DMSH 1950 Book 3 Chapter 7

← Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950)

Emotion and the Life Force

One of the largest roles in therapy is played by Emotion. In the second book we covered this subject and divided it tentatively as a theory only into three divisions: (a) the emotions contained in the command of engrams whereby physical pain became confused with emotions; (b) the emotions contained as endocrine reactions subject to the analytical mind of the clear and the analytical mind and reactive mind of the aberree; and (c) the emotions contained in engrams which bound up free units of Life force.

Further work and research on emotion will undoubtedly bring about an even closer understanding of it. But we have a workable knowledge of emotion now. We can use what we know and produce results with it. When we know more, we shall be able to produce much better results but just now we can produce the release and the clear. If we treat emotion as bound up life force and if we follow these general precepts to release it, we shall obtain a very large gain in any pre-clear; indeed, we shall produce our largest single gains by so releasing emotion.

In an engineering science like dianetics, we can work on a push-button basis. We know that throwing a switch will stop a motor, that closing it again will start it and that no matter how many times we open or close that switch our motor will stop or start. We are using here a force which is still as mysterious to us as electricity was to James Clerk Maxwell. Much earlier Benjamin Franklin had observed that electricity existed and had done some interesting things with it: but he had not used it much and he could not control it. A philosopher like Bergson selected out a thing he called elan vital, a life force. Man is alive, there must be a force or flow of something which keeps him alive; when Man is dead there is no force or flow. This is life force in the Benjamin Franklin stage. As he considered electricity, so did Bergson consider life force. Now we are up, in dianetics, to the James Clerk Maxwell stage, or very nearly. We know that certain equations can be made about life force and we can use those equations. And we can theorize that “life force” and what has been called a certain kind of “emotion” are either similar or the same thing. We may have the wrong theory, but so might James Clerk Maxwell. Indeed, Maxwell’s theories may still be wrong: at least we have electric lights. In dianetics we are pretty certain that the majority of tenets are parallels of natural law: these are the big computations. We are not certain that we have emotion properly bracketed, but then we shall not be sure until we have actually taken a dead man and pumped him up with life force again. Short of this extreme, we are on solid ground with emotion as life force.

We can, for instance, take a girl, examine something of her background with, let us say, an electro-encephalograph (an instrument for measuring nervous impulses and reactions) and then proceed on the basis of the information so obtained to do one or two things. The first is inhuman and would not be done, ot course, but she could be made sick or insane merely by using this data, so obtained. (If the data is obtained in therapy, it is obtained by actual contact with engrams and an engram contacted in reverie has lost its power to aberrate: dianetic therapy thus makes such an eventuality utterly impossible.) The second and far more important fact to us is that she can be made to recover, with this same data, all the force, interest, persistence and tenacity to life and all the physical and mental well-being possible. If it could not be made to work both ways, we would not have the answer, at least in workable form. (Some fiction writer, by the way, if tempted to horrorize on the first fact, must please recall that the data was obtained with apparatus which would have staggered Doctor Frankenstein for intricacy and skill in use and that dianetic therapy contacts the data at source: the apparatus is necessary to keep from touching the source for the instant the source is touched by therapy its power vanishes like yesterday’s headlines: so let’s have no “Gaslight” plays about dianetics, please: they’d be technically inaccurate.)

This is not as simple as electricity in that the switch cannot be turned off and on. So far as dianetics is concerned, it can only be turned on. We have a rheostat, then, which will not drop back but which, when pressed forward, releases more and more dynamic force into the individual and gives him more and more control over its use.

Man is intended to be a self-determined organism. That is to say that as long as he can make evaluations of his data without artificial compulsions or repressions (held down 7’s in an adding machine) he can operate to maximum efficiency. When man becomes exteriorly- determined, which is to say compelled to do or repressed from doing without his own rational consent, he becomes a push-button animal. This push-button factor is so sharply defined that an auditor, in therapy, who discovers a key phrase in an engram (and does not release it) can use that phrase for a little while to make a patient cough or laugh or stop coughing or stop laughing at the auditor’s will. In the case of the auditor, because he got the data at source — contacted the engram itself, which robbed it of some power, the push-button will not last very long, certainly less than two or three hundred pushes. The whole pain-drive effort at handling human beings and most of the data accumulated in the past by various schools has been, unwittingly, this push-button material. If the engram is not touched at source it is good for endless use, its power never diminishing. Touched at source, however, the original recording has been reached and so it loses its power. The “handling of human beings” and what people have been calling, roughly, “psychology” have been actually push-button handling of a person’s aberrational phrases and sounds. Children discover them in their parents and use them with a vengeance. The clerk discovers that his boss can’t stand a full waste basket and so always has one full. The bosun on a ship finds out one of his sailors cringes every time he hears the phrase, “fancy-pants” and so uses the word to intimidate the man. This is push- button warfare amongst aberrees. Wives may find that certain words make the husband wince or make him angry or make him refrain from doing something and so they use these “push- buttons.” And husbands find their wives’ push-buttons and keep them from buying clothes or using the car. This defensive and offensive dueling amongst aberrees is occasioned by push- button reacting against push-buttons.

Whole populaces are handled by their push-button responses. Advertising learns about push-buttons and uses them in such things as “body-odor” or constipation. And in the entertainment field and the song-writing field push-buttons are pushed in whole racks and batteries to produce aberrated responses. Pornography appeals to people who have pornographic push-buttons. Corn-and-games government appeals to people who have “care for me” push-buttons and others. It might be said that there is no necessity to appeal to reason when there are so many push-buttons around.

These same push-buttons, because they are 7’s held down by pain and emotion (false data forced into the computer by engrams — and every society has its own special patterns of engrams), also happen to drive people insane, make them ill and generally raise havoc. The only push-button the clear has is whatever his own computer, evaluating on his experience which itself has been evaluated by the computer, tells him is survival conduct along his four dynamics. And so, being no marionette in the hands of careless or designing people, he remains well and sane.

It is not true, however, that a clear is not emotional, that his reason is cold, and that he is a self-conscious puppet to his own computations. His computer works so rapidly and on so many levels with so many of his computations going on simultaneously but out of the sight of “I” (though “I” can examine any one of them he chooses) that his inversion or acute awareness of self is minimal. Inversion is the condition of the aberree whose poor computer is wrestling with heavy imponderables and held down 7’s in his engrams such as “I must do it. I just have to do it. But no, I’d better change my mind.”

The computational difference between the clear and the aberree is very wide. But there is a much grander difference: life force. The dynamics have, evidently, so much potential force. This force manifests itself as tenacity to life, persistence in endeavor, vigor of thought and act and ability to experience pleasure. The dynamics in a man’s cells may be no stronger than those in a cat’s cells. But the dynamics in the whole man are easily greater than those in any other animal. Assign this as one will, the man is basically more alive in that he has a more volatile response. By more alive is meant that his sentient-emotional urge to live is greater than those found in other life forms. If this were not true, he would not now command the other kingdoms. Regardless of what a shark or a beaver does when threatened with final extinction, the shark and the beaver get short shrift when they encounter the dynamics of Man: the shark gets worn as leather or eaten as vitamins and the beaver decks a lady’s back.

The fundamental aspect of this is seen in a single reaction. Animals are content to survive in their environments and seek to adjust themselves to those environments. That very dangerous animal — or god — Man has a slightly different idea. Ancient schools were fond of telling the poor demented aberree that he must face reality. This was optimum conduct: facing reality. Only it isn’t Man’s optimum conduct. Just as these schools made the fundamental error of supposing that the aberree was unwilling to face his environment when he was actually, because of engrams, unable to face it, they supposed that the mere facing of reality would lead to sanity. Perhaps it does, but it does not lead to a victory of Man over the elements and other forms. Man has something more: some people call it creative imagination, some call it this or some call it that: but whatever it is called, it adds up to the interesting fact that Man is not content merely to “face reality” as most other life forms are. Man makes reality face him. Propaganda about “the necessity of facing reality,” like propaganda to the effect that a man could be driven mad by a “childhood delusion” (whatever that is) does not face the reality that where the beaver down his ages of evolution built mud dams and keeps on building mud dams Man graduates in half a century from a stone and wood dam to make a mill wheel pond to structures like Grand Coulee Dam, and changes the whole and entire aspect of a respectable portion of Nature’s real estate from a desert to productive soil, from a flow of water to lightning bolts. It may not be as poetic as Rousseau desired, it may not be as pretty as some “nature lover” would desire, but it’s a new reality. Two thousand years ago the Chinese built a wall which would have been visible from the Moon had anybody been up there to look; three thousand years ago he had North Africa green and fertile; ten thousand years ago he was engaged upon some other project; but always he has been shaping things up pretty well to suit Man.

There’s an extra quality at work or perhaps just more of it, so much more of it that it looks like a new thing entirely.

Now all this is not any great digression from therapy; it is stated here as an aspect of life force. Where the individual finds himself “possessed of less and less life force,” he is losing some of the free units somewhere.

And the free units of this life force, in a society or an individual, are the extra surge that is needed to tame North Africa, divide an atom, or reach the stars.

The mechanical theory here — and recall it is but theory and dianetics can stand without it — is that there are so many units of force per individual. These units may be held in common by a group and may build to higher and higher numbers as “enthusiasm” increases; but for our purposes, we can consider that Man, as an individual or a society — both are organisms — has a ready number to hand for use in any given hour or day. He may manufacture these life units as required and he may simply have a given supply: that is beside the point.

What is to the point is that he can be considered, at any hour or day, as just so much alive. Consider this as his dynamic potential as we can see on our descriptic earlier.

What happens, then, to this dynamic potential in the aberree? He has a large quantity of engrams in his bank. We know that these engrams can sleep for his entire life without being “keyed-in,” and we know that any or all of them can be keyed-in and thereafter wait for restimulators in the environment to set them into action. We know that his necessity level can suddenly rise and surmount all these keyed-in engrams, and we know that a high survival activity can bring him such a chance of pleasure that the engrams can stay unrestimulated, though keyed-in. And we can suppose that these engrams, from one period of life to another, can actually key-out again and stay out because of some vast change of environment or survival chances.

The usual case, however, is that a few engrams stay keyed-in continually and are restimulated rather chronically by the environment of the individual, and that if he changes environment the old may key out but eventually new ones will key-in.

Most aberrees are in a state of chronic restimulation which, on the average, starts the spiral dwindling down rather rapidly.

As this pertains to life force, the mechanical action of an engram on being keyed-in, is to capture so many of these units of life force. Sudden and sweeping restimulation of the engram permits it to capture a great many more units of life force. In the average case, every restimulation captures a greater residue of life force and holds it. When enthusiasm or impetus aligns the purpose of the individual toward a true survival goal (as opposed to a pseudo-goal in the engrams) he recaptures some of these units. But the spiral is dwindling: he cannot capture back, except in very unusual circumstances, as many as he has lost into the engram bank.

Thus it can be said, for purposes of this theory of life force action, that more and more life force units out of an individual’s supply are captured and held in the engram bank. Here they are perverted in use to counterfeit themselves as dynamic (as in the manic and the high euphoria case) and force action upon the somatic and analytical mind. In this engram bank, the life force units are not available as free feeling or for free action but are used against the individual from within.

An observation here tends to demonstrate this action: the more restimulated an aberree is, the less free feeling he may possess. If caught in a manic (highly complimentary pro- survival engram), his life force is channeling straight through the engram and his behavior, no matter how enthusiastic or euphoric, is actually very aberrated: if he has this much life force to be so channeled, then he can be shown to have even more life force, sentiently directed, when clear. (This has been done.)

We have demonstrated the parasitic quality of the “demon circuits” which use pieces of the analytical mind and its processes. This parasitic quality is common to engrams in other ways. If a man has, arbitrarily, a thousand units of life force, he has an ability to channel them, when clear, into highly zestful existence: in a manic state, with a pro-survival engram in full restimulation, the life force is directed through an aberrated command and gives him, let us say, five hundred units of pseudo-dynamic thrust.

In other words, the power is out of the same battery: such an engram has at best less power than the whole organism, cleared, would have. (This aspect of the manic or super- personality neurotic has misled some of the old schools of mental healing into the thoroughly aberrated and poorly observed belief that insanities alone were responsible for Man’s ability to survive, a concept which can be disproven in the laboratory simply by clearing one of these manics or any other aberree.)

The engram uses the same current but perverts it just as it uses the same analytical mind but usurps it. Not only does the engram have no life of its own, but it is wasteful as are so many parasites, of the life force of the host. It is thoroughly inefficient. If a comparable device were fitted into an electronic circuit it would merely lead off and make “unalterable” some of the functions of the equipment which should be left variable and would, in addition, consume, simply by lengthened leads and bad condensers and tubes, power supply vital to the machine.

In the human mind, the engram assumes its most forceful “assist” aspect in the manic, channeling and commanding the organism into some activity of wild violence and monomanic concentration.

The “super-salesman,” the violently buoyant “glad-hander,” the fanatical and apparently unkillable religious zealot are classifiable as manics. The abundance of “power” in these people, even when it is as grim as Torquemada’s or as destructive as Genghis Khan’s, is an object of admiration in many quarters. The manic, as will be later covered, is a “pro-survival,” “assist” command in an engram which yet fixes the individual on some certain course. But an engram is capable only of as much “power” as is present in the host, just as it is capable of tying up only as much analyzer as is present.

Let us take a forceful manic who is displaying and functioning on 500 arbitrary units of life force. Let us assume that the entire being is possessed of 1000 arbitrary units of life force. Suppose we have here an Alexander. The dynamics of the average person are unassisted by manics in most cases but are dispersed as a stream of electrons might be dispersed by a block before them.

Here are scattered activity, scattered thoughts, uncomputable problems, lack of alignment. In such a person, with 1000 units present, 950 of those units could be so captured in the engram banks and yet so thoroughly counteractive that the person displays a functioning capacity of only 50 units. In the case of Alexander, it could be assumed, the manic must have been an alignment in a general direction of his own basic purposes. His basic purpose is a strong regulator: the manic happens to align with it: a person of great ability and personal prowess becomes possessed of 500 units via a manic engram, believes he is a god and goes out and conquers the known world. He was educated to believe he was a god, his manic engram said he was a god and had a holder in it.

Alexander conquered the world and died at 33. He could hold in his manic only so long as it could be obeyed: when it could no longer be obeyed, it changed his valence, became no more a manic and drove him, with pain, into dispersed activities. The engram, received from his mother, Olympia, can almost be read even at this late date. It must have said he would be a joyous god who would conquer all the world and must keep on conquering, that he must always strive to rise higher and higher. It was probably a ritual chant of some sort from his mother, who was a high priestess of Lesbos and who must have received some injury just before the ritual. She hated her husband, Phillip. A son who would conquer all was the answer. Alexander may well have had fifty or a hundred such “assist” engrams, the violent praying of a woman aberrated enough to murder. Thus he could be assumed to have conquered until he could no longer stretch a line of supply for conquering, at which time he, of course, would no longer be able to obey the engram and its force of pain would turn on him. The engrams dictated attack to conquer, and they enforced the command with pain: once conquering could not longer be accomplished, the pain attacked Alexander. He realized one day he was dying: within the week he was dead: and at the height of his power. Such, on a very large scale, is a manic phrase in an engram at work.

Now let us suppose that Alexander, with only education to turn him against his father, with only prayers to ask him to conquer the world, not engrams, had been cleared. Answer: given a sufficient and rational reason, he would most certainly have been able to conquer the world and at eighty might well have been alive to enjoy it.

How can we assume this?

The manic with 500 units of directed purpose has been cleared. He now has 1000 units of sentiently directed purpose. He is exactly twice as forceful as he was when he was in a forceful manic and his basic purpose may be similar but now can be realized and will not turn on him the moment he has reached a goal or failed.

This is clinical, the theory behind life force. It was formulated in an effort to explain observed phenomena.

The theory may be wrong, the observed data is not. But the theory must be somewhere close to right because with it could be predicted considerable phenomena which had not been

known to exist before: in other words, it is a profitable theory. It followed after dianetics was well formulated, for a strange fact, vital to the therapist, turned up: the pre-clear advanced in therapy in exact ratio to the amount of emotional charge released from his reactive bank.

The purpose and persistency of the aberree was hindered in ratio to the amount of emotional charge within his engram bank. His recovery of survival potential increased in ratio to the amount of energy freed from the engram bank.

His health increased in ratio to the amount of energy feed from the engram bank.

The engrams which contained the greatest discharge were those which centered around loss of imagined survival factors.

Hence, this theory of life force was formulated. Any manic cleared seemed to demonstrate far more actual power and energy than before he was cleared. And any “normal” cleared increased in accessible life force units to compare with any manic cleared.

Undoubtedly further work and observation will refine this theory. At the present moment, however, it serves. It is one of those “scientific theories” thrown in to explain an operation or a long series of observations. In this case it happens to be squarely aligned with the basic tenets of dianetics, for it predicts data which can then be found and does not throw out former data predicted by the basic mathematics and philosophy of dianetics.

Here we are speaking, actually, not of this slippery term, emotion, but, we believe, life force. This life force is considerably enhanced by success and pleasure in general and is, according to this theory, augmented in terms of arbitrary units, by pleasure. In other words, pleasure is a thing which recharges the batteries or permits them to be recharged and in a clear, far from leading to softness, leads to renewed activity since indolence is engramic.

Pleasure is a vitally important factor: creative and constructive endeavor, the overcoming of not unknowable obstacles toward some goal, the contemplation of past goals reached all combine to recharge life force. The person, for instance, who has been an enormous success and then loses that success and so becomes ill is following no rational cycle but an engramic command cycle. In a way he has disobeyed an engramic command and having disobeyed, suffers pain. The “child wonder” who early “burns out” is actually, via therapy, about as burned out as a banked furnace. Any “child wonder” is a forced affair: think of the dreams mama must have poured through his engrams. She’s hurt: “Oh, I’ll never forgive myself! If I have ruined my child, I will never forgive myself. My child, that’s to be the world’s greatest violinist!” or “Oh, you brute! You have struck me! You have injured our child. I’ll show you. I’ll make him the greatest child pianist in all Brooklyn! He’s to be a beautiful child, a wonder child! And you’ve struck him, you brute. Oh, I am going to sit right here until you go away!” (Actual engrams.) The last computes that the way to get even with papa is to be the greatest pianist in all Brooklyn. The child is a great success — musical ear, practice and great “purpose.” He gets this engram restimulated constantly by his mother. But then, one day he loses a contest, he knows suddenly he is no longer a child, that he has failed. His purpose wavers. He gets headaches (papa’s blow) and is at last “neurotic” and “burned out.” Cleared he went back to being a pianist, not as an “adjusted” person but one of the best paid concert pianists in Hollywood. Music aligned with basic purpose.

Again, in another manic example, a patient who had been some time in therapy — not the first to do this by far — raved that he had been “turned-on” by dianetics. He was walking about a foot off the earth, chest punched out and so forth. His glasses suddenly would not fit him, his eyes were too good. He was a beaming, powerful case of euphoria.

Artificial restimulation had touched a manic engram, had brought it into key for the first time in his life. He felt wonderful. The auditor knew that he was due for a complete come down within thirty-six hours to three days (the usual time) because an artificial restimulation, by therapy, had tapped the engram. It happened that his grandmother had told her daughter that she must not abort the child because someday it might become a “fine upstanding man or beautiful woman.” He was upstanding all right: it almost strained his back muscles. Another glance at the engram in therapy and the manic phase was gone.

This manic, then, as in the case of the boy wonder, can be assumed to have gathered up available life force and suddenly channeled it along basic purpose lines, making a high level of concentration of life force. In the case of the pianist his cleared force was well above the manic force. In the other case, currently in process, a level has been reached which is approaching the former level and will surpass it by far.

In the same way an enthusiasm for a project will channel life force along some purpose line and necessity will suddenly rob back from engrams enough power to carry an individual far, although he has no active manics whatever.

Now we come to the heart of this matter: the pro-survival engram. It is pseudo-survival like all engramic “assist,” a mirage which dissolves and leaves burning sands.

Formerly we spoke mainly of contra-survival engrams. These lie across the dynamics of the individual and his basic purpose.

The contra-survival engram is, to the dynamics, like a log jam which dams a necessary river. The dynamic is blocked in some degree. Any blockage to any one of the four dynamics (or any section of that spectrum) causes a dispersal of the flow. It does not make less dynamic, particularly, but it does misdirect it in the same order that the river, blocked in its natural flow, might become five streams going in various directions or flood a fertile pasture it should merely have watered.

The pro-survival engram alleges to assist (but does not actually assist) the dynamic on its way. It pretends it is the dynamic. In the analogy of the river, the pro-survival engram would be a canal which took the river’s force and sent it off in some unintended direction. The pro-survival engram is not a manic; it can and does contain at times manic phrases.

A contra-survival engram says, “He’s worthless, damn him, let’s kill him.”

The pro-survival engram says: “I am saving him.” If it added: “He is a darling and a very wonder with the ladies,” it would then be a pro-survival with a manic.

In terms of the descriptic which defines the survival dynamic and the suppressor earlier in this book, the contra-survival engram would be part of the suppressor (an aberrated part) and the pro-survival engram would be part of the dynamic thrust (an aberrated part).

Neither one of these things is actually a sentient and computable portion of survival dynamic or suppressor.

The engram (delirium from illness, perhaps) which says, “I will stay with you, darling, so long as you are sick” is an apparent but wholly shadow-stuff part of the survival dynamic. But the reactive mind has no sense of time when restimulated and this engram, keyed-in and constantly restimulated by some concept in it such as an odor or a person’s voice who may or may not be the original person, demands that the person who has it be ill just as he was ill when it was said. This way, according to our moron, the reactive mind, lies survival: “I had some one taking care of me when I was ill. I need some one to take care of me. I must be ill.” Here is the basic pattern of all sympathy engrams. Here is the basic pattern of the engram which will contain the chronic psycho-somatic illness in any patient. The variety is, of course, very large but all insist that the individual who has them be ill in order to survive.

The suppressor-type engram, always contra-survival, can be cut into restimulation in exactly the same way as the pro-survival engram. An engram is an engram and all the mechanics are the same. The fact that the analytical mind cannot time the engram can make any engram seem omnipresent. Time can “heal” the experiences of the analytical mind, perhaps, but not the reactive mind which has no time, a fact which makes time not the Great Healer but the Great Charlatan. There may be no actuality at all in this suppressor data. It is false data. Such engrams let an individual, for instance, see a butterfly and then tell him it is dangerous: he then comes to detest spring because that is the time he sees butterflies. This engram may say: “You’re all against me. You’re against everything I do,” which was actually Mama making a stand against her husband and mother-in-law. It contains a concept, a recording of the sound of a sewing machine as well. The individual possessing this engram hears a sewing machine (if this engram has at some time been keyed-in) at a moment when he is weary and dull and, looking toward the machine (he never identifies the actual sound:these engrams protect themselves), sees his wife. She is the associative restimulator, something his analytical mind, told to scent danger, picks up as the cause. So he searches around and finds something he is angry about (something almost “rational”) and begins to tell her she is against him. Or it can be an engram of such low emotional tone that it is an apathy, and so he sits down and weeps and moans that she is against him. If, during “unconsciousness” at birth, the doctor said he’d have to spank him, the individual possessing this engram howls and gets headaches when he is spanked and when grown spanks his children as the strongest suppressor he can think of.

There is a difference, then, between the pro- and contra-engrams, particularly the real sympathy pro-engram and the contra-engram. And it is a difference, even if we have been long on the road in this chapter, which is of vital interest to the auditor.

All the real reluctance he will see in pre-clears during therapy will come from these sympathy pro-survival engrams. These add up into some very weird computations. They tell the patient that he had better not “get rid of it” and so the patient struggles to retain his engrams. Such an engram is very common. A typical case is Mama pushing off Papa, who insists he cannot afford a child: the struggle injures the child and in the “unconsciousness” he receives, of course, an engram: Mama is refusing to get rid of it. Mama is on baby’s side, therefore baby had better do exactly as Mama says and “not get rid of it.” This aligns with purpose, the deepest purpose, to survive. If he gets rid of his engrams, he will die because getting rid of it means death, for Mama said she would die if she got rid of it. Further, on up through life, Mama may have the nasty habit of telling him when he is ill that she will “take care of her baby and protect him from his father,” and this makes a new force in the old computation.

Thus we come to the ally computation. This will be the chief and number one struggle of the auditor, the thing which will most elusively resist him, the thing which lies down close to the core of a person.

The ally computation is severe enough that an auditor once said that a man is not victimized by his enemies, he is murdered by his friends. Engramically speaking, that is quite true.

The only aberration and psycho-somatic ill the patient will continually hold to is a pro- survival engram which is part of an ally computation. That could be written fifty times here without being stressed enough. It is most important, it is the first thing which the auditor is going to buck when he enters a case, the first thing he must discharge if he wishes therapy to go swiftly. He may have to touch and reduce many contra-survival engrams, for the come swiftly enough when called, before he can even get an idea of what the ally computation is. But when he gets an ally computation he had better run it out and discharge all its emotion or the case will hang fire.

The ally computation is the reactive mind level moronism that survival depends on Grandma or Aunt Sue or some serving maid thirty years dead. The attendants of the individual when he was ill, the people who begged his pregnant mother to stop trying to abort him, or fed him or otherwise tried to keep him from being hurt: these are the allies.

The reactive mind operates wholly on two-valued logic. Things are life or they are death, they are right or they are wrong, just as the engram wording states. And the personnel of engrams are friends or enemies. The friends, the allies, mean Life! The enemies mean

Death! There is no middle ground. Any restimulator or associated restimulator for the pro- survival engram means Life: and any restimulator or associated restimulator for a contra- survival engram means Death!

The auditor, of course, may be a really restimulative person (one who is a pseudo- father, a pseudo-lover of mother before birth, etc.) but he is always an associative restimulator, the person who may take away these terribly, horribly vital things, the pro-survival engrams. The contra-survival engrams outbalance this factor and, of course, the analytical mind of the pre-clear is always all for the auditor and the therapy.

The trouble comes when the analytical mind is shut down by restimulation and the auditor is seeking the ally computation. Then the pre-clear’s reactive mind dodges and avoids.

The ally computation, however, is simple to trace. And it is very vital to trace it, for this computation may contain the bulk of all the emotional discharge of the case. Freeing the complete ally computation wholly before basic-basic is reached is wholly impossible. But as much life force as possible must be restored to the pre-clear to make the case work well.

For the ally computation, above all things, encysts the life force of the individual. Here is caught and held the free feeling, the very heartbeat of life itself. A pre-clear is only placed in apathy by ally computations. The body can be almost dead in the presence of antagonism and still rally and fight. But it cannot fight its friends. The law of affinity has been aberrated into an entrance into the reactive engram bank. And that law, even when twisted with the murky shadows of unreason in the reactive mind, still works. It is a good law. It is too good when the auditor is trying to find and reduce engrams which are making the pre-clear ache with arthritis or bleed internally with stomach ulcers.

Why can’t he “get rid of” his arthritis? Mama said, when she gracefully fell over a pig, “Oh, I can’t get up! Oh, my poor, poor baby. Oh, my baby! I wonder if I hurt my poor, poor baby. Oh, I hope my baby is still alive! Please God let him live. Please God let me keep my baby. Please!”

Only the God to which she prayed was the Reactive Mind, which makes one of its idiot computations on the basis of everything is equal to everything. A holder, a prayer for life, a thoroughly bruised baby’s spine, Mama’s sympathy, a pig grunt, a prayer to God, all these things are equal to the reactive mind and so we have a fine case of arthritis, particularly since our patient sought “survival” by marrying a girl with a voice just like Mama’s sounded when he was in the womb. Ask him to get rid of his arthritis? The reactive mind says “NO!” Arthritis is a baby is a pig grunt is a prayer to God is wife’s sympathy is being poor is Mama’s voice and all these things are desirable.

He’s kept himself poor and he’s kept his arthritis and he married a wife who would make a harlot blush and this is pro-survival: wonderful stuff, survival, when the reactive mind computes it! And in the case of the ulcers, here was baby poked full of holes (Mama is having a terrible time trying to abort him so she can pretend a miscarriage, and she uses assorted household instruments thrust into the cervix to do it) and some of the holes are through and through his baby’s abdomen and stomach: he will live because he is surrounded by protein and has a food supply and because the sac is like one of these puncture-proof inner tubes that seals up every hole. (Nature has been smart about attempted abortion for a long, long time.)

It so happens that Mama in this case was not a monologist, although most of Mama’s activity on this line is a dramatization and has conversation with it; but it also so happens that Grandma lives next door and she comes over unexpectedly, shortly after the latest effort to make baby meet oblivion.

Grandma may have been an attempted abortionist in her day but now she is old and highly moral and besides, this baby is not giving her any morning sickness: she therefore finds much to censure when she sees a bloody orangewood stick in the bathroom. Baby is still

“unconscious.” Grandma berates Mama: “Any daughter of mine who would do such a horrible thing should be punished by the vengeance of God (the principle of, don’t do as I do, do as I say, for who gave Mama this dramatization in the first place?) and driven through the streets. Your baby has a perfect right to live: if you don’t think you can take care of him, I certainly will. Now you go right on through with your pregnancy, Eloisia, and when that baby is born, if you don’t want him, you bring him to me! The idea of trying to hurt that poor thing!” And so, when our bleeding ulcer case gets born, there is Grandma and there is security and safety. Grandma is here the ally (and she can become an ally in a thousand different ways, any of them based on the principle that she talks sympathetically to baby when he is out like a flounder, and fights Mama in his favor when he is “unconscious”), and when he grows to boyhood he can be found placing a large dependency on Grandma, much to the parental wonder (for they never did anything to little Roger, not they). And Roger will, when Grandma is dead, develop bleeding ulcers to get her back.

Whoever is a friend is to be clasped to the bosom with bonds of steel, says this great genius, the reactive mind, even though it kills the organism.

The ally computation is a little more than the mere idiot calculation that anyone who is a friend can be kept a friend only by approximating the conditions wherein the friendship was realized. It is a computation on the basis that one can only be safe in the vicinity of certain people and that one can only be in the vicinity of certain people by being sick or crazy or poor and generally disabled.

Show an auditor a child who was easily frightened by punishment, who was not at ease around home and who had allies who seemed more important to him than the parents (grandparents, aunts, boarders, doctors, nurses, etc.) and who was sickly, and the auditor can usually spring into view an attempted abortion background because, more often than not, it is there. Show an auditor a child who showed enormous attachment for one parent and detestation for the other and the auditor can bring out a background wherein one person wanted to get rid of or hurt the child and the other parent did not.

The ally computation, then, is important. And it is also very secret. Trying to get the real allies in a case is often a great struggle. It may be that a patient had eight or ten of these allies in some cases and tried desperately to hold to them, and when he could not, searched and found mates and friends who were approximations of his allies. A wife, around whom A is continually ill but whom he will not leave under any circumstances, is usually a pseudo-ally, which is to say she approximates some mannerism of the actual ally, has a similar voice or even a similar first name. B, who will not leave a job and yet who is working far below his ability level in life, may be there because his boss is a pseudo-ally; further, he may be working at this job because an ally had a similar station in life and he is being the ally.

Anything which can so far corrupt a person’s life is naturally going to be difficult to some degree in therapy, for when he is asked to get rid of his ally computation, it is as likely that he will give any clue to it as it is that he would have spit in his ally’s face.

These pro-survival engrams containing the ally computation can be described as those which contain personnel who defended the patient’s existence in moments when the patient conceived that his existence was under attack. This need not be an actual, rational defense: it may only be that the content of the engram seems to indictate it; but it can safely be assumed that the worst ally computations are those when the life of the patient was defended against attackers by the ally. Most ally computations have their genesis in the prenatal area.

The ally computation is sought as the first action in any case and new ally computations are sought throughout a case.

These sympathy pro-survival engrams, which make up the ally computations, vary only in intensity from the standard pro-survival engram. A standard pro-survival engram is bad only because someone has expressed friendship for the patient or another person when he was “unconscious”: it is difficult to discover and clear even when it actually has been entirely misread — which is to say that the pro-survival content was intended for another person than the patient but is only misconstrued by the patient. If the patient is “unconscious” and somebody says “he is a good guy,” actually meaning another person entirely, the egocentric reactive mind takes the phrase to have been meant for oneself.

In the sympathy pro-survival engram (the ally computation is composed only of these) there is an actual defense of the person from danger by some ally: this can vary from a dramatic scene wherein somebody has been bent on killing the patient and the ally has arrived, like the cavalry, in the nick of time, to the incident wherein the patient was simply saved (or assumed he was being saved) from destruction such as drowning, being run over, etc. And the sympathy pro-survival engram is only as good as its content in words, for it does not rationalize the action. Engrams have been discovered where the patient was actually being murdered but the content was such that he was convinced he was being saved: such a case would include what auditors call a “mutual AA” — a father and mother together attempting an abortion, AA meaning “attempted abortion” — wherein Mama was in utter agreement and disposed herself for the operation but became frightened and began to scream about “her precious baby” in an effort to save herself from being injured: patients with this sort of sympathy pro-survival engram can get pretty confused about mother.

The insidious aspects of the sympathy pro-survival engrams are several. (1) They are aligned with the fundamental dynamic of survival in the most literal sense and are therefore aligned with the purpose of the individual; (2) they are like cysts round which contra-survival engrams serve as the outer shell; (3) they most sharply affect the health of the individual and are always the basic factor beneath the psycho-somatic illness which the individual displays; (4) they cause the reactive mind (but not the analytical mind) to resist therapy; and (5) they are the largest drain upon the life force units.

In (3) above, the pro-survival sympathy engram does more than just carry forward the injury which becomes the psycho-somatic illness. Any engram is a bundle of data which includes not only all perceptics and speech present but also metering for emotion and state of physical being. The last, the state of physical being, would be serious enough. This metering says that structure was so and such at the moment this sympathy pro-survival engram was received: in the case of an embryo engram, then, the reactive mind, in forcing the engram back into action, may also force the structural pattern back upon the body: this occasionally results in retarded development, embryo-like skin, embryo-type back curvature, and so forth. The glands themselves, being physical organs, are also sometimes so suppressed in the reactive mind’s effort to approximate all conditions. The underdeveloped gonads, the sub-level thyroid, the wasted limb, all these things often come from sympathy pro-survival engrams. This is so observably the case that when an individual is being cleared, growth process begins to bring the body up to genetic blueprint even before the case is completed: the change which takes place in the physical being of the patient is sometimes so remarkable and so marked that it is far more startling than the mere disappearance of a catalogue of psycho-somatic ills such as coronary, ulcers, arthritis, allergies, and so on.

It would be supposed that anything powerful enough to twist the physical blueprint and keep the body from developing or make it keep on growing where it should have stopped would resist any therapy. This is true only in a most limited sense. Once one is aware of what suppresses a case, one can go about vanquishing the suppressors because a pro-survival engram, unlike a contra-survival engram, has an Achilles heel.

The most workable answer now known to dianetics lies in the principle of life force units and a technique for throwing them back into circulation. The pro-survival engram collects and holds such units, according to this theory, and collapses when its power to hold units is broken.

Entering a case, then, where one has a chronic psycho-somatic illness (and what case doesn’t have, even though it is as slight as an occasional fit of sneezing or hiccoughs), the auditor first scouts it, going through a returning routine to find out how early he can get for

material, how the state of the sonic recall is, how occluded is the youth of the person, and so forth. When he has made this survey, he begins to make his computation on the case: first, was the child happy with both father and mother, and if not, where was the child happiest (there will be where the allies live). Was either parent an unreasonably powerful factor in shaping the thinking powers of the child: here again may be an ally, even if a poor one. Did the patient have grandparents or other relatives; how did he feel toward them? All this data will be more or less occluded and warped by demon circuits and is about as reliable as the data this patient will inevitably try to get from “loopy” parents or relatives, who not only do not know what happened to him but might be most anxious not to have anything discovered.

What really did happen? Don’t let patients ask relatives or parents anything if you can help it, for these are restimulators in the extreme and never have any data you can use; the patient is just trying to use them as by-pass circuits to avoid the pain of recalling things himself. When the case is finished he will no longer want to hound these people and if you want a check for research reasons, get one of the relatives and put him through therapy.

The auditor now has some slight idea of who the allies may be. And here comes the Achilles heel of the ally computation:

Any ally computation may have included the loss of the ally. And the loss of the ally may be the trigger which will start chain fission. For what we are going to try to do is blow off or discharge as many life force units as possible from the reactive engram bank and weaken it. Every charge we get from the bank will reinforce the ability of the patient to carry on in existence and will aid his analytical mind to get into the engram bank. Hence, discharging these frozen units is a vital and important part of therapy and the condition of the case will improve in direct ratio to the number of these units so discharged.

Consider these life units as free life energy: an engram capturing them can set itself up, for all intent, as a life force. It is then an entity and only then. The demon circuits, the valence walls (which compartment the analyzer, so to speak, and bring about multi-valence), the force and power of the engram itself are all dependent, according to theory and as observed in practice, upon usurped life units.

To free these units is the primary task of therapy: to relieve pain from the engrams is the secondary task; to make the patient comfortable during therapy does not even rank, though there is no need he should be uncomfortable. The dual character of therapy, then, is actually two sections of the same thing: relieving engrams. There is this dual nature in engrams, however, that they have painful emotion (where that means usurped life force) and physical pain (where that means pain of injury, illness, etc.).

To get as early as possible as fast as possible and find basic-basic is the direction and intent of therapy in its first stages: to accomplish this (when it cannot be done immediately merely by returning and finding basic-basic which can and always should be tried) one relieves the case and robs the engram bank by releasing life units (painful emotion captured them) from the ally computations.

In brief, the entire intent and act of therapy is to find the earliest engram and erase it and then proceed to erase all other engrams as engrams so they can no longer be discovered (they refile in the standard bank but it takes a genius to find them there and a search of hours and hours: hence, to the auditor they can be said to have “erased” for they are no longer engrams and are now experience). The first, last and only job of the auditor is to find the earliest engrams available and erase them. That cannot be said too often or too strongly.

The various ways to accomplish this are the techniques and arts of therapy. Anything which brings about this erasure of engrams in place and their refiling as experience is useful and legitimate whatever it includes. An engineer intends to remove a mountain which is in the way of a river: his intent and all his effort is directed toward moving that mountain; the ways and means employed by him to move that mountain, by steam shovel, hydraulic rams or dynamite are the art and techniques applied to do the job.

There are three degrees of knowledge in our task: (1) In dianetics we know the goal: we know the results which come about when that goal is attained; (2) We know the character of the obstructions between us and the goal but of the exact character of the obstruction we can never learn too much; (3) The art and technique of removing the obstruction between us and the goal are legitimate only by the test of whether or not they remove the obstruction.

The method of attack on the problem can always be improved by learning more about the character of the factors in the problem, and by learning new arts and techniques which can be applied to the problem, and by studying to improve our skill in practicing existing arts and techniques. The currently existing art and technique is not to be considered optimum merely because it does the job. The time and ease of work could be shortened by new techniques or advancing skills for old techniques.

All this is interjected so that dianetics, unlike Aristotelian logic and natural history, will be recognized as an advancing, changing science. It is interjected at this place because no auditor should just sit back with this routine and never try to improve the routine.

Very well: this is the routine: it works but it can never be made to work too quickly or too well:

(1)  Place the patient in reverie and scout into the prenatal area to see if engrams are available for lifting without further work. If they are there and can be found, take the charge out of them and erase them if possible. Do not try to erase anything as remote from basic-basic as birth unless the file clerk insists on presenting birth. In other words, get the subject into the prenatal area and look for the earliest engrams. Do not ask for specific instances, particularly for something like birth, just take whatever is presented. If you can’t get back early, take step two.

(2)  Scout the patient’s life, while he is in reverie (do this in any event sooner or later if the case slows down but only if it slows down to a point where early engrams are either not reducing or are without any emotion). Establish in this scout whomever may have been depended upon by the patient and be suspicious always that he has not told you the really important allies, but do not tell him you are suspicious.

(3)  Find out when the patient lost any ally through death or departure. Approach this moment and one way or another, by getting earlier material and this incident or getting just this incident, discharge the sorrow of loss out of the incidents. Treat any incident in which the ally departs or the patient is separated from the ally as an engram and erase it accordingly or run it until it has no “charge” of sorrow on it. If the “charge” holds, suspect an early moment of sorrow about this ally and find that and treat it as an engram.

(4)  First, last and always, the job is to get basic-basic and then ever afterwards the currently existing earliest moment of pain or sorrow, and to erase every incident as it is advanced by the file clerk or found by repeater technique.

(5)  Any incident that hangs fire always has a similar incident earlier, and the patient should be taken earlier for the prior incident when an engram will not “reduce” on recounting.

(6)  At any time the engrams start to become emotionless in tone, even though they reduce, suspect another ally computation and, early or late in the patient’s life, get it and reduce it at least until the emotional discharge is gone. Do not get everything in a case restimulated by changing from an unreduced incident to something which looks more fruitful, but reduce everything in view before you go looking for a new sorrow charge.

(7)  It is better to reduce an emotionless early engram than it is to upset the case by hounding him for an ally computation when a cunning search fails to reveal none in sight. Erasing early emotionless engrams will eventually bring a new ally computation into sight if you occasionally look for it.

(8)  Consider that any hold-up on a case, any unwillingness to cooperate, stems from ally computation.

(9)  Treat all demon circuits as things held in place by life force units absorbed into the bank and address the problem of demon circuits by releasing charges of sorrow.

(10)  Consider that loss by death or departure of an ally is identical with a death of some part of the patient and that the reduction of a death or departure of an ally will restore that much life back to the patient. And remember that great sorrow charges are not always death or departure but merely may be a sudden reversal of stand by the ally.

Always keep in mind that that person who most nearly identifies himself with the

person of the patient, such as a sympathetic mother or father or grandparent or relative or friend, is considered by the reactive mind to be a part of the person himself and that anything happening to this sympathetic character can be considered to have happened to the patient. In such a case, where an ally has been found to have died of cancer, you may occasionally find the patient to have a sore or scaly place where he supposed the ally’s cancer to have been.

The reactive mind thinks in identities only. The sympathetic pro-survival engram identifies the patient with another individual. The death or loss (by departure or denial) of the other individual is therefore a reactive mind conviction that the patient has suffered some portion of death.

Emotional charges may be contained in any engram: the emotion communicates, in the same tone level, from the personnel around the “unconscious” person into his reactive mind. Anger goes into an engram as anger, apathy as apathy, shame as shame. Whatever people have felt emotionally around an “unconscious” person should be found in the engram which resulted from the incident. When the emotional tone of personnel in an engram is obviously angry or apathetic from the word content and yet the patient, recounting, does not feel it, there is something somewhere which has a valence wall between the patient and the emotional tone, and that valence wall is nearly always broken down by the discovery of an engram with a sorrow charge sometime earlier or later in a patient’s life.

The only legitimate reason for entering later portions of a person’s life before the prenatal area has been well exhausted is search for sorrow discharges occasioned by the death, loss or denial by an ally. And by “denial,” we mean that the ally turned into an active enemy (real or imaginary) of the patient. The counterpart of the ally, the pseudo-ally, is a person whom the reactive mind has confused with the real ally. The death, loss or denial by a pseudo- ally can contain a sorrow charge.

According to theory, the only thing which can lock up life units is this emotion of loss. If some method existed of doing nothing but freeing all life units, the physical pain could be neglected.

A release is brought about, one way or another, by freeing as many life units as possible from periods of loss with minimal address to actual engrams.

The loss of an ally or pseudo-ally need contain no other physical pain or “unconsciousness” than the loss itself occasions. This is serious enough. It makes an engram.

Any person who is suddenly discovered to be occluded in a patient’s life can, with some reliability, be considered an ally or pseudo-ally. If, either while remembering or returning, large sections of a patient’s association with another person are missing, that person can be called an occluded person. It is a better guarantee of ally status if the occlusion surrounds the death of the person or a departure from or a denial by that person. It is possible for occlusion to take place, also, for punishment reasons; which is to say, the occluded person may also be an arch enemy: in such a case, however, any memory present will concern the death or defeat or illness of the occluded person. Occlusion of a person’s funeral in the memory of a patient would theoretically label that person an ally or pseudo-ally. Recollection of the funeral of a person but occlusion of pleasant association might tend to mean that the person was an enemy. Such rules are tentative. But it is certain that any occlusion means that a person had a vast and unrevealed significance in a patient’s life which should be explained.

It may be remarked at this point that the recovery of the patient will depend in large measure on the life units freed from his reactive bank. This is a discharge of sorrow and may be quite violent. The usual practice is to “forget” such things and the “sooner forgotten, the sooner healed.” Unfortunately this does not work: it would be a happy thing if it did. Anything forgotten is a festering sore when it has despair connected with it. The auditor will find that every time he locates that arch denyer, “forget it,” he will get the engram it suppressed; when he can’t locate the engram and yet has found a somatic, a “forget it” or “don’t think about it” or “can’t remember it” or “don’t remember it” or some other denyer will be sitting there in the context of the engram. Forgetting is such unhealthy business that when a thing has been “put out of mind,” it has been put straight into the reactive engram bank and in there it can absorb life units.

This “loopy” computation, that forgetting things makes them bearable, is incredible in view of the fact that the hypnotist, for instance, gets results with a positive suggestion when he puts one of these denyers on the end of it. That has been known now for a great many eons: it was one of the first things the author was taught when he studied Asiatic practices; from India it long ago filtered to Greece and Rome and it has come to us via Anton Mesmer: it is a fundamental principle in several mystic arts: its mechanics were known even to the Sioux medicine man. Yet people at large, hitherto unguided about it, and perhaps because they lacked any real remedy, believed that the thing to do with sorrow was to “forget it.”

Even Hippocrates remarks that the whole of an operation is not finished until the patient has recounted the incident to all of his friends in turn, and while this is inadequate therapy, it has been, like the Confessional, a part of popular knowledge for lo, these many ages: yet people persist in suppressing sorrow.

The auditor will many times in his activity be begged by a patient “not to talk to me about so-and-so’s death.” If he is foolish enough to heed this tearful plea when the patient is in reverie, then the auditor is actively blocking a release. That is the first incident he should get!

Perhaps it would be bad, without dianetic technique, to approach such things; but with our art it is easy not only to enter the actual moment of the incident but to then recount it until the tears and wailings are but echoes in the case book. Treating that loss like an engram, recounting it until it is no longer painful emotionally, is to give back to the patient vitality he has not had since the incident took place. And if the incident does not ease on a dozen recountings, slide back down its sorrow track, just as you would with any other engram, and find earlier and earlier moments. A patient starting to discharge sorrow at the age of fifty may find himself, two hours later, down in the basic area recounting the primary moment of sorrow, at the moment when the lost ally first became an ally. If the auditor can get the whole chain on any one ally, exhausting sorrow from it from later to earlier, taking all the sorrow he can get from every incident and stripping the entire series of engrams of their charge, he may, in a few hours work, rid the case of enough emotional charge to then begin an orderly erasure.

Please observe this difference: the Achilles heel of the ally computation can be considered late on the chain of incidents which concern that ally, which is to say that we have a funnel here, upright in time, which can be entered late and followed early: the Achilles heel of the contra-survival engram chain is in the earliest incidents, exactly the reverse of the emotionally painful engrams.

To regain out of the engram bank life units so that enough free emotion is available to release or clear a case, start with late ally or pseudo ally losses and work back earlier.

To release the physical pain of the individual from the engram bank, start early (as close to conception as you can get) and work through to late. Physical pain in the contra-survival chain can suppress painful emotion in the pro-survival chain.

Painful emotion in the pro-survival chain can suppress physical pain in the contra- survival engrams.

If you were to draw a picture of the prenatal area of the reactive engram bank, it would appear somewhat as follows: a long line drawn horizontally, representing time, would have dark blots on it representing engrams; one end of the line would represent conception, the other end birth: above this line would lie a dark area, like a heavy mist, extending from one end of the line to the other and dropping down almost to it: above this dark mist would lie another horizontal line, the apparent time track along which the patient returns. The first long line is the actual time track; the mist is painful emotion; the uppermost dark line is what the patient mistakes and uses for his time track.

The painful emotion is, of course, occasionally tapped in the prenatal area itself, and the opportunity of dispersing it by so discovering prenatal emotional charges should never be overlooked by the auditor: indeed, once much of the later life painful emotion is discharged, a great deal of painful emotion can be found amongst the early engrams. The better part of this mist, and the first part the auditor often contacts, is in late life: although it originates, as charge, in late life, it can be said to lie on this prenatal area.

Moments of loss, the loss by death or departure of any of the patient’s allies, and the loss of an ally because he turns against the patient, trap these emotional charges and intervene them between the patient and actuality. Although the moment of loss was post-birth, in infanthood, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, it was retroactive in suppressing early engrams.

This aspect of painful emotion is a key-in of the early incidents by the moment of loss. In other words, a moment of great loss suppresses the individual on the tone scale to a point where he approximates the level of early engrams and these, keyed-in, hold the units of charge thereafter.

Life units so seized are held and are the life of engrams. As in electricity, a positive charge glances away from a positive charge: like charges repel each other. The analyzer, operating, it can be said for analogy, on the same kind of charge as that contained in the engram, glances away from the engram, which remains thereby unknown and intact.

As the individual returns into the area of the early engrams — which are held keyed-in by virtue of the seized charges from late incidents — he can quite comfortably pass by enormous quantities of aberrative material without even suspecting it is present. However, when the late moments of painful emotion are released, the auditor can go immediately into the early area and find engrams of physical pain which he had not hitherto been able to uncover.

Actually the late moments and the early moments are both engrams: the news or observation of loss shuts down the analyzer and everything which then enters it is engramic and is filed in the reactive mind. Because of sight and a memory of activity which is connected to the present, all of which serves to keep an individual oriented, a person can often recall the moment of loss, whereas he cannot recall prenatal material, for he lacked in that area any connection with orienting factors which would impinge themselves on the analyzer. While the prenatal infant definitely, especially in the late stages, has an analyzer, experience and memory are not coordinated and the existence of engrams is not then suspected by the analytical mind. This is not true of the later periods of life, particularly those after speech has been learned and is being used. The fact of the matter is that this later-life ability to recall surrounding circumstances without feeling any extremity of pain also serves to hide here the existence of an actual engram: a person feels that he knows all about such a moment of loss analytically: actually he has no contact with the engram itself, which contains a moment of “unconsciousness” of a lesser depth than that, for instance, of the anesthetic variety. Childhood losses of allies, however, can be so entirely occluded that the allies themselves are not remembered.

The auditor will find very late engrams easy to contact. And he will also discover something else. The patient may not be, as he is returning to such a moment of loss, occupying his own body. This “phenomenon” has been known for several thousand years and even the latest mention of it merely said that it was “interesting” without making any further effort to find out why a person, returned to an area in hypnotic regression, sometimes could be found within himself (which is to say, seeing things as though he were himself) and sometimes saw things there and himself included as part of the scenery (as though he had a detached view). Because we have discovered that a natural function of the mind is to return in an awake state to past incidents does not alter the fact that we encounter aspects hitherto known as mysterious “phenomena” of drug dreams and hypnotism. We are not by any means practicing hypnotism; so this means that hypnotism and dianetics use similar abilities of the mind — it does not mean that such abilities belong in the field of hypnotism. And one of the various aspects of the return is that it occasionally — or, in some patients, continually — encounters areas where the patient is “outside” his body. These exteriorized views of self have two explanations. One of them is valence, whereby the patient has taken unto himself the identity of another person and sees the scene through that other person’s eyes; the other is exteriorization, in which painful emotion is present in such quantity that the patient cannot occupy himself. That painful emotion may stern from past or future incidents to the moment when the patient is witnessing a scene to which he has been dianetically returned. On several recountings of the scene, the patient will come nearer and nearer to an occupation of his body until at last he sees the scene from within his body. At times no emotional discharge (tears, etc.) takes place until the patient has gone over the incident several times and until he is within his own body. It is as though, returned, he had to scout the ground to find out if it was safe to occupy himself. If, after a few recountings, no discharge such as tears takes place, then the emotion is suspended elsewhere, earlier or later but usually much later. Exteriorization because of emotion is the same as exteriorization because of physical pain to all intents and purposes of the auditor. When he encounters a case which, all the way up and down the track, is continually exterior, he should address his skill to the release of moments of painful emotion.

All patients seem to have the idea that time heals and that some incident of ten or twenty years ago no longer has any effect upon them. Time is a Great Charlatan, not a great healer, as has been remarked. Time by the processes of growth and decay alters, and environment introduces new faces and activities and thus alters the restimulators: a moment of painful emotion in the past has, like any other engram, its own restimulators and is, in addition, holding keyed-in all the early engrams which relate to it so that their restimulators also work: every restimulator has a set of restimulators which are associated to it by the analytical mind, which cannot see the real restimulator. All this makes a complex pattern but complex in therapy only if one does not know the source of aberration. If the auditor returns the patient to any moment of painful emotion in the past and runs it as an engram, he will discover that all its original charge is present and will discharge.

He will usually find the patient shying away from any thought of going into the actual engram: the pre-clear may attempt to detail all manner of bric-a-brac, his own thoughts, the reasons why it no longer is painful to him, and so forth. These thoughts and data before the fact or after it are about as much use in running an engram as a dissertation about “childhood illusions” was to the problem of removing aberrations from the human mind. The auditor who will listen to these “reasons” and “I remembers” in lieu of running the engram itself will not get his patient well and will waste valuable hours of therapy. An auditor who will do this belongs to the hand-patting school of thought which believes sympathy has value. He does not belong in an auditor’s chair. It is wasted time, wasted valuable time, to listen to anything the patient thought or said or did or believed when the patient should be going into the engram and running it as an engram. Certainly there is a necessity to find out, from the patient’s talk, where that engram is, but once it is located, all else is dross.

Take a moment when a child is notified of his parents’ deaths. The auditor learns that the parents died when the child was two years of age. He can then deduce, without further trouble or questions, that somebody must have told his patient about the death of the parents, that there was a precise moment when the patient, then an infant, learned about that death. Recounting the matter in present time — without being returned, the patient is using all the intervening years as buffers against the painful emotion. The auditor returns the patient, without further preamble than the usual routine of putting the patient into reverie, to the moment when the patient learned of the death of the parents. The patient may do a little fumbling to orient himself in the past, but shortly he will have a contact with the instant somebody informed him. Be assured, if that child loved his parents at all, that an engram exists here. The engram starts at the first moment the child is informed, when the analyzer can be expected to have shut down. The end of the engram is a moment, an hour, a day or even a week later when the analyzer again turned on.

Between the first moment of analytical attenuation and a regain of analytical power is the engram. The first minutes of it are the most severe. Running an hour of it (an hour of incident, not of therapy) should be more than ample. Most auditors run only the first few minutes several times to get a test of whether or not there is going to be any emotional discharge. Run such a period of loss which must contain painful emotion exactly as you would run a period of physical pain and “unconsciousness” with another source. For the period of painful emotion is an “unconscious” period just as certainly as if the patient had been struck with a club. If the emotion in this period can be contacted with four or five recountings (each time starting at the beginning, making sure the patient is returned and in contact with all perceptics of the incident, and running it for what it is, an engram) then the engram should be recounted until the emotion in it is gone, until the patient is bored with it or even cheerful about it. If, after four or five recountings the patient is still well exteriorized, still has not contacted any emotion, then the charge is suspended elsewhere, either earlier or later, and tries should be made in terms of other losses, no matter how many years from the unyielding incident, to get a discharge.

After a discharge is blown off elsewhere the incident first addressed, as in the case of the two-year-old who lost his parents, may discharge. It is certain that sooner or later such an incident will discharge and it is also certain that the case will not make much progress in getting any bulk of physically painful engrams until such a severe incident is well discharged.

Discharges are contacted, often, in very unlikely places. Somewhere they contact the surface enough so that a touch by the returned patient will permit the units to free, permit engrams to key-out and come into view on the time track in their proper places.

The engram bank becomes severely distorted by painful emotion and the areas of painful emotion become severely distorted by physical pain elsewhere. The filing system of the reactive mind is bad. The file clerk is able to recover and deliver to the auditor only so many painful emotion engrams or physical pain engrams at a time.

They may be disordered in their positions on the track, which is to say, the auditor may contact an early physically painful engram (always his most important job) then contact one in mid-prenatal, then one post-birth, and thereafter no other engrams of the physical pain variety seem to be present (engrams of the physical variety which contain knock-outs by accidents, illnesses, surgery or injury). This does not mean that the case is stalemated or that the patient is cleared. It more likely means that there are incidents of the other engram variety (painful emotion, stemming from loss by death, departure or reversal of allies) which can now be contacted.

The auditor then looks for and exhausts the emotional discharge from the loss engrams, usually later in life.

These, with the units freed back in circulation, allow earlier physical pain engrams to appear and the auditor reduces each one of these he can contact. As soon as he can no longer find physically painful engrams, he goes back to a search for painful emotion engrams and so forth alternately as necessary. The mind, being a self-protecting mechanism, will sooner or later block the patient from physical pain engrams if painful emotion engrams are ready; and it will block him from painful emotion engrams as soon as physical pain engrams are ready.

Start late to get painful emotion and work back early.

Start early to get physical pain engrams and work toward late. And whenever any engram is contacted, run it until it is no longer troublesome in any way to the patient or is entirely gone (refiled, but gone for all the auditor and patient will be able to tell at the moment). If an incident, after many recountings, shows no signs of lightening (somatic decreasing or emotion either not expressed or not decreasing), only then should the auditor seek another incident. In a painful emotion engram the charge is often later, in a physical pain engram the suspension is invariably caused by the existence of the same phrase in an earlier physical pain engram which can be contacted, and in such case the auditor should go back over the phrases which brought him to the somatic until he finds a contact and a lift of the engram.

It should be extremely clear by this time that rationalization about action or conduct or conditions does not advance therapy and is of no use beyond occasional aid in locating engrams. It should be equally clear that no amount of explanation or hand-patting or evaluation by the auditor is going to advance the erasure of the engrams themselves. It should be plain that what a person thought at the time of the incident was not aberrative. It should be clear that painful emotion puts the compartments and demon-circuits into the mind and that the physical engrams hold the aberration and physical pain in the body.

This entire operation is mechanical. It has nothing to do with justified thought or shame or reasons. It has only to do with exhausting the engram bank. When the bulk of painful emotion is gone, the person is released; when the engram bank is exhausted of content, the person is cleared.

The mind is like a fine piece of equipment: as itself and as a mechanism it is almost impossible to destroy except by removing some of its parts: engrams do not remove parts of the mind, they add unnecessary things to it. Envision a beautiful, stream-lined machine, operating perfectly — that would be the mind without the additions of pain and painful emotion. Now envision this beautiful machine in the hands of a crew of moronic mechanics: they start to work around it and do not know that what they do affects the machine at all. Now they see that something is wrong with the machine and are all unwitting that they have placed various assorted monkey-wrenches, hatpins, old cigar butts and yesterday’s garbage into it and around it. Their first thought is to put something new on or in the machine to correct its operation and they add arbitrary gadgets to it in order to patch up the machine’s operation. Some of these gadgets appear to help the machine (sympathy engrams) and can be used, in the presence of the remaining bric-a-brac, by the machine itself to help its stability. The morons interrupt the fuel supply (painful emotional engrams) or, like the Japanese captain who beat the car with a switch when it would not go, try to goad the machine (punishment drive) and so add more trouble. At last this machine appears to be a hopeless wreck, being almost hidden beneath everything added to it and thrust into it, and the moron mechanics shake their heads and say, “Let’s put something else on it or it will stop!” They do and the machine appears to stop (goes insane).

In dianetics, a workmanlike job of clearing away the debris in and around the machine is performed. It is not done by adding any more debris. The moron mechanics (the content of the reactive mind) seem dismayed at this action, but the machine itself, suddenly aware that something is being done for it which will actually bring it into good running operation again, begins to help. The more debris which is cleared, the better it runs and the less force the moron mechanics have. The course of improvement should be and is rapid. We can stop when the machine is running at least as well as the “normal” machine (a release) or we can stop when we have all the debris out of the machine (a clear). When we have effected a clear, we behold something which has never been beheld before because it never before existed in a debris-free state: a perfect machine, stream-lined, powerful, shining, able to adjust and care for all its own operations without further therapeutic assistance of any kind.