NEW VIEWPOINT ON PROCESSING

A lecture given on 26 June 1951

Building Up Theta in the Preclear

I mentioned earlier that we now have a changed viewpoint on processing. What we are trying to do is convert entheta to Theta, or get more Theta on the case, or less entheta on the case. That is what we are trying to do. That is different than running engrams.

There are several manifestations of entheta. The first manifestation of entheta is, of course, the engram. When dynamic six comes into collision with dynamic seven with an impact you get an engram. Theta impinges too hard against MEST— that is number one.

The next is the key- in and lock chain, all being more or less the same breed of entheta.

And the next is the secondary, which is actually dynamics six and seven coming apart with a shock— loss.

Those are the three general types of entheta— the engram, the lock and the secondary.

There is one way of running an engram that is really basic, and that doesn’t change an iota from the optimum way to run it as known back in August or July of last year: "The file clerk will give us the engram necessary to resolve the case. The first phrase will flash," and so on— whatever patter you have finally developed that you find highly efficacious.

Another development forward of that is chain- scanning of engrams. Chain- scanning of engrams has been found most beneficial and not dangerous way up the tone scale about 3.5, and it is really something to finish off a case with. But be sure you are finishing off the case when you do it.

The people who developed the chain- scanning of engrams scented the fact that action phrases do not need to be effective on the case. It is the Theta/ entheta ratio, actually, which establishes the effectiveness, but the auditor can actually to some slight degree educate or persuade his preclear away from obeying action phrases. However, if his preclear is pretty badly down the tone scale he does not have any say about it. But with a preclear around 3.5, when you are finishing up a case, you can really do tricks with chain- scanning of engrams. Below that level, though, let’s run them individually and be on the safe side.

Engrams, as you know, exist in chains. If you can get the first anaten off a case— get the basic engram off the case— it is worth fighting for, because it loosens up all the anaten on the case. Of course, every time any anaten is restimulated in any engram, it is more or less restimulated in every other engram. If you can pull the bottom— basic- basic, the common denominator to all engrams— then you are really off to the races.

You are actually justified in trying to reach basic- basic on low- toned cases, if you can get it. But don’t enturbulate this low- toned case very much, and make sure that you don’t hand this along as a technique to a book auditor. It is very fine to get basic- basic off a case, because then you loosen up all the engrams on it and you can get good anaten. If you can take out half a dozen engrams in the basic area, if you can get them to erase or anaten to come off them, you are doing well. Ordinarily, your low- toned cases will only reduce.

But if you as professional auditors go on running engrams to reduction on some case, you ought to be shot anyhow! There is only one reason engrams keep on running just to reduction: there are too many secondaries. About the third engram you start running on a case just to reduction, you get out of the prenatal area and find that secondary that is ready to pull, because there is a secondary on the case— fear or grief, or even an apathy secondary— that is ready to pull! I can’t say that strongly enough.

It was an error I didn’t know was being made. It is in the first book. But the error is being made quite generally that auditors are running engrams in the prenatal area to reduction only! Sure you can improve a case by running engrams to reduction, but how many years do you want to work on this case? You have to go over all those things again, so that is no good. The second an engram starts to run to reduction, you know you have too many secondaries on this thing, and it isn’t that those secondaries are not ready to pull, either! They are ready to pull. That is what establishes it. As soon as you run some secondaries on this case you will find that you can go down into the basic area and get some erasures, or you will find a whole new brand of engram down there waiting for you to run.

If you ever start a case erasing and get it up to a point where it is getting a little bit sticky on these erasures, stop right then and go up the time track and find that secondary and bleed it off. You can understand how the first three, four or five engrams in the basic area of the case will have a tendency to be slow, but after that those things ought to start erasing with a couple of passes— if there are no secondaries to interrupt you. But if you have five, six or seven passes and the thing goes down to reduction, stop that erasure and find that secondary and run it, and then come back to the basic area. Don’t make that error!

Now, the next kind of entheta is the lock. Actually, this possibly has a different physiological aspect; probably the trapping of it is a little bit different than the trapping of the secondary. The similarity between the two would be that of leaving a little bit of rubber on the highway as you stamp on your brakes and leaving half of your car in a roads department repair ditch. Locks, however, existing in tremendous numbers on a case, can as an overall aggregate trap an enormous amount of Theta and make entheta out of it. Locks are sort of married into these engrams and they are all more or less part of a chain and so on. Get them apart.

If you start running a lot of engrams on a case without ever scanning off any locks, the case will get top- heavy after a while. There is such a trick as unburdening. You run an engram and then you run all the locks that were on the engram. Then go back to the engram again; you will find a couple more perceptics waiting for you. You can keep this up ad infinitum. So there are lock chains. Of course, these things exist laterally.

The next type of entheta is the secondary. If you want a case to get well in a hurry, you pull a secondary. But if you start to pull a secondary, for God’s sake, pull it all! Don’t leave any of it around all mixed up, because you will put a lot more entheta up later on the time track by only running it out halfway. So you had better run out all of it.

However, you will get into this sort of a situation: You can lock- scan a case that is pretty low on the tone scale, and all of a sudden he will hang up and on one phrase he will start to cry. He doesn’t know where it is from or anything. You get some tears off on this thing and come on up the chain and he seems to feel a lot better. That is using Lock Scanning down too far on the tone scale; it can produce some results but the reality level of the operation is very poor, so you shouldn’t have a lot to do with it.

If you can contact secondaries with some reality on them, you ought to just contact them and run them. Run them all the way off. Keep the preclear going through it. Don’t be super sympathetic or give him lots of advice, because when your preclear runs into a secondary he is in a hypnotic trance to all intents and purposes— just as in a boil- off he is in a hypnotic trance to all intents and purposes— and what you say can go in as positive suggestion.

But don’t avoid secondaries because you have got one to run yourself! And don’t ever go off and leave one partly run. Sometimes you may make a mistake and get the fellow spotted wrong on the tone scale and try to run out a secondary that he won’t be able to get all the way off. That is a very bad error because you will leave the fellow parked on the time track at that point and he can stay there for months. It is pretty hard to undo an auditing blunder of that magnitude on a person that low on the tone scale. You shouldn’t run a secondary, in other words, unless you are pretty sure this person can run a secondary. Take locks. Get the entheta off the case in locks.

There are the three manifestations of entheta, permanently fixed in the bank. These are permanently fixed in the bank, except for Dianetic processing and occasional bleeding of affects as is occasionally accidentally done in psychoanalysis (when the psychoanalyst isn’t looking).

There is also what you would call temporary entheta, which would be the entheta of present time— confusion— which doesn’t get nailed down. Most of it doesn’t park on the track. You generally don’t get any real manifestation on present time confusion unless the thing goes in as a lock.

But you can create a present time of temporary entheta for the preclear by saying, for instance, "Let’s go back to basic— oh, now just a minute. Who died in your family?" As a matter of fact, if you get a fellow who is liable to go down into apathy, who is low on the tone scale, you can spin him in just by doing that— just by changing your mind.

Now, don’t think that ARC breaks form a special kind of entheta, because they don’t. All the entheta there is, is ARC breaks.

ARC is Theta— the three manifestations of it.

If you really want to go in on a case highball with Straightwire, start pointing up only enforced and inhibited ARC. You can do a fast job on straightening up a lot of things for this person. In other words, we are pinpointing the target.

But ARC doesn’t form a special kind of entheta. All entheta is ARC entheta.

The real break of affinity between Theta and MEST is impact. Impact is a break of communication or an enforcement of communication of Theta and MEST. It is disagreement; Theta and MEST don’t want to both be there in that state, so there goes reality.

Now, a secondary is when you pull them apart when they ought to be together, and you get a similar manifestation. But that is inhibited, so you could say that an engram is enforced ARC and a secondary is inhibited ARC. A fear engram is fear of loss, a fear that dynamic seven is going to part from six. A grief engram is recognition that seven and six have come to part. And of course a lock is "It’s liable to happen again."

Secondaries have their own breed of locks, and engrams have their own breed of locks. The secondary type of lock says, "I’m liable to lose it again," and the engram type of lock says, "It’s liable to go ‘crunch! ’ again."

The physical universe and the Theta universe, in other words, have a certain harmonic intermingling with each other at about 4.0, and below that on the tone scale neither one of them likes it.

That is what you are tackling. That is your target.

Now I want to go over the types of cases with you.

The first type of case is way down at the bottom of the tone scale. You can draw the time track as a line running from conception at the bottom to present time at the top. Now fill in all the space between those two points so that the line is all covered up. That is entheta. That is the case which is low on the tone scale, and also practically missing on time track. This is the occluded case.

There is a second kind of case. On this one there are gaps in the entheta, and what you have is an occasional section of the time track showing up. It is not as solidly filled in. This case is up the tone scale a couple of points.

The third case type is the kind of case which you most ordinarily handle. This is the one that says " What present time?" And this is the one that says "I’m sure my father beat me; I know he did. He beat me many times. I’m just sure that . . ." and then you find out his father died when he was born.

Then there is your fourth kind of case. On this one, the engrams are isolated incidents, the secondaries are isolated incidents and so are the locks. The time track looks like a ladder, with separate rungs for the engrams and secondaries, and lots of locks scattered in.

Now, your job is to make case number one into case number four when you find a case number one, or case number two into case four or case number three into case four, before you start processing engrams and secondaries as such.

You have a time track on case four, very definitely. These incidents are separate. And the command phrases on number four are not such that it will collapse the whole case just because you hit one phrase— a grouper or something like that. Also, on number four, you don’t hit a holder and restimulate it and tell the guy to come to present time and find he can’t. That happens on case three or two— the fellow who wouldn’t know present time if you showed it to him.

You are going to find some low- level cases, way down at the bottom of the tone scale, and these cases have a time track and they can run incidents on it, and they cry and they tell you they have some pain once in a while and everything, but they are really case number ones! They are apparently wide- open cases, but the stuff that is really obliterated on that time track shouldn’t happen to anybody! They will run dub- in, they will run anything. Fortunately for you, their somatics are very seldom heavy unless they have some phrase in the vicinity of the engram which enforces the somatic, and then it will be very heavy and it will be all over the track.

What you are tackling is entheta. And what you want to do is take enough entheta off the first type of case to get a case number two. And then you take enough off it to get a case number three. And then you take enough entheta off it to get it to the level of case number four. That is the way you go up the line on these things. Clean up the case, open up the occlusions, bring them up the tone scale.

You start cleaning entheta up on a case type one and you will find that it will go up the tone scale. But if you try to run engrams off that case it will stay static or go down on the tone scale. You try to run engrams and secondaries off even a case number two and it will have a tendency to go down the scale, but occasionally you can hit a secondary if it presents itself. On a case type three you definitely can hit a secondary once in a while. And over on case four you have engrams you can run, secondaries you can run, and so forth; you can do most everything you want with this case.

This case type one is the 0.5— the chronic 0.5. The second type is the 1.1, case three is at about tone 2.0, and case four is at about tone 2.5 or something like that. It tells you on the Chart of Human Evaluation what to do with each one.

That is your new target. This is what you are trying to do in Dianetics. Hold with this and practice along these lines of picking up the entheta wherever it may be found or however you may get it. You are trying to clean up a lifetime a little bit, trying to reduce the activity of action phrases. You are trying to put the case in shape.

Don’t think that you are not doing Standard Procedure, because you are. Standard Procedure is not running engrams and secondaries by snapping the fingers. Standard Procedure includes any process which fits in with the tone scale and is provably useful in increasing the position of the preclear on the tone scale. You keep breaking down sections of entheta until you get them down to where they belong.

Here is what happens to an individual: He gets an engram and he goes along and the thing keys in. Now, it is all very well to think of this key- in as another incident on the track; what actually happens is that, because it is filed in the reactive mind, that key- in is filed with the engram. The next one gets filed with the engram, and on top of it more and more locks and more and more secondaries pile up. Pretty soon you have this big fat bundle of entheta and the person can’t get to any perceptics or anything else. Why? Because of the repulsive effect of entheta on Theta. Theta tries to attack entheta and it can’t get into it. Theta just enturbulates in the vicinity of entheta. You try to attack this engram and it is just a fat blob of sausage! You can’t get into it anywhere on its perceptics.

There is no reality on it, and the reason there isn’t any reality on it is that entheta doesn’t have any reality that low on the tone scale. Of course this big blob of a case with all this tremendous amount of entheta on it doesn’t have a sense of reality! He doesn’t get reality on very many things. Of course he doesn’t have good recalls, and of course he disagrees with you and with himself and with his case continually! So, ARC is low.

Saying a case is low on reality says that it is high on entheta. Psychotherapy has for a long time recognized this. They said, "What you have got to do is make them face reality." That was a good idea. But what we have to do is pick up enough curtain so the fellow can get some faint conception of what reality is.

To you who have a great deal of experience in running preclears this subject doesn’t have to be beaten over the head continually or for very long. You shift your viewpoint and all of a sudden you remember a case you tried to run that was really a tough one. The case just wouldn’t move. You couldn’t get anything on the case, he couldn’t run an engram, so he didn’t believe in Dianetics. And although he came to you originally, you worked him for a little while and then he went away and you didn’t do anything for this case. You thought, "I really failed that time."

You didn’t fail, really. What you were doing was trying to attack more entheta than you had Theta available to do the attacking. There are techniques now which will clean this case up to a point where you have a much better chance of doing something for him. For instance, you can take ARC Straightwire: If a fellow comes in to you long enough and you talk to him long enough just on ARC Straightwire, you are going to bring him up along the line. You can’t help it if you are really running ARC Straightwire on him.

I have seen an auditor or two trying to take an occluded case and not run ARC Straightwire. They ran Straightwire that really had nothing to do with Straightwire; they wanted the preclear to remember this and remember that. But sometimes a case is so badly off that you can’t direct the Straightwire. You are lucky if he can remember anything with any degree of reality. However, if you can direct his recalls on good ARC Straightwire you can start bringing this fellow up the line quite rapidly, and the next thing you know, you will be lock- scanning him and picking up entheta on very light areas and you will have him high enough up the tone scale to clear up a lot of occlusion out of his life and so on.

You would hold him down on the tone scale if you started to go in and slug and then acted peeved or puzzled as to why his case didn’t resolve overnight. It took this fellow maybe forty years to get his case as loused up as it is. You are not going to undo that case in two hours. You may turn off a chronic somatic or something by a fluke, but it is not very possible.

So if you hit these cases with this new attitude, you might have a much higher level of success. You are handling inaccessibility.

Of course, if you can’t even run ARC Straightwire on the case, you have to do mimicry. That is great stuff— he smokes a cigarette, you smoke a cigarette. You are trying to get him into present time with mimicry.

Additionally, in Science of Survival we have a process known as Present Time. We have had a tendency to overlook the fact that all the time track consists of is the composite and consecutive moments of present time and the recorded perceptions of that, and conclusions that were along that line. This present time is going to be, tomorrow, yesterday’s time track. It is quite important to know that and to get the concept of Present Time Processing.

There is Present Time Processing. If you can put some Theta on the preclear’s time track or get him to put more Theta on it, in a few weeks you will be able to use that Theta; you will be able to use his time track. The preclear who is really gruesomely loused up is the preclear who doesn’t have very much Theta present time in his whole life. Of course, this works both ways: the more loused up the case is, the less chance you have of having Theta moments back on the time track and the more you need them.

So you could actually go into the field of just processing the present time environment, trying to straighten it up for the preclear a little bit so that it isn’t quite as entheta or it is in a little bit better order than it was in, and then finding out what he would like to do and encouraging him to build up moments of present time consecutively on his time track. That is processing, oddly enough. That is not something that you would sort of apologetically explain—" We will fix him up and then we’ll process him." No, you are processing him right there; that is all valid.

A valid process is anything which brings the individual up the tone scale; it doesn’t matter whether it is temporarily or permanently. If you start bringing him temporarily up the tone scale, that amount of Theta will start to compound itself and the next thing you know, you have enough Theta, and that keeps bumping him up the tone scale.

For instance, take these fellows who go fishing and hunting for a couple of weeks: they come back and for some peculiar reason their health has picked up. We could say it is because they were out in an unrestimulative environment. That is one reason, but a more important reason is that they picked up two weeks’ worth of Theta on the time track. And of course it banged into and knocked out entheta, because there is a natural cycle going between Theta and entheta. We will go into that in another lecture.