MOTION AND EFFORT - PART I

A lecture given on 20 August 1951

A Turning Point in Dianetics

We are beginning on a new aspect of theory and practice in Dianetics.

I have decided that in training we can come out of the first part of the kindergarten state that has been passing as training previously— such as running engrams, secondaries, basic- basic, chains and so on— and start moving up to something a little more interesting.

Here is a little story: A knock sounded on the door at 42 Aberdeen Road one day at about one o’clock in the morning. I went to open the door and there was a poor preclear who had been audited by a psychiatrist we had under training at that time, and this preclear really looked haggard. He was shaking and he was barely able to get inside the door. He was in trouble.

Of course, he hadn’t let us know that a very short time before he had been in a sanitarium. Then he got a little psychiatric- type "auditing": "The only thing that’s wrong with you is you’re being willful and stubborn! Now, you want to run that engram; you’ve got to run the engram, mostly because I tell you you’ve got to run it!" (I have seen some of them audit like this, really.) This psychiatrist was really squirrelly.

The preclear came in and lay down on the couch. I didn’t tell him to lie down on the couch. He just said, "You’ve got to straighten me out. I was ready to blow my brains out."

We couldn’t have that— not on the clean pavement of Elizabeth, New Jersey! So I said, "The file clerks will give us the engram necessary to resolve the case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of the engram. When I count from one to five, the first phrase will flash. One- two- three- four- five"— bang! "Eeeyow ! "

This was gruesome! It was summer and the windows were open. It was one o’clock in the morning in a quiet residential district. The next day we replied to a complaint from the police from a house three blocks away, to say nothing of the complaints of the houses nearby. People rushed in and closed down all the windows and everything else— but this preclear just kept on rolling. He was hitting a very high decibel level at about high C above high C. I had never heard such stuff in my life. The next morning I was walking around and people were talking to me but I couldn’t hear them. I was stone deaf.

I dug that up the other day, by the way. I was Lock Scanning and I was wondering what was so interesting at this date and period. All of a sudden I ran into this preclear, and the somaticl on it was nothing more nor less than. sound volume.

Now, as I mentioned, we are going to go into some more advanced material. This has to do with the theta- MEsT theory on awareness- ofawareness impulses as they translate into effort impulses on the MEST electronic line, and backfire.

Here is, in short, how "I" gets aberrated. I will give you some postulates regarding theta, to the end of getting your preclear moving on the time track even if it kills him. This is the material on motion and emotion blown up to a point where you can use it in processing.

You might think offhand that words are important. Words are not important. Lack of differentiation is the basic aberration— lack of differentiation.

Look at how many things a person can fail to differentiate. He meets a girl by the name of Abetha and he says to Abetha, "I love you dearly." But actually he has just gotten through meeting Grandma. And he is much astonished to find out that Abetha can’t cook cookies, because obviously Grandma is Abetha, yet Abetha then doesn’t do all the things that Grandma is supposed to do. So he gets mad and finally the marriage breaks up. That is a failure to differentiate.

A fellow walks into a room and the room is rather close; it is rather tight around him. He feels that this room is much too small and he wants to get out of it. He has never been in this room before in his life. But he has failed to differentiate between that room and a room in which he was punished and therefore he becomes nervous or upset. He has two environments confused.

Let’s go to another point of differentiation just a little more basic than that: When he was in that room where he was getting punished, he failed to differentiate that it wasn’t the walls that were punishing him, so after that the walls have a tendency to punish him. (It was Mama or somebody else who was punishing him, not the walls.) That is a failure to differentiate.

Now, when Mama said "I always have to do everything myself; you never pay any attention to me; it’s no wonder nobody ever likes you" while she was beating and spanking him, it is very interesting that he failed to differentiate between the hairbrush blows and Mama’s words. So later on he begins to think these words are important, not the hairbrush blows.

The auditor, working away at processing, can fail to differentiate. The auditor can fail to differentiate. His first failure to differentiate is mixing up all the perceptics and saying "If we can get one perceptic out of that incident, that’s good enough. If we can just get an impression of words out of that incident, that’s fine," or "If we can just make this preclear boil off, that’s all that’s necessary."

Sure enough, when you are beginning a very occluded case, it is perhaps necessary when you are co- auditing to make your preclear boil off. But you had better not make him boil off to the point where you start piling up a lot of ungraded material and you had better not make him boil off until his sense of reality is way down.

A lot of flashy new techniques came out in the field. Some of these were really something— they tied a preclear up in knots, sometimes got his head over the back of his neck and so on. They were interesting, but they didn’t do anything for the preclear though they probably amused the auditor.

Now, the failure to differentiate that most auditors fall into is their inability to recognize the fact that the preclear is suffering from an illusion, and the auditor will buy the idea that the reason the preclear is aberrated is because of words.

Of course, on the surface it is words. Book Two of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health goes into this rather heavily, and as a matter of fact, that is the manifestation, that is the mechanism; but that is not how you resolve it.

I have been saying for a long time that there are twenty- six perceptics. There are actually twenty- six main perceptics and then there are another twenty- six main perceptics— and maybe another twenty- six after that, I don’t know.

But certainly what you want to do is find the central point of emphasis in a case. What is the emphasis? The emphasis is not going to be this illusion of language. The emphasis is not going to be to further the illusion of the preclear that he is utterly mad and aberrated and suffering and so on. You get rid of that one by validating the preclear instead of the preclear’s aberrations. It is easy.

But the central point on which you concentrate is motion as it pertains to the muscular effort of the preclear. That is the center line that you take in processing.

The only way a person can distinguish motion is by perception. That is easy; he doesn’t know he is moving unless he perceives it. Now, he perceives it with his twenty- six perceptics and amongst those twenty- six perceptics is the particular combination of perceptics that tells him that he is exerting effort. Those are mostly internal perceptics but there are also external ones. Sight, sound or any one of these things can go in, but when it comes down to motion and emotion you can sum it up with a single word: effort.

So, when it comes down to the bottom of the rock pile, it is effort that you are trying to hit— motion— but the effort associated with motion. This includes the effort to move and can’t- move; it includes the effort to stay still and the inability to do so; it includes the attempt to be one’s size and the inability to do so because of the actual environmental pressure which brings one in. That, by the way, is the physical effort called a grouper.

There is also the effort of a fellow trying to bring himself in small enough and he can’t. This would spread him out more. Also, there is the effort to go up and the inability to rise, and the effort to go down and being held up. Here you are studying action, and here you are studying the center line that you should follow in observing a case.

What do you find, in running engrams, gives you the most trouble (outside of the snide and nasty cracks of the preclear)? It is nothing more nor less than an action phrase. l

Let’s look at an auditor happily running an engram, and then all of a sudden the preclear bounces. The preclear up to this time has been shaking all over and suddenly the preclear doesn’t shake anymore. The auditor at this moment can say, "Well, we’ve got it down to a bit of a reduction. That’s fine. Swell. We’ll just run it along like this. So let’s go over it again, and let’s go over it again.... It must be reducing; he’s not shaking anymore."

But if somebody who could really audit came along, he would say, "Bouncer? (snap!)"

"Yes."

"What’s the bouncer? (snap!)"

"Get up."

"Repeat it."

All of a sudden the preclear would start shaking again.

He had moved just that far on the time track— in other words, he had bounced just above this thing.

In order to get this manifestation, by the way, he would generally have to have a call- back and a holder and a bouncer, and he would strike one of these phrases and hit a couple more in sequence there, and then he would just ride right up on top of the engram. He couldn’t get up, he couldn’t get down and he wouldn’t be in it. That is a very interesting manifestation. I have seen many auditors louse that one up.

But what has happened? Why does he think he has to get up but can’t? Why does he think he has to go back? Why are action phrases effective in a case?

Now, supposing you could run a case without any action phrases being effective— wouldn’t that be lovely? No action phrases to worry about whatsoever— you get down into an engram and just tear through the engram. He would never get up above the level of the pain, never get below it; it would never group on you or anything like that. That would be very good, wouldn’t it?

It is a very funny thing and quite a comment on this society that you can actually run a preclear back into an engram and the preclear will respond to the action phrases in the engram and not respond to the actuality of being held down in that engram.

Really, the way it ought to work out, if there were not such a thing as language, is that you would get the preclear back to this point where he is being held down and run that out. That is the holder. You would run out the sensation of being held down, because the sensation of being held down is accompanied by a sensation of trying to rise.

Many years ago a fellow by the name of Isaac Newton came along and wrote three laws of motion. People tried to apply these things to the mind and they found out that that didn’t work, because they were trying to apply them to human behavior and they didn’t know about a time track. They hadn’t even compartmented the theta universe and the material universe; there was a tremendous amount of background that was missing there.

But you can make a statement about these laws which is interesting.

There is the law of interaction, and this law applies to the physical universe: For every action there is an equal and contrary reaction.

That, by the way, makes very interesting lecture material. A physics professor lecturing on this says, "Now, for every action there is an equal and contrary reaction," and he stamps his foot. Then he says, "The whole earth kicked back just that much. I stamped down, the earth kicked back." For every action, there is an equal and contrary reaction. Because of the tremendous inertia of the earth, however, it would be too microscopic to measure, but theoretically that is what happened.

There is such a thing as inertia. A body has a tend ency to remain at rest or in motion until acted upon by an exterior force; that is the law of inertia. An object has a tendency to remain where it is until something comes along and applies an exterior force and moves it. Furthermore, an object has a tendency if it is moving in some direction to continue, save for friction, to go forever in that direction until stopped.

Then there is the law of acceleration, which we needn’t worry about.

People tried to button this up and work out human behavior with it; it didn’t work. But it works to this degree for you: Theta is an energy which mobilizes and animates matter and energy in space and time. In other words, its mission is to control, animate and handle matter, and part of that matter is the organism.

So the theta over the organism remains in control or else! The theta says, "As long as self- determinism exists in this organism it can live. As long as this organism can control itself in the majority of its actions it survives. When it ceases to handle itself it will succumb."

That is interesting, because it postulates something further. A human being is standing around, and his self- determinism has brought him to a point where he is standing and watching a steam shovel. That is what he has elected to do— stand and watch a steam shovel. Then somebody comes along and shoves him. He moves aside and then comes back and says, "What are you trying to do, shoving me around?" In other words, he objects to being handled by the environment. You might say he objects to being MEST. He has got to handle the environment.

So he is standing there self- determinedly until acted upon by this exterior force— he gets pushed— at which moment he reacts.

If you want to see this in its virgin state, take a little child— a perfectly happy, cheerful little child. He crawls into your lap and he is perfectly willing to sit there— until you reach your hands around him. Just reach your hands around and close them around him without touching him. The first thing he will do is try to separate your hands. Then grab him and you can watch the tone scale go into action, because first he will get mad, then he will try to slip away from under you, and then he will decide he can’t quite make it and he will expend some grief, and finally he will go into an apathy and sit there— if you want to go to all that trouble. An organism is quite a lot of trouble, so choose a small child!

You can take a little child who is standing in one place, and with your thumb and finger just touch his belt without putting any weight on it, and that child will start right away from you.

This is why Newton’s laws didn’t work; it is because the reaction is so exaggerated. In trying to apply them to the human mind, people were trying to apply them to the reactions of matter. It says, "For every action there is an equal and contrary reaction," and goes on about the state of inertia and about interaction. These laws don’t work out too well; you can see this, because if you take a little baby who is just learning to walk and just touch the dress, you might as well have booted him hard, from the amount of action you get out of him, because he will leave!

Now, if that child is very happy with you and likes you a lot, of course he will come over and laugh and so on. But if you want to mess up your interpersonal relations with a child, see how happily he responds when cooperating with you and then just a few times say "Come here" and go over and put your hand around him and make him come to you. Then say, "Come here."

"No!"

The only way you can make him respond, finally, is to bust him down into the apathy of obedience. You can train him just like you can a dog— most people do: you get him to a point where, when he doesn’t come to you, you say "Pow!" and when he tries to walk away from you, you grab him back.

There was a character in one of Dickens’ stories, Martin Chuzzlewit, who had a most wonderful theory of how to raise children: You gave them everything they didn’t want and wouldn’t let them have anything they did want. As a matter of fact, if you did that you would eventually have an obedient child— the child would be in apathy. Of course, the child would be sick too, and would probably never amount to anything. He would probably grow up and go to college and all sorts of things. But when the child has his self- determinism interrupted far enough, he will finally go into an apathy and obey.