down the scale into an unresponsive bracket. And his wife says to him, “I’m going to leave you, dear,” and his wife says, “because . . .” He just doesn’t think about it. It has no reality to him that she would leave him. He is in this scale on reality. Now, is that clear? His tone would probably, but only incidentally, be apathetic about it, you see? Only incidentally be apathetic about it. This is another breed of cat. This is the Reality Scale. He doesn’t have any reality about what’s going on around him.
The person who walks into the room, of course, and sees somebody there when somebody isn’t there, is suffering both from a communication difficulty and a reality difficulty. The fact that this person would be unable to differentiate the fact that there couldn’t be anybody in that room anyway—computationally there wouldn’t be anybody there — this person accepts the fact that there is somebody there, that says right away there’s something awfully wrong with this person’s reality.
Now, the inability to differentiate between imagination and reality comes as well on this scale. Now, you’ll find imagination is—dub-in and so forth here. For instance, a fellow can be actually 100 percent imagination all the way up and down the track. His reality level and so on can be down here in this band. But it is definitely in that band when he has cut in imagination for reality. He is disagreeing with the reality of existence by just dubbing in something else for it. Do you understand that? So that he’s down there around a 1 tone on the reality level. This is how bad your dub-ins are. They’re way down here. You look around along the line you find out, by the way, that on the Affinity Scale they’re down around covert resentment, ordinarily. They’re down below, well below anger. You very seldom find your dub-ins getting angry. They seethe behind the scenes. They get very upset one way or the other but they don’t come out with it. That’s your dub-in, fits about there. Okay?
You understand now that in reaching for locks on this scale you would be looking for moments when people disagreed with this person— when they disagreed with his reality, when they tried to foist off another reality. The chronic phrases, this way—people around them who had the dramatization of “This is not true,” “You don’t know this,” “That’s false,” disagreement. People, for instance, who constantly said to the child and so forth, “Oh well, that’s not true. It’s just your imagination.” This is on this Reality Scale.
Now let’s take up the communication line. This is communication as a Tone Scale. And we take communication, here, and we find that along about 3 and above we get the person is communicative. This person will talk when he should talk and be quiet when he should be quiet according to the reasonableness of the situation, not because somebody else is oppressing him, but according to his understanding of the reasonableness of the situation. You’re going to have this situation coming back and forth. In other words, he is able to communicate to and be communicated with. Communication is a two-way affair. I have mentioned before the person who can communicate all sorts of things to all sorts of people but nobody can ever get any of his attention to communicate anything to him; that’s a 50 percent shut-off line.
All right. Now, here is your 2, 1, 0 on this Tone Scale and below this, into the boredom range, we start to get secretive—selectively cut out. Selectively cut out communications. This person will sometimes be so secretive that stuff which is coming in he will occlude. He won’t receive it. He’ll select it out as it comes in. Now, this is useful, you see, in trying to break locks. “Did you ever have any trouble talking to your mother?” “Yes, as a matter of fact, I used to have an awful lot of trouble talking to my mother.” “Well, did she ever say ‘Shut up’ to you?” “No, no, she never said ‘Shut up’ or anything. Used to say ‘Be quiet.’ She used to say ‘Don’t talk in company.’ ‘Don’t talk here.’ Oh, yes, she used to say ‘Don’t talk’; that’s what she used to say.” “All right. Let’s remember a specific moment when she said ‘Don’t talk.’” And we get him working on the thing and all of a sudden, boom! He’s got one up and you get a lock and restore an attention unit or two to “I.” So there’s your secretive band is coming in there, into boredom. This requires quite a bit of adjustment. All I’m giving you here is just the overall picture of this.
Now, we mentioned that the dub-in was down around that covert hostility band, so on. Here, on communication, we get prevarication. Life lies to this person because of his selection. What he observes actually lies to him. He doesn’t get the straight communication in. Furthermore, when he puts it out he is very apt to lie. He distorts what actually happens. There is your communication—your prevarication, general distortion.
Compare it on your Affinity Scale, by the way, compare it on your Affinity Scale, but this is something very special. It is compared to something on the Reality Scale, but we’re talking about communication here; it’s very special. There’s a special type of unit which is not an emotional unit that gets tied up when these things are broken. When the scale gets broken down there’s a special type of unit, there’s a special theft from “I” which, by reversing the thing, gets restored to “I” by Straightwire. When you release these moments where this has taken place, you’ll restore stuff to “I.” Now, something I want to say here, which is actually a little bit of a digression, is that you know, don’t you, that as you are processing a person you should bring them up the Tone Scale. They pass through, on their whole tone and general tone, many manifestations of the Tone Scale. If you have a preclear that you can’t get up to a point where he is mad at anybody, you have somebody that hasn’t passed through the first tone band. And if he has not passed through the first tone band, he’s still below it. And no matter what he says, you know doggone well. For instance, Mama used to beat him up, something like that and, well, he keeps saying, “Well, Mama had her reasons” and so forth. And “Yeah, there’s no reason to be upset about that,” or “Why should I be?” This person is still below 1. This person has not been brought up to a first tone. Now, there’s no use for you to try to prime this person—you’re not just trying to make him get angry. You’ve got to pick up enough locks and secondary engrams out of this person to bring him up to the general tone level.
Now, this is the way you do it. For instance, if you’ve got a dub-in case that after you’ve worked on him for quite a while he still dubs in, you just plain haven’t brought him up to a point there where he can communicate with himself. Furthermore, over on the Affinity Scale he has not passed through anger yet. And he hasn’t passed through disagreement, for instance, on the Reality Scale. He has not disagreed with what has been foisted off on him. In other words, he hasn’t gotten angry. So here’s your dub-in. Now, below this, of course, there are undoubtedly many other steps on this thing, but the language is just pauperized on this scale. They’ve never considered communication and they’ve never considered the aspect of reality. As a matter of fact, they haven’t even got good definitions of what reality is. Everybody talks about “real” and so forth. As a matter of fact, in the grammar we are not supposed to qualify, modify or limit the word real . . . [gap] . . . actuality demonstrates that nothing is more than relatively real. Well, nothing expresses it more closely than the paucity of stops on this communication line, but I think possibly if we search quite a bit we can find the rest of the stops on this line. We’ve got the general shape of it here with communicative, secretive and prevarication, distortion and down here unresponsive. Worse than unresponsive, doesn’t put out, doesn’t receive—your catatonic schiz—and here’s your dead man. So there is your communication line, fragmentary as it is.
You’re trying to break up locks, then, when this person was unable to understand other people and when other people couldn’t understand this person. And if you look around in this society, you’ll find out that this is chronic with little kids, that they have one awful time trying to make grown-ups listen to them, to understand them and so on. Grown-ups are very impatient with them and they’re always being chopped off communicationwise. Their communication is being severed, severed, severed, continually. And you can start picking up these locks and you’ll find out that usually on a case there’re just thousands of them because the society is very good at interrupting communication. But I don’t think, at this time, that there exists a lot of circuitry about communication and there isn’t a lot of circuitry existing about reality. This is not chronic circuitry in the society because people haven’t specialized on these things in the society. Therefore you can reach these things and bypass circuits. For instance, the circuits in the society: “You shouldn’t permit yourself to get emotional.” That is on the affinity line. “You mustn’t be emotional.” All these things, those are circuits on the affinity line. And so we get the emotions very badly encysted on a case with this circuitry; but there is relatively little circuitry that interrupts communication and reality locks and engrams. That is to say, “You should not tell.” Well, you sometimes have circuits on the basis of “nothing is real to you” and you sometimes have circuits on the subject of “you are disagreeing,” “you are so disagreeable,” “you’re always disagreeing with everything.” We’ve got circuits on there, but they aren’t the crushing circuits that they are on the affinity line compared to your overall average through the society. Now, that may not be a very well qualified statement; it may not be borne out on further examination. That’s just the way it seems to me at this stage of the development of this situation. I will give you this, though, that these locks are easier to reach, ordinarily, than emotion locks.
Now, by bringing up a person’s tone on communication, you bring up his tone on reality and emotion. By bringing up a person’s tone on reality, you bring it up on communications and emotion. In other words, I’m giving you the other two points of the triangle. And you can start to look for these communication breaks and you will find real meat here. It gives you a lot more to look for in a case.
Now, I’m going to give you the rest of communication here. Here is the inhibition column [drawing on blackboard] and here is the compulsion column—over here on the left, compulsion. Now, under inhibition we have those statements and engrams and locks which inhibit speech, first. Those which inhibit hearing. You know, communication is perception. These perception lines that come through to “I” and so on are communication lines with which a person communicates with the real world. Perception is communication; it’s not just talking to somebody. That is a combined up, specially packaged perception that is handed out and received back. So these things are the meat and core of communication.
Now, we have one, inhibition of seeing, inhibition of hearing, feeling, smelling, and you can go on down the line, inhibition of motion and so forth. These things are relatively light. There’s inhibition of heat and cold, by the way—inhibition of thermal, you might say. “Oh, you never feel the cold.” But these are very easy to reach as locks. “Has anybody ever said to you that you never heard what they said?” Now, that’s a little bit difficult there at first because that’s a shut-off to some degree, but you force a preclear’s mind back down and he says, “Oh yes, my God, that’s my wife!” And “ ‘You never pay any attention to me,’ she says. Yeah.” Well, that’s a nice, complete shut-off. You work that sort of thing out, in other words.
Now, you’ve got it for speech. “Don’t talk to me,” or “You mustn’t talk to people.” “Don’t repeat this.” That’s a wonderful one. “Don’t repeat this.” You try to use repeater technique on this fellow and it doesn’t work. If repeater technique doesn’t work on somebody just have him say “Don’t repeat this” a few times and you generally wind him up someplace on the track.
All right, so there’s inhibition of seeing, hearing—in other words, “You can’t see,” “You can’t hear,” “You can’t feel,” “You can’t smell,” so on. This is the shut-off chart. This means that a person’s communication system to the real world has been inhibited by people’s statements that combine up to this meaning. And boy, there’s lots of variation there. If you know this, this gives you more Straight-wire material than you can get rid oí in just weeks of work on your preclear. This society is pretty good at interrupting communication. They’re polite about it too: “Shut up!” All right. Now, of course we get the compulsion chart. It means “you’ve got to listen.” Now actually, isn’t it strange that a “you’ve got to listen” would not improve a person’s communication? You get too much “you’ve got to listen” on the case and you’ll finally work on down the Tone Scale and you get the person down here into the apathy range or at best up into prevarication range.
Every dub-in has got a lot of this “you’ve got to listen,” “you’ve got to hear it,” “you’ve got to talk”—compulsion, compulsion— “you’ve got to communicate, you’ve got to communicate.” And finally the “I” will say, “This stuff just keeps coming in all the time. Draw the shade.” And out it will go. And if there’s control circuitry, an enormous amount of control circuitry on the case it says, “Well, I know how we comply with these engrams. We’ll just dub in a whole imaginary reality. We won’t have anything to do with this reality over here, that’s dangerous to have. The dickens with that. We’ll just build a world.” They do. So we’ve got, then, duality here: compulsion of speech, hearing, seeing, feeling, smelling, thermal, so on. These are your shut-offs over here on the inhibition scale. But on the compulsion scale these are your turned-too -full-ons, and the turned-too -full-ons cut the communication line.
A person has concourse with reality up to a certain point, till reality hurts him too much. And then in order to keep reality from coming through to him too much, he’ll chop the communication line. We move over from the reality band, over here. Now he cuts the line and it cuts it outgoing and incoming too. So anything which is trying to press communication upon him too solidly, he’ll resist, and he’ll cut the line on it himself.
You’ve got Straightwire material here, all the way across a case. It’s just enormous the amount of volume you have. Let’s take schoolrooms, so forth. Let’s go over a preclear’s teachers. We finally get him to remembering teachers and we get him to remembering shut-offs: “You mustn’t whisper.” “Now you’ve got to stand up here in front of the class and talk.” These are locks on early communication lines.
The case that you should eschew and run away from if you’re early in your auditing career is a case on which the hypnotist advances with great confidence. It is unwarranted confidence. The stutterer; the stammerer. You know, you take an interruption of communication to a p-p-p-p-point where the p-poor fellow c-c-c-c-c-can’t get anything out; he’s down there in an apathy tone. And he’ll surge up—as high as he can get will be into the dub-in band. That’s a rough deal. Don’t look at stuttering as being one of these pushovers, because stuttering is not so much interrupted by—well, of course it is, computationally, on statements as, “You can’t talk straight” and “You can’t say anything about it” and so on—as it is an interruption of the communication. And it depresses a person on the Tone Scale. Or a person’s emotions have been depressed down to the low, low band and has carried communication down with it.
A stutterer’s sense of reality is not normally very good. If there are any stammerers present, cancelled. But I give you the fact that here is a physiological manifestation of merely a suppressed communication Tone Scale. This person has both been told to talk and has been told not to talk. This person, in order for those comments, those statements to have had any real effect upon him, must have, on the emotional ledger, been depressed clear on down below anger. And on the reality side has been pushed down at least into the area of distortion. Here you’ve got a case which is well down the bank, reactively. And you’re going to have to rehabilitate this case, ordinarily, quite a bit in order to do a lot with them. And you start rehabilitating with them by knocking out locks. And you knock out the secondary engrams.
Now, you know that any terrifically solid interruption of speech, of hearing, of sight, of feeling, anything like that, would pen up some of the units of “I.” There need be no emotional connotation with this at all. There normally is, but if you could pen these up with a sudden shock, any one of these things, you have a secondary engram. Whether it’s a lock or an engram or not merely depends upon the force of impact of it.
Supposing we had one whereby this boy all his life had just done fine. Up to the age of six he’d just done fine with his father and oh, his father and he just got along fine, and always talked to his father and father talked to him and everything was just going along fine up to the age of six. Well, that particular day Papa’s store burned down or something else happened, and Papa was in very, very bad shape, highly restimulated. And the little boy comes in and for the first time in his life says to his papa, “How are you?” and receives the answer “Shut up and get the hell out of here.” Boom! You’ve got a turmoil there, and that’s a secondary engram. Because if Papa says it to the little boy, he probably said it once or twice to Mama way back in the prenatal period, something of this sort; there’s usually an earlier engram on it. You don’t think that produces a marked and wonderful effect aberratively? Now, you can sort these things out; you can contact them.
Now, on the reality level, a person that is told continually, “It’s all in your imagination; it’s only your imagination,” his reality is being denied to him consistently. Now, those are mainly, usually, just locks. But supposing we get the person into a situation where he has told a story which he knows to be true and he is forced to say that it is false. You’ve got him communicating up to a point, but then all of a sudden we tackle this kid’s reality. And he is worked up about it to this point and then somebody fairly close to him, something like that, suddenly turns on him and makes him admit that it’s imagination. There is a reality secondary engram, all by itself That thing will not come off with tears, particularly. But the real secondary engram, the masterpieces that just interrupt people’s life all over the place, have all three interruptions: communication, reality and emotional interruption.
The three of them: sudden shock—for instance, loss of an ally, somebody says, “Don’t cry” and so forth, suppression on the thing, so on; “Don’t look at him there in the coffin; come away”—communication interruption; and over here, “Well, just pretend that it never happened”—make a super secondary engram which will then, itself, begin to pile up locks, locks, locks, locks, locks.
When this engram is run, by the way—any one of these secondary engrams are run—you normally find under them, lying under them much earlier on the track, the physical pain incident for which they depend for their force. You run the secondary engram, run a grief engram, we get some grief charge off of the thing, we can send the person back to the physical pain engram and run that out. Yes, Jim?
Male voice: Well, on the secondary engram of an emotion type, it gets the discharge going up in tears. You know you’ve got it when you have the tears. And in the other types, like communication and reality, how . . . [gap] . . . now for a little while, and I don’t know what the standard reaction is. I give you that very frankly. I would not, at this time, make a statement of what the standard reaction is. I know that I have gotten a variety of reactions so far. Somewhere in this variety of reactions is the standard reaction; one of them is. Until I know that myself I’m not going to announce it until I know it absolutely conclusively. I would thank, by the way, particularly the instructing auditors and so forth present to—let’s take a look at them, take it on the qui vive and let’s find out what the standard manifestation is. I would appreciate it very much if we took a look at this. This data has been formed up. I’ve noticed some manifestations. There are some of them that are common. All right?
Suppression of the preclear all the way across the board—just to tie this up the last couple of minutes here —all the way across the board on the Tone Scale, an estimate of his position on the Tone Scale is predicted from his ability to communicate, his concept of reality and his emotional suppression and so on. Now, whether or not you get these things up depends upon the active circuitry of the case. If there’s lots of circuitry on the case, you’ve got to get that out before these other things can be gotten up in their turn. The main thing that you are trying to do, you’re trying to raise this person’s position on the Tone Scale. If a person seems to have a lot of grief on the case and you can get that grief off, the other two points of the triangle are going to rise correspondingly with the grief, because there is charge on the case. But I am trying to . . . [gap] . . . tackle these so-called tough cases, make something of an estimate of their position on the Tone Scale and conduct yourself accordingly. If you realize that this case is supercharged with grief and with communication breaks, with reality, imagination lineup and so on, if you realize that this case is supercharged, then you know that you have to get this material off of the case, that it isn’t just a statement back down the engram bank someplace, “I’m outside myself,” that keeps this person exteriorized on the track. Or it’s not a statement, “You’re always lying” that keeps the person dubbing in. No, it’s got a mechanical suppression on the Tone Scale, and you’d better unburden and take some of the charge off of this case. And you take it off by the affinity, communication and reality breaks, by breaking the locks and by trying to run secondary engrams, particularly those of grief and apathy. And if you can’t get those engrams off, it’s because the person is under the suppression of circuitry. Try to knock out the circuitry and get going on it that way.
If a person cannot move on the track and you cannot easily get him started moving on the track it immediately tells you that you have a supercharged case.
Now, I hope these points dawn in more closely. There has been no change here to Standard Procedure. There have been two or three things pointed up. The thing is refined so that you even more mechanistically can look at a case and know where to look on the thing so that your cases will now be easier to run, and so that we don’t see, walking around, a lot of circuitry cases.
This sort of thing, for instance, can go on: somebody will come up and everybody will say, “Well, that case is pianola.” And I take a look at this case and this case is running solid dub-in, circuitry all over the place. And underneath that circuitry, tremendous suppression, tremendous quantity of secondary engrams. This person hasn’t run a piece of reality from one end of his processing to the other! And the auditor will stay with that case and keep on patty-caking with it and saying, “The case is just going fine.” The case won’t go fine! That case will rise just a little bit, but this isn’t a pianola case. A pianola case is one which will run out an engram in the basic area with all twenty-six perceptics. And I want everybody here, after this, to immediately, in the first couple of hours of processing, to put the case into the kind of shape that it should be in to run out these basic engrams in their own valence and begin the erasure immediately on the case. And lets get some Clears around here and stop stalling!
Thank you.