Things an Auditor Must Not Do (500714)
Date: 14 July 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Now that you’re all thoroughly educated and experienced auditors . . .
Female voice: Hurray, hurray! (whistling from student, laughter) . . . with nothing more to learn and with thousands of hours of auditing behind you . . .
Female voice: Wait till I put that down carefully, “nothing more to learn.” All right (laughter) I’d like to tell you a few things that you must not do. I’m telling you a lot of things that you could do, but some things that you must not do.
One of them—the main one, of course, is you must not invalidate the patient’s sense of reality or his confidence in his own data. Even if he says it’s dub-in, don’t agree with him. If he keeps maintaining it’s dub-in, he may yet be running perfectly valid engrams, out of an engram that said, “It’s invalid.” Don’t ever take up for any of the dramatic personnel in the patient’s engram bank. If he starts to say, “Well, after all, Mother had her engrams too,” don’t say, “Yes, that’s right, she had her engrams too.” Because he’s not talking very rationally if he is having a bad time of it and if you suddenly agree with the statement that Mother was not guilty, you are actually siding with his engrams. When you do this, you may throw him into a very deep apathy from which you will have great difficulty pulling him. So never side with any dramatic personnel in the engram bank. If you do anything, be mad at them. This encourages his anger.
Now, the next thing that you must not do is put your hands on the sperm sequence without running it out or finding why it isn’t run out. Did some correlation on this not too long ago, and found that the sperm sequence not run out had marked a difficult point in every case where it had not been run out but had been touched.
This was an interesting datum suddenly arriving from a lot of information. I have run it out from time to time in cases quite as a matter of course. And in some cases it was so much like a dream to the patient that I did not pay much attention to it.
When this occurred, the case afterwards, according to the data, went into a difficult period. Further, the only patients I know who have been disturbed during therapy—which is to say become very anxious and upset and eager to get more therapy and so on, very irrational about therapy suddenly after being very rational about it—are those who have had the conception touched but not run out. So, if you get the patient in the conception, run it out. Run it out as the sperm, run it out as the ovum, and run out any and all engrams which precede it—precede it.
You may find that some engrams apparently precede the sperm and ovum sequences. It is not up to us to judge at this time, little as we know of structure and the recording mechanism of cells, to judge whether or not these are valid or invalid.
If they are there, their validity seems to be very good. The chances of getting objective reality on this matter are not very good. However, it’s going to be done. But it has to be set up as a specific project to validate one small section of the engram bank. We will learn rather rapidly what the objective reality is. But regardless of objective reality, if there is pain there, and if he maintains that it is prior to conception, by all means run it out of the preclear. According to the formula that things which will not lift are preceded by engrams which have not been erased—might be equally valid in this sequence, since it led us all the way from late-life operations clear on back down through the engram bank. And I’ve found that it is difficult to tell, working in that area, whether you’re getting material which is preconception or postconception or what. Very often the engrams are all tangled up with conception. In such cases in the past, I (when I found preconception things) considered that probably we had a displacement on the time track or the sense of time was out due to the very smallness of the organism, something of the sort.
I had other explanations for it which were not as logical as the actual explanation. The cell, after all, recording as a zygote, is not much bigger than those cells which, dividing, created the sperm. That’s valid enough.
There are eight generations in the testes from the initial cell which by dividing—and another cell divides and another cell divides and it divides again and divides again, eight times, and then we get a sperm. In other words there is a separate chain of mitosis, you might say, in that sequence which comes down the line to be a sperm.
Now these cells are present and are dividing many days before fertilization. In the case of the ovum, the ovum may be there for some time before fertilization takes place. Don’t be surprised at an early engram, then, which comes in before conception; don’t be confused by it.
If you find pain and words in the engram bank, run them out or find something earlier to erase so that they can be run out. But here’s what you’re running into in this area. You’re running into little choppy engrams which erase. You tell the person to go back to the earliest moment of pain or unconsciousness. You are erasing engrams. You don’t care what they say, what they do, what their aberrative effect is or anything else, unless you’re doing research on them.
We run out something that is early in the patient. He then proceeds to run an engram, erases it. You take note of the fact that you are early on the track. You keep doing this, you can erase half a dozen engrams in the early part of the track. You have no clue in most cases that you are anywhere near conception.
You keep asking for the earliest moment of pain or unconscious, one day you’ll turn up with this sperm sequence. So you say, “Well, there’s pain there, we’ll run that too.” So we just run it off. He thinks he’s a sperm. Okay, so he’s a sperm. Run it off. Every once in a while, well, he thinks he’s an ovum. All right, run off the ovum. But next time—this is the way you do an erasure: You say to the patient, “Let us now go to the earliest moment of pain or unconscious which can now be reached. The somatic strip will go to the first part of this engram. First phrase will flash into your mind. Let’s roll it.” There is an engram being deintensified.
These engrams normally look like plain coitus engrams. And from where you are sitting as an auditor, and from where I was sitting as an auditor, they look simply like another part of the coitus chain or another part of the fight chain. They are never differentiated. In the early part of the track it is most difficult to tell the exact time of the engram. An age flash is not good enough at this part of the track. It’s no good, as a matter of fact.
Male voice: If he’s perhaps earlier than conception—his engram—what does the patient think he is?
He thinks he is him. That’s one of the confusers on it. What I’m telling you simply is that if you find a sequence in the basic area where he is a sperm and then maybe is an ovum or a little bit further ahead where he has pain because of cell division, you run these things as engrams.
In the normal course of erasing a case to Clear, you would pick up this material, but you’d just pick it up as something that was there. Now, on a closer inspection of it, it seems possible that some of these might have been preconception engrams. How can one tell? You listen to them for a while, you will see what my point is.
Just get the earliest engrams and keep running them and if he suddenly comes up with the datum—I’m telling you this for one specific purpose—the datum that this is before conception, don’t immediately challenge his data. Because that’s invalidating his data and it would be a very serious and bad breach of the Auditor’s Code. And that’s why I’m telling you this so that—you’re going to run into this in patients, I don’t want it to surprise you. First time I ran into it, it surprised the hell out of me.
Now, as far as the sperm dream is concerned—as far as I was concerned it was a dream because it was so often accompanied by a dream. It’s accompanied sometimes with the most fantastic dreams you will ever see dreamed. Like here are 10,000 angels flying down. Where are they coming from? What are they going to do? Well, they’re coming down to attend a fish fry, that’s one sperm dream. “Here I am, a great eagle flying up on this huge cliff and down below are these thousands and millions of people. But I have made it, I have triumphed, I have succeeded.” That’s a sperm dream.
Naturally, this is not an engram or anything like an engram. But lying right under that dream there is an engram. And I want you to be advised of it. Nobody ever got well by running anything which was imaginary in Dianetics. You can take a patient and run innumerable engrams which are fully imaginary and the patient does not get better, he actually gets worse.
In view of the fact that patients get better when you just keep rolling out the earliest engram on the track, the earliest engram on the track, the earliest engram on the track—regardless of what he gives you, if his mother is being raped by the Sphinx, roll it.
The only real damage which you could do is by avoiding the rolling of it. And if you avoid the rolling of the sperm sequence, according to a look-over of notes and so on, it seems that a deterioration in the case can be expected. If you erase it, a marked improvement in the case can be expected. That’s all we want.
Female voice: Just return people to the sperm sequence—at what point do we go for it and what point do we not go for it?
With this technique, go for it very early in the case—go for it with this technique of stabilizing the emotion. You might say stabilizing the patient in an emotional incident. If you can put him in a moment of sexual pleasure, he need not tell you a thing about sexual pleasure or what he is doing, where he is, who he’s with, anything. You just assure yourself, yes, he’s going through some sort of an incident. You can say, “Are you there?” “Yes.” “All right. You know all about this. You needn’t tell me anything about it. But let’s go over and let’s reexperience it.” Get him to do this two or three times. [gap] And sometimes he will wind up there, and when he does, and you get conception to run, you’re down in the basic area right then. And that’s where you want to be. Now, you run this for a short ways, you don’t find any pain on it. Run it anyway. There may be some pain shows up in it.
When you find that it is stuck and the words won’t come up on it, ask the file clerk for what it requires to resolve this sequence. If the file clerk isn’t working too well, just push him a little bit earlier. Tell him to go a little bit earlier. He’s liable to pick up an engram.
Mind you, I’ve drawn you pictures of the engram bank lots of times. Here are engrams [drawing on blackboard] that are lying in the engram bank; here’s the sperm sequence, and here’s another engram and so on. Now these actually in the time sequence are very orderly but they seem to be scattered around in the bank. So therefore, it’s actually possible that one of these comes later than the sperm sequence but might appear to come earlier. You ask him to go earlier, he will arrive here and you run that and then the sperm will erase.
All through the book says go to basic-basic, and you’ll get near basic-basic if you hit the sperm sequence.
Male voice: Even though you re not sure it is basic-basic, you go for it anyway?
Yeah. Sure. Well, it’s so close.
Female voice: I’m still confused. I get patients that didn’t ever really work on the basic track, and they might be mildly stuck on the track, in valence problems, somatic shut-off, one thing or another on it—you go for the sperm sequence, but on account of these other difficulties, it wont erase. Will you get in more trouble than you have the time for?
No. Try it sometime. You’ll find out you don’t get into trouble doing it. You say he’s got circuitry trouble, he’s got this kind of trouble, he’s got that kind of trouble. What would be the best way to solve circuits? The best way you could solve circuits is get unconsciousness off the bottom of the case.
You could get unconsciousness off of this case, then you would be able to safely touch later engrams. So it’s a good try. Furthermore, if he’s got so much circuitry trouble he can’t get there, how can you get there? You see what I mean? [gap] Well, all right. You get the sperm sequence, you’ve got your hands on a very early sequence in a case. Now it’s very worthwhile to be in that area. That is the area you’re trying to get into. There is where the erasure starts, right in that vicinity. It starts a little bit earlier than this or you might postulate in its vicinity on another chain. But it’s in that area.
Now you’re in basic area. And there is no reason to sweat backwards all the way down the bank if there is a nice, neat way of skipping the whole bank and winding up in the sperm sequence. There is where you want to be in the case. This is not contradictory, this is just standard procedure.
Get as early in that case as possible and start erasing as soon as possible. That is the first, last goal of an auditor who is clearing a preclear.
Female voice: When you reach an imaginary engram, how do you know whether they’re imaginary?
Well, the less we worry about whether they’re imaginary or not— let’s put it on this order: if you have what you know to be bad circuitry problems in this case, your file clerk is not giving you the engrams you want or the engrams that will resolve the case, if you’re getting prenatal visio and you’re getting this and you’re getting that, you’re liable to be running incidents which are partly imaginary. Some of them will be real, some will be imaginary. But let’s not worry about evaluating and a person knows really, when his case has been cleaned up, whether or not it’s imaginary or real. There are two ways of repairing this damage. One is shooting for the circuitry that causes him to believe everything is unreal and the other is just by straight memory, rehabilitating his sense of yesterday’s reality.
Male voice: Ron, how do you get a child into the sperm sequence?
How young a child?
Male voice: Say the child is twelve.
Child of twelve? It’s all right. A child of twelve will work. How do you get him into it?
Male voice: Yeah? Just look for the sexual incident . . .
Oh, come now, this is 1950. Children of twelve—it’s like the marine that came home from the war . . .
Male voice: He says he can take a kid at eight Sure.
He says, “What’s these words mean?” He says, “What’s these words mean?” And you say, “Well, they’re just words, let’s roll it.” “What’s this undulant somatic?” Only he doesn’t say “undulant.” There’s no problem there. There really is no problem there. The marine came home from the wars and his mama says to him, “Now, why don’t you tell your little brother about the birds and bees.” So he takes the little brother out and he said, “Well,” he says, “you know about when you take a girl,” he says, “out in a dark alley?” “Yeah,” little brother says. “And you back her up against a wall?” “Yeah.” “You know what happens?” “Yeah.” “Same thing with the birds and bees.” (laughter) Male voice: If you have a part of basic-basic—you run the sperm dream, you find, let’s say, four phrases in it that wont lift and you need to find an earlier—it won’t lift early, you go up the track if you don’t have the file clerk . . .
Well, let’s ask the file clerk.
Male voice: Yeah.
He might be working in that area. I resolved one just the other night simply by asking the file clerk, “Give us the incident which will resolve the remaining content of this sequence.” And he promptly shuffled me a couple of engrams. And whether they occurred five years before the conception or eight years after I wouldn’t have known. But when I went right back to the sperm sequence, out it went and on came the lady’s sonic in full, which was considered advantageous by some.
Male voice: I wanted to ask about that. Doesn’t it seem very likely that sonic will turn on when you get all the engrams around there?
Working in the basic area, a person usually will shift into his own valence unless he has a serious problem in circuitry, unless he’s seriously latched up on the track somewhere up the line with somebody’s death—a coffin case, in other words. And you get him early, and quite often you run this material and you’ll find in the material much that affects his sonic, that affects this, that affects that computationally, but most important, you are early. He can settle into his own valence at this point because things are erasing.
You try to coax him into his own valence, you try to coax him into feeling other perceptics. If you say, “Shift into your own valence now,” aw, he’s liable to go to Papa’s. He might be a junior case. This is going to Joe’s valence which is Papa’s valence. Oh, that’s a terrible thing, so what you coax him to do, and is more reliable, is coax his perceptics into being. “Let’s see if we can hear some of this. Let’s see if we can feel the moisture. Let’s see if we can feel this or hear that. Let’s get a little more tactile.” And you are shifting him actively into his own valence. If he doesn’t reply then on a blunt command, “Get into your own valence,” why, shift him by coaxing the perceptics into line.
Okay.
Female voice: May I put a comment in here?
Yes.
Female voice: I wonder if anyone else but me has had any trouble in getting people to imagine a sex experience when they’re lying in front of you? I had three people have trouble doing this. I was trying what someone said, so I said, “Well — the first one said, “I’m embarrassed”; the second one said, “I can’t”; the third one said something else. So I said, “Well, can you imagine yourself kissing someone?” And it was no trouble at all. So I let them do two or three of those and then they did the other and then they went boom. And it worked beautifully.
Thank you. Yes, make the patient kiss somebody.
Female voice: They were perfectly willing to do that.
All right.
Female voice: I didn’t make them feel bad either.
I would caution you against using the word imagine. I would slam them back into an actuality.
Female voice: Maybe I said it, I don’t know.
Yeah.
Female voice: I’ll watch it next time.
Okay.
Male voice: One point—inasmuch as, along that line, anticipation is sometimes far more pleasant than realization to some people—if you can pick up a heavy necking session . . .
That’s—in less indelicate terms, (laughter) Yes?
Male voice: I did it on one guy; he wouldn’t get inside himself when he rolled sexual phrases.
Well, in all of these cases, this is working on, you might say, a specific rule of thumb. If you can get a person into any emotional situation up in the lock area of a case, and run him through that emotional situation until he turns on his emotion, you can tell him to go back now to the first time this emotion was felt and not only with the sexual experience with the sperm dream, but also with several other emotions. You may get yourself into the fight sequence first, might get early in it, might get early into most anything. The dramatization, in other words, is lying there as a lock. And this is not very peculiar. I’d like to make this point again to this class.
Here is the engram, here is a lock, [drawing on blackboard] Although the lock might have occurred in time sequence clear up the bank, here is the engram and here is the lock. Actually the lock has drifted down and is on top of the engram.
If you can find this dramatization here and run it until the emotion in here would match the emotional content of the engram, you’re going to be able to run out an engram that you would not otherwise have picked up. Now this follows this: When you as auditors find that an engram run out of somebody else is sitting in your own bank, don’t be surprised and say, “My imagination’s working overtime.” This is perfectly good mechanics.
What are locks? They are conscious-level incidents which approximate engrams. Now, of course an engram, a tailor-made engram out of somebody else’s bank that comes along, all of a sudden gets into the auditor’s bank, or just the listener’s bank, may be hit later and someone starts to run it.
He should not at this moment say, “Oh, heavens on earth, this is—what? All imagination. The whole thing must be, because look, here we are running somebody else’s engram. This is terrible, everybody must have dub-in.” Wrong conclusion. That’s a lock. You run it as a lock and as you’re running it very innocently you just whip the fellow into the engram on which it’s sitting.
Because this is what it’s done. The auditor or listener has had impinged upon him a brand-new lock on this one engram. And it won’t sit in his bank unless it has an engram to sit on. And it might be visible as a lock but the engram might be hidden as an engram.
Consequently, this is a wonderful way to find engrams. By the way, there is a point in a case, way beyond the first moments of the case, when an auditor gets desperate.
The first moments of a case in taking apart circuitry, valences, doing diagnosis, finally getting the erasure started, getting the erasure progressing—these moments are sometimes held up and one is puzzled. But there comes a horrible time in a case when one has erased the bank prenatally. Birth, tonsillectomies, everything else is out of the thing, he’s up to present time again. Now, he knows that there are engrams which weren’t on these chains. [gap] He knows that there are more engrams on this case. There may be forty, fifty, sixty engrams in this case but he has completed his erasure. The patient by this time, by the way, feels fine. Sometimes he is very difficult to interest in therapy. He has gone over the hump as far as his mental health is concerned. He has no somatics, he has enormous energy, he’s feeling good. So you have to persuade him and sometimes practically blackjack him.
Mike at Collier’s had an appointment over here about four days ago and he hasn’t shown up. Mike’s work was always late and he had a horrible time and he used to get sick spells and vomiting and he had ulcers and other things and all of these things cleared up.
Now, all of a sudden Mike figures, well, he must be superman or something. And yet Mike isn’t a third Clear yet. And I want him over here because I want a Clear over on Collier’s. So I’m going to have to call him up and feed him all the restimulators I can think of. (laughter) Now, you’ll find yourself sometimes in this position when you want somebody really to be cleared and he’s no longer anxious about this. But you know there are engrams there. Oh, you can convince him after a fashion that you should work, but he starts working and he isn’t finding anything. And you’ve got a blank track but you know he’s still got engrams. Certain things are wrong.
One of the best ways to do this that I know of is single word repeater. There’s some word in the English language going to be contained in one of his engrams, and you just take the dictionary . . .
Male voice: Oh no!
That’s right, a little dictionary, and you start in with “A.” Male voice: Aardvark Aardvark. You pick up these various words and start shooting down the line and you start covering the dictionary with him on repeater technique. And he’ll start turning up engrams for you. Of course, by this time anything in his case will erase. Just as anything in the case in its intermediate stage will reduce after basic-basic and a few others are out at the bottom, so after you have obtained the overall superficial erasure, anything now will erase. You don’t have to do it in sequence; you can go any part of the bank you want to and you run through the words once, start through them again, yawn, words gone. So it doesn’t take very long. You can sit there and run out fifteen, twenty engrams out of a person one right after the other. But try to find them in a person who is no longer interested in them! They now have insufficient force because this equation is taking place: The less engrams the person has, the more activity and the more strength his attention units have.
As a consequence, his mind is able to buck these things much stronger. You’ve got something working on your side. Every time you take an engram out you have some more of it working on your side too. So you take these things out and they’ll start knocking out engrams as locks after a while.
The last end of the case, if you’ve really done a good job and there’s nothing very bad sitting around in the case, between sessions you will find out the fellow happened to recall . . . You know straight line technique, “Who used to tell you to control yourself?” “Ha-ha-ha, yeah, my father.” The fellow will say, “Like the time I was run over by a truck, ha! Yeah! Yeah! Boy, was that cop mad.” In this thing he was out for two days with a brain concussion. So you go back to the incident and so forth, and he says, “What do you want to do this for?” And you say, “Well, run it out, run it out, of course.” He becomes very hard to handle in reverie. He starts going places. You’re working with a file clerk now face to face. And the file clerk has so much self-determinism he doesn’t much take to guiding. He knows what to do.
This is real self-control, by the way. A person gets up along this level, with a little bit of practice he can start regulating his pulse. Weird. There’s real self-control.
Male voice: Order of magnitude?
Oh, order of magnitude by about a third of the pulse rate, I don’t say that they can do this to an enormous extent and everyone can do it. I happen to know three patients; one after the other, I said, “Let’s see how fast your pulse is beating.” “Well, how fast do you want it to beat?” (laughter) Contradictory to that, the other day—that is to say months ago—I was very embarrassed. I told Joe about this and I said it was a peculiar darn thing. You could get a count2 anywhere from about sixty on up to about ninety-two without any trouble on the thing. And he said, “Yeah?” he says, “lets see how well you can do it.” So he reached over and grabbed my pulse and I was sitting there all tired out and so forth, so I said, “Beat slow.” It went on—bumpity-bumpity-bumpity-bump. “Beat slow.” Nothing happened. I managed to reduce my pulse rate by about eight. I managed to increase it by about three. Other than this it was not a good experiment. I guess I’ll have to wait for one of you people that’s really smart to clean up my bank for me.
Male voice: Ron, at that real late stage going towards Clear, does he get so he can take care of the small balance himself or is the auditor always a necessity right up to the end?
I don’t know. I suppose a fellow could. It’s a bad thing to do for the good reason that the auditor has to be there to make a thorough check on the bank. Mike gets a release, now he’s over the hills and far away as he’s writing a history for historians and he’s writing this and that and so on. He was behind on all these things and he had collected advances on all of them, and some of the advances he had had for about two years and people have really been hounding him. Now he’s got energy enough to do it, we don’t see anything of Mike. Well, the auditor should rather keep after a person right there at the end line.
Male voice: Feed him restimulators.
Yeah. Feed him good.
Male voice: Ron? I’ve got a question that’s been hanging on about the sperm sequence.
Okay.
Male voice: In running through one I noticed that there were skip areas—go along a rather consecutive story and then bing seem to be sometimes rather alone. I found later that there were engrams in some of these blank areas. Now would it be a good idea if you notice such a ship, to take advantage of the thing or do a little urging and handle it?
Well, ordinarily on these, just additional recountings, you’ll get these skip areas out automatically. The number of times over. All engrams have skip areas in them, you might say, and by additional recounting— that’s the material I was showing you here, the material that went like this [drawing on blackboard] and so on. And this deep part here, this will probably be skipped on the first recounting.
Male voice: But in this case, his own sequences would be very, very long you know, a long time.
Mm-hm.
Now you’ve heard me say that you will find lots of engrams tangled up with the sperm sequence. You’ll very often find them all twisted up and overlaying it and underlaying it and everything else.
In some cases this is so remarkable and so twisted that you keep trying to run the sperm engram and you’ll keep trying to run it and keep trying to run it and you’ll just keep running other engrams. But each time you try for the sperm engram you’ll get another engram that you can erase.
That was a standard procedure a couple of years back, was just to ram the guy back against the time he was conceived, just slam him into it somehow and you knew he’d pick up a new engram. And you just keep doing it. And you just keep peeling engrams off of this thing. You see, you hit it head on, just jam him into it and you get this bundled-up appearance in the bank and you can just peel engrams off of it and peel them off and peel them off and peel them off, in some cases.
On this emotional tuned-up business—you’ve seen Russ doing this lately—ptock! ptock! The emotional tune-up—one seems to be able, because these cases are behaving—I haven’t seen any of these pile-ups lately. And they’re hitting them with this tuned-up emotional stress and going right straight to conception. Evidently they’ve entered this thing by the back door. Now, if you can enter it by the back door, get into the sperm sequence, we really don’t need to say much else about the sperm bundle there at the beginning of the track. But it’s there and you’ll find it.
You can do this with a patient: “Let’s go to the beginning of track. All right, let’s go to the time you were a sperm. Now let’s go forward to the first moment of pain.” They wind up at four months. Those early ones on the track are sort of out of sight. And you can keep doing this with a patient, taking him—beginning of track and then go forward to first moment of pain and you’re winding up maybe at three months. Each time you do, you find another engram, reduce it, beginning of track, forward to the first moment of pain.
This technique is so old it’s got hair on it. It’s really moldy. I wouldn’t advise its use. Many is the weary evening I have spent and wearier morning going through this routine until I found the patient finally peeled back to the moment when you could get something around basic-basic. And then you could finally get a sperm sequence around here sometime in the case, so you’d run that too. That’s a weary one.
This other one—bing bang sperm sequence, oh boy!
That emotional bounce method is a process of settling the patient in an emotion, an emotional incident—any emotional incident when he was dramatizing the emotion, when he was observing it being dramatized—and take him from there back to the earliest moment in the bank which contains this emotion. You can do that with any emotion. But it’s peculiarly apt with sex because you wind up, in a lot of cases, with the sperm sequence. So you erase it, so the case makes fast progress.
It is phenomenal with the valences and demon circuitry and other things that have been suddenly consolidated, how many basic-basics are coming out. Just bang! The proportion has gone way up. What this is going to do to the final time tally on clearing I don’t know. But it’s going to do something to it. Knocking out some of these dub-in circuits, that is going to bring the average time of Clear way down.
Male voice: You mean by straight memory?
All these things.
Female voice: Ron? Look, if that demon circuit that you re after and that you stimulate in order to dive on it—happens to be the one that’s holding up the case and everything is there also a possibility that it’s one of the engrams which will not lift? You’ve said sometimes that we couldn’t . . .
You pays your money and you takes your chance3 when you’re gunning for circuitry. Therefore, it’s a very fine thing to get basic-basic off the case, if you can possibly manage it.
Female voice: That’s what I mean.
If you can get basic-basic off, it’ll shake the case up so now the person can’t be badly aberrated by just running into something and not being able to lift it. It won’t hurt him much. He’ll go around yelling at you for a day or two but it doesn’t matter.
Male voice: Could there be any value in actually freeing a pleasure moment?
Might be, who knows? Make the experiment, will you?
All right. Good.
Male voice: On a specific case that had been through the sperm sequence and it had not lifted, when I went back down there the party reacted as a sperm, I mean with the wiggling and everything and trying to send the party earlier resulted in that sequence . . . [gap] . . . pushed into the ovum section of the sequence. And then the ovum section of the sequence, coming up to it, and then suddenly slowly moved up towards it, “It’s coming towards you, towards you, towards you, towards you. You re there now!” The party came off the bed about a foot and screamed! There was a tremendous shock and it was run over a number of times. When it finally reduced the patient was asked, “How do you feel?” and replied, “I feel as if something has penetrated me and just torn me apart inside.” And this is a pretty strong circuitry case. And right there at that moment, right with that shock, was this “Ouch! It hurts, control yourself, for heaven s sakes, be calm,” and a few other various and sundries like that and the circuits had weakened to a great extent.
There’s a report on the validity of running conception and running it from both sides. Extremely necessary. [gap] Now, a great New York Dianeticist had a comment to make, though, I considered very interesting. And that was—she said, “Well, I know it sounds old-fashioned in Dianetics, but why doesn’t he walk the somatic strip backwards?” Now, I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the text to get this, but the somatic strip will walk backwards. You say now, “The somatic strip will go to the phrase before this. Now what’s the phrase? The somatic strip will go to the phrase before this, now what’s the phrase?” And you can walk this way, in fact I’ve walked all the way down an engram bank backwards that way, trying to find something that would reduce.
In other words you can back the somatic strip up, not turn it around and run the film backwards.
You can do a lot of things. Now, obviously there are emotional shut-offs in this case and so forth. The auditor was not permitted a full play of his own imagination on this because I gave him a phrase which I had heard this gentleman utter two or three times. And that phrase was, “I feel the world is against me.” Watch the phrase “against me.” You can find this as a part of the engram bank. You have the phrase which causes paranoia. There are many things which can be said in a roundabout way about Rorschach and the rest of them, but there’s one that coordinates: “against me.” Now, any time you have “against me” in a case, it moves the engram bank up against “I” and makes a rather nasty situation. Such people are very unhappy. This paranoia which, of course, is pathological and everybody knows it’s pathological, happens to be the phrase “against me.” When you run into such a case, you know you have a classification of paranoia or somebody feels that the world is a bit against him, just run that “against me.” Run it as repeater, you’ll find it in the bank. All right. When you do, why, you can generally deintensify the case somewhat.
The auditor in this case could have asked whether or not either of Mama’s parents were around because it is a cinch that one of them had “the whole world against me.” And the phrase out of that mouth might have been much more aberrative than the phrase out of the mouth of Mama. Because Mama got it someplace. And she had a mama, and she had a papa. And the odds are very much in favor of the grandparents of the preclear having said the words.
The cases here, by and large, made pretty fair progress, not the kind of progress that I would like to see perhaps, but overall the picture is pretty good. You know your Dianetics; with experience and by putting to work what you have used, what you have learned, by using it, by practicing, by observing what it does, by paying attention to a few of these admonitions, I’m sure you can get away with most anything in Dianetics. It takes experience.
Now we started in this course by talking about the Auditor’s Code and we’re going to finish it up talking about the Auditor’s Code. The Auditor’s Code is not there because it’s a good idea or we must all be knights-errant. It’s there to protect the auditor as much as it is to protect the preclear.
The auditor can cause himself an enormous amount of work by becoming impatient, by becoming angry, by departing from what is considered to be a course of decent human conduct toward the preclear. He can add up for himself dozens, scores of hours of . . . [gap] The data should be held to himself. He should never by any slightest movement or show, appear to question the truth or accuracy of data which the preclear is giving him. He should never assign the word “imagination” to anything the preclear is doing or saying.
The factors which most aberrate people in this society are the phrases which destroy reality, that is to say which invalidate—“That’s just your imagination.” “You didn’t see it,” “You’re wrong.” The “wrong” phrases, the phrases which tell a person that he must control himself and the idea that pleasure is sinful.
This trio flowing along the time line down to us here, we inherit in the form of disturbed lives, crammed asylums and a criminal populace which according to the figures of Hoover4 shouldn’t happen. So don’t break the Auditor’s Code, because you may severely injure the mental health of the patient you are auditing. And you may cause yourself a great deal of trouble and you may have to go to much more expense and effort to bring this person’s case back into line than you would care to go through.
It’s not just an idea of ours that the Auditor’s Code should be there. It’s been rather a long time since I’ve seen a serious break of the Auditor’s Code. The boys are getting the professional class so touchy about this that somebody snorts because he’s trying to repress a sneeze that’s been restimulated on him and somebody comes around to me within three or four minutes and says, “So-and-so broke the Auditor’s Code.” Yup. Invalidation of data. They’re getting touchy about it. Well, that’s the way they ought to be.