On Raising Our Level of Life and Behavior

     The tone scale, a small edition of which is in this book (page 44), plots the descending spiral of life from full vitality and consciousness through half vitality and half consciousness down to death.

     By various calculations about the energy of life, by observation and by test, this tone scale is able to give levels of behavior as life declines.

     These various levels are common to all men.

     When a man is nearly dead, he can be said to be in a chronic(1) apathy. And he behaves in a certain way about other things. This is 0.1 on the tone scale chart.

     When a man is chronically in grief about his losses, he is in grief. And he behaves certain ways about many things. This is 0.5 on the chart.

     When a person is not yet so low as grief but realizes losses are impending, or is fixed chronically at this level by past losses, he can be said to be in fear. This is around 1.1 on the chart.

     An individual who is fighting against threatened losses is in anger. And he manifests other aspects of behavior. This is 1.5.

     The person who is merely suspicious that loss may take place or who has become fixed at this level is resentful. He can be said to be in antagonism. This is 2.0 on the chart.

     Above antagonism, the situation of a person is not so good that he is enthusiastic, not so bad that he is resentful. He has lost some goals and cannot immediately locate others. He is said to be in boredom, or at 2.5 on the tone scale chart.

     At 3.0 on the chart, a person has a conservative cautious aspect toward life but is reaching his goals.

     At 4.0 the individual is enthusiastic happy and vital.

     Very few people are natural 4.0s. A charitable(2) average is probably around 2.8.

     You can examine the chart and you will find in the boxes, as you go across it, the various characteristics of people at these levels. Horribly enough these characteristics have been found to be constant. If you have a 3.0 as your rating, then you will carry across the whole chart at 3.0.

     You have watched this chart in operation before now. Have you ever seen a child trying to acquire, let us say, a nickel? At first he is happy He simply wants a nickel. If refused, he then explains why he wants it. If he fails to get it and did not want it badly, he becomes bored and goes away But if he wants it badly he will get antagonistic about it. Then he will become angry Then, that failing, he may lie about why he wants it. That failing he goes into grief. And if he is still refused, he finally sinks into apathy and says he doesn't want it. This is negation.(3)

     And you have seen the chart in reverse. A child threatened by danger also dwindles down the scale. At first he does not appreciate4 that the danger is posed(5) at him arid he is quite cheerful. Then the danger, let us say it is a dog, starts to approach him. The child sees the danger but still does not believe it is for him and keeps on with his business. But his playthings "bore" him for the moment. He is a little apprehensive and not sure. Then the dog comes nearer. The child "resents him" or shows some antagonism. The dog comes nearer still. The child becomes angry and makes some effort to injure the dog. The dog comes still nearer and is more threatening. The child becomes afraid. Fear unavailing,(6) the child cries. If the dog still threatens him, the child may go into an apathy and simply wait to be bitten.

     Objects or animals or people which assist survival, as they become inaccessible to the individual, bring him down the tone scale.

     Objects, animals or people which threaten survival, as they approach the individual, bring him down the tone scale.

     This scale has a chronic or an acute(7) aspect. A person can be brought down the tone scale to a low level for ten minutes and then go back up, or he can be brought down it for ten years and not go back up.

     A man who has suffered too many losses, too much pain, tends to become fixed at some lower level of the scale and, with only slight fluctuations, stays there. Then his general and common behavior will be at that level of the tone scale.

     Just as a 0.5 moment of grief can cause a child to act along the grief band for a short while, so can a 0.5 fixation cause an individual to act 0.5 toward most things in his life.

     There is momentary behavior or fixed behavior.

     How can one find an individual on this tone scale? How can one find oneself?

     If you can locate two or three characteristics along a certain level of this scale, you can look in the number column opposite those characteristics and find the level. It may be 2.5, it may be 1.5. Wherever it is, simply look at all the columns opposite the number you found and you will see the remaining characteristics.

     The only mistake you can make in evaluating somebody else on this tone scale is to assume that he departs from it somewhere and is higher in one department than he is in another. The characteristic may be masked to which you object - but it is there.

     Look at the top of the first column and you get a general picture of the behavior and physiology(8) of the person. Look at the second column for the physical condition. Look at the third column for the most generally expressed emotion(9) of the person. Continue on across the various columns. Somewhere you will find data about somebody or yourself of which you can be sure. Then simply examine all the other boxes at the level of the data you were certain about. That band, be it 1.5 or 3.0, will tell you the story of a human being.

     Of course, as good news and bad, happy days and sad ones, strike a person, there are momentary raises and lowerings on this tone scale. But there is a chronic level, an average behavior for each individual.

     As an individual is found lower and lower on this chart, so is his alertness, his consciousness lower and lower.

     The individual's chronic mood or attitude toward existence declines in direct ratio to the way he regards the physical universe and organisms about him.

     There are many other mechanical aspects of this chart having to do with energy manifestations and observation of behavior but we need not cover them here.

     It is not a complete statement to say merely that one becomes fixed in his regard for the physical universe and organisms about him, for there are definite ways, beyond consciousness, which permit this to take place. Manifestation, however, is a decline of consciousness with regard to the physical environment of an individual. That decline of consciousness is a partial cause of a gradual sag down this chart, but it is illustrative enough for our purposes in this volume.

    At the top of this chart, one is fully conscious of himself, his environment, other people and the universe in general. He accepts his responsibilities in it. He faces the realities of it. He deals with the problems within the limits of his education and experience.

     Then something happens - his perception of the material universe is dulled. How does this come about?

     The first and foremost way that a decline on the chart is begun is through being caused physical pain by the physical universe. It is one thing to gain experience and quite another to suffer physical pain. For any experience surrounded by actual physical pain is hidden by that pain. The organism is supposed to avoid pain to survive. It "relishes" pain memories below 2.0 as these lead to death. As soon as it can begin avoiding pain wholesale,(10) although that pain is recorded, consciousness begins to decrease markedly The perception of the physical universe begins to decrease and the caliber" of one's activities begins to decline.

     One could say that there is an interior world and an exterior world. The interior world is the one of yesterday The data it contains is used to judge the world of the exterior, of today and tomorrow. So long as one has all data available, one can make excellent computations. When the facts he has learned begin to be buried, one's conclusions are apt to become wrong to just that degree.

     As one's confidence in the physical universe declines, so does one's ability to handle it decline. One's dreams and hopes begin to seem unattainable, one ceases to strive. Actually however, one's ability seldom diminishes - it only seems to diminish.

     When the interior world tells of too much physical pain, the organism becomes confused. Like the child who finally says he doesn't want the nickel, the organism says it wants nothing of the physical universe and so perishes-or lives a while in a twilight and then perishes all the same.

     The goal is to win. When one has lost too much and too many times, the possibility of winning seems too remote to try And it loses. It becomes so accustomed to loss that it begins to concentrate on loss instead of forward advance. And it does this quite irrationally Because one has lost two cars does not mean one may lose three, yet he who has lost two will actually be so prepared to lose three that he will actually if unconsciously take steps to lose the third. Thus it may be with people, with any object.

     As an individual descends the tone scale, he first begins to lose his confidence in trying to reach the further rims of his environment, the further frontiers of his dreams, and becomes "conservative." There is not much wrong with cautiousness, but there is something wrong with chronic conservatism for sometimes it takes a wild charge to win a life.

     As physical pain begins to mount up in the recording banks of the mind, the individual further confuses yesterday with today and further withdraws his confidence. He becomes a little frightened and poses as being bored - he says he didn't want to reach so far anyway. Isn't worth it. He makes fun of the things he really wants, makes fun of the dreams of others and acts, in general, like a reporter from the New Yorker.(12) He is afraid to face a hopeful fact, much less a truly desirable object.

     With a further increase of pain, he continues on down the scale until he is actually on his way out from life.

     The fact of the matter is, the older a person gets and the more experiences he has, the better able he should be to handle his environment. If he could stay fully conscious and rational about it, this would be true. But the mechanics of pain storage are such that he actually grows less and less conscious the more pain he has received and so cannot really use his experience at all. If he could gain experience without physical pain, his enthusiasm, his ability and dash would remain very high. But man was a lesser organism, evidently, before he was a man. And a lesser organism can only react, it cannot think. Thinking is something new.

     Until Dianetics, this looked like a hopelessly closed cycle. One had enthusiasm but no experience. So with enthusiastic rushes he attacked the environment with all the folly of youth and was ignominiously(13) repelled. He gained pain with each repulsion. He gained experience, but he could not think about the experience without facing the pain so the experience did him no good. When he had enough experience he no longer had the dreams, energy and enthusiasm to carry home his attack upon his environment.

     Processing such as the questions in the last section of this book or in Dianetic co-auditing(14) broke the cycle. Youth could attack the environment and experience pain of repulsion. But the physical pain could be knocked out of the mind by Dianetics, leaving the experience standing there, with the enthusiasm.

     There must be, at this writing, tens of thousands of people who have experienced Dianetics by now. A few, here and there, were unable to achieve full benefit because it formerly required considerable technical knowledge to process somebody This book and Self Analysis were developed in order that an individual could gain at least the primary benefits of processing without any technical knowledge and without taking up the time of another person.

     Wherever a person may be on the tone scale (unless he is very low and in the insane bracket, for this is also a scale of sanity) he can ascend that scale again by rehabilitating his ability to think about and know his environment. Now that one knows the rules it is rather easily done and one is astonished that it could not be done before.

     Have you looked at the chart for yourself? Well, don't go looking for a cliff or an axe if you were below 2.0. Self Analysis can pull you up this chart so that even you will see that you have climbed.

     Now, just beyond the chart there are some tests and graphs. You should answer these. They will help you to locate yourself. Then you will know much better why you are or aren't a good friend to yourself. You may find you don't care to have such a friend. Well, if he's that bad off, he really needs your help. So give him a hand. The whole last part of the book is filled with exercises which will make a better friend to have out of yourself if you just apply these exercises a half an hour a day

     I don't know how high you can get yourself up on this chart. You can raise yourself pretty far and Dianetic co-auditing can do the rest if you wish. Or you may get all the way and stabilize there.

     Right now if you aren't being a friend of yourself, I'm your friend. I know by experience that you can climb the chart.

     Man is basically good. Pain and social aberrations turn him away from high ethics,(15) efficiency and happiness. Get rid of the pain and you'll be at the high level of the chart.

     Now turn to the questions which will help you locate yourself. But don't use this chart as an effort to make somebody knuckle under.(16) - Don't tell people where they are on it. It may ruin them. Let them take their own examinations.