NEW TECHNIQUES

A lecture given on 25 June 1951

Advances in Dianetics

There are two schools of thought in processing. There is the school of thought which removes the patient and the school of thought which removes the aberration. The next lectures are devoted to that small minority who might possibly be interested in removing the aberration.

The tremendous amount of advance which basic theory and techniques themselves have made during the last year, since the publication of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, actually requires a complete resummary of the subject.

There have been many techniques originated in the field. In spite of the fact that very seldom does anyone send the mimeograph sheet in my direction, I have seen most of those and have kept check on them. I have reviewed them and used portions of them.

Some of these contain very interesting material. One of them, which was concerned with reducing engrams by causing the preclear to boil off, called up a new concept. What is boil- off? This is highly important. What is the physical discharge? Is there a difference between when you are running an engram and when a person it simply standing by himself and walking around yawning because he is sleepy?

The concept of enMEST fits in with that very nicely. What is the physical enMEST which leaves the body when the entheta gets disenturbulated? And can you just kick off the enMEST and have the entheta come back out of it? The answer is fairly definitely yes. This boil- off technique, in other words, pointed up something which went into the regular line of research and a refinement of Standard Procedure. However, the technique itself, because it did not take into account two or three very vital points, can spin and has spun cases.

There have been such wide divergence’s as a technique I saw one day about the "prime valence" on the genetic line. This was the interesting concept that no one could go into a valence unless that valence was on his own genetic line. I might buy this if it said a person could only go into a Theta body on his line or something of the sort, but not genetically, because I have treated too many psychotics who were in the valence of their favorite dog.

So these various things are highly provocative and it is tremendously interesting that so much would come out of the field.. It has been rather a heavy job in correlating and coordinating what is proven procedure— running enough cases enough times to find out whether or not we have something here that will keep going.

Not the least of the advances in the last year has been the advance in communication. At the time I wrote the first book, I don’t think more than three or four people had been trained to be auditors. Their results had not been well observed— that is to say, they had not been auditing well enough, long enough. But the wonderful thing about it was that they were at least able to go through the motions, and they were at least able to curl preclears up in a ball and do other startling things. So I didn’t know how much I was doing that I didn’t know I was doing, and that is a tough problem to try to resolve.

Now, here is the problem of communication: One has to find out in the first place what the various factors involved in the problem are, and then find out how to break these down in such a way that they can be communicated. That is very important. That is probably the major jump forward: the ability to communicate techniques— the codification of techniques necessary to permit them to be communicated.

It is all right to walk around with a hazy idea that the last time you snapped your fingers at the preclear he went up and hit the ceiling, bounced off, caromed off the wall and sank down on the couch again. You try to repeat that procedure, and maybe you can repeat it and maybe you can go on repeating it. But then you want to tell the fellow who is auditing across the hall about it, and you say, "Well, I (let’s see, I snapped my fingers)— when you snap your fingers at a preclear, he goes up and hits the ceiling, caroms off the wall and hits the couch again!"

This other fellow walks in to his preclear and snaps his fingers but nothing happens. Immediately he says, "That technique doesn’t work!" What he should be saying is "That communication doesn’t work."

So communication is a major line of advance.

At the time I wrote the first book I had a publisher sitting over the back of my neck saying, "We’ve got to go to press, we’ve got to go to press, we’ve got to go to press!"

I would say, "Well, just let me get down this paragraph." And he would ask, "Is it saying something important? Are you sure we can’t delete that?" And this was the sort of pressure that first book was written under.

Furthermore, it was written under the tremendous pressure of letters. People were writing in saying, "How do you do it? How do you do it?" and it was so time- consuming to answer every person, trying to tell them the whole technique from beginning to end without anything to refer them to, that the first book was very vital.

So when the second book, Science of Survival came along, I spent about two and a half months figuring out how to organize it. This book is not only organized, it has a map!

Early in January I saw where the tone scale lay and what could be done with it with relationship to pointing out types of processing. This was an advance right there, because it was obvious that individuals going out to process people would, every time, take the case, start to run it by Standard Procedure and then discover that this person could not do this or he should not have done that, and then the auditors would say, "Something is wrong. Standard Procedure doesn’t work." The actual point is that they were entering cases too heavily that were too low on the tone scale.

This is very important. The primary failure in processing cases has been mistaking the position of a case on the tone scale. That, as far as I have been able to tell, has led to a majority of the trouble.

The second failure is that of the auditor just plain not knowing the basic mechanics of what he is doing. He says it is not important to know just exactly this, and he thinks he knows. He is like some old- time pilot who learned to fly by the seat of his pants; l according to modern instruments he is flying a little bit wrong, but he has been flying that way for a long time.

You can take a kid out of high school and put him in the airplane and say, "You fly like this and here are the instruments and you do this and that," and if you teach him perfectly he will learn very rapidly how to do that.

But let’s take this old- timer with his seat- of- the- pants flying and put him in an airplane with all the new instruments and say, "Now we are going to teach you how to fly."

"Oh, yeah? I’ve been flying for a long time!"

"Yeah, but you know how you carry your left wing a little bit low?"

"I don’t carry my left wing low."

"But there are people around who say you do."

"The seat of my pants tells me . . ."

He is pretty hard to teach because you have to do a retrain.

The point I am making is that the organization of the book is definitely and directly around a chart. As far as I know now, all the kinds of cases there can be are plotted on that chart. And this chart contains all but one of the proven procedures which as a group go to make up Standard Procedure. I don’t know how many procedures are actually composited into Standard Procedure right now; there is a little dash of this and a little dash of that and a little dash of something or other, but used along the line properly, it produces results.

Now, every case level has a technique which can be employed on it, which makes it only the auditor’s business to find out where that case is and not get happy and overly optimistic about it. Where is that case on the tone scale? Let’s process him at that point and let’s not jump up the tone scale and try to process him higher, because you will often depress cases on the tone scale if you do that.

The emphasis in processing now is picking a person up to tone 4 and stabilizing him continually as close to tone 4 as you possibly can, and to hell with how many engrams he has still got. There is your shortcut.

Anybody has been in his lifetime— once, twice or thousands of times— at tone 4. How do you pick a person up and keep him there?

The point is, bring him up the tone scale. The devil with the aberrations and the somatics! Bring him up the tone scale, because you will find out that if you bring him up the tone scale the aberrations and somatics will take care of themselves.

When you change your emphasis in processing like this, you are not then looking ahead to a thousand hours, fifteen hundred hours, eight thousand hours or however long it takes to get all the engrams out of a preclear What you are looking forward to is a relatively short- term basis: "How long is it going to take me to get this fellow up the tone scale and spike him there?" That may take you weeks or it may take you months, but it is not going to take you a thousand hours or five hundred hours. It might not even take you two hundred.

It is sort of a pig in a poke, of course; it is a definite gamble on your part. You don’t know exactly how long it is going to take. But if you just keep working toward that one target, that one goal, you are going to have somebody who will be stable as far as you are concerned. And as far as the social order is concerned and as far as he is concerned, he will be stable and keyed out. His engrams are mainly going to be keyed out; they are not going to be troubling him.

Sure, if a sudden big blow comes along from life, he will immediately take a dive. The funny part of it is, he won’t dive anywhere near as far as he would have before and you can pick him up above that dive.

Here is an effort to get more people up into a civilized band rather than in the "normal" band. I think we can use some civilized individuals in the society. I have looked around and I have seen places where they could be placed and I haven’t found very many there.

The biggest mistake that an auditor can make is to take a manic. This is the biggest mistake, and I doubt that there is a person auditing, including myself, who hasn’t made this error. This tone scale definitely gets around this, among countless other errors. Take a case which is apparently a wide- open case; it has sonic, visio, kinesthesia— just beautiful. So you put him down on the couch and throw him down the time track, and for some reason or other this doesn’t run well, but you go ahead because this person has got sonic and visio. But he doesn’t cooperate too well, and finally you get up to the point where you feel like hitting him over the head with a baseball bat, because obviously this person has sonic, he has visio, he is beautiful and he is obviously up on the tone scale around 3.0. He says he is happy all the time, says he is cheerful, but he doesn’t run well. What you have there is a wide- open case.

On review of all cases processed that have come under surveillance, a mental structure was discovered which prevents some cases from compartmenting off entheta. A person who is going to stay sane and be very effective starts blocking entheta off, putting it back in compartments, and he operates on maybe one tenth of his mind. But he operates in that tenth with perfectly free Theta and the rest of the entheta has been thrown overboard. There is a Theta inhibition or something on it. He just doesn’t have anything more to do with that aberration. And he is functioning, he is effective. This is just a postulate, now.

For instance, take a very occluded case which is really hanging, reactively, around 0.5, and yet this fellow has a tremendous amount of Theta which he can still invest in projects. He still goes forward constructively and creatively when he is not too terribly enturbulated. This fellow we have looked at in the past with horror. You take good care of him; he is your best case.

But a wide- open case can be riding around 0.5 with full sonic and full visio— and this case can enturbulate fully. If somebody comes along and says "Boo!" the case will enturbulate right down the level. In other words, the enturbulation of this case is such that everything on the case is active. All the engrams can get active on this case. This is really a potential psychotic, and when this person gets in a manic he stops looking like a 0.5. He is riding this manic and it makes him look at a casual glance like about a 3.5.

You take that manic out of there and see how fast this case looks like what it actually is. Then something can be done about it. This person "feels fine"; he is actually in misery. This person is quite dangerous.

We can make that error with old methods and, as a matter of fact, I know of two preclears who were put in institutions. They are both out, but they had been put in institutions simply and solely because somebody grabbed hold of an apparent 3.5 that was wide open and riding a manic hot and heavy and threw him back down the track right into a prenatal engram. There he stuck.

Someone does that, and then the next auditor comes along and says, "All we have to do is run out that prenatal." Maybe this person had started to get a little bit sane; he had 1 percent Theta to reinvest; there goes the 1 percent and he spins again. Now it is going to take a long time to pull that case out. That was too heavy a brand of processing.

As you look over these techniques and as you start to use them in this new coordination, you may find yourself thinking at first, "Using anything this light couldn’t possibly produce any results. That’s all there is to that. I mean, look, we don’t have any baseball bat sitting alongside of the couch. We don’t ever snap our fingers at this guy on these lower bands. Nothing happens down in these bands; there is no action, there is no excitement, he’s not exploding, he’s not jumping off the couch, he’s not screaming. These techniques can’t be any good."

Don’t measure a technique by the amount of action it gives you. Measure a technique by the amount of sanity it returns to your preclear That is all that is important.

Later I will give you a technique which is in advance of Science of Survival. There is always that model sitting back in the planning room which is in advance of the model on the assembly line. It has been literally months since this book was finished, and one just couldn’t stand around and mutter to himself. So what has happened is that this book naturally extrapolated, pointing out certain things, and I went ahead and investigated these things. Although the investigation is not complete on this advanced proposition, I would say that its incompleteness was only that I don’t know how well you will like it or what results you can produce with it. I have seen a very small amount of work done with it by other people and it has been efficacious to some degree.