LINE CHARGE

A lecture given on 27 August 1951

A Fast Route to Sanity

I want to tell you about line charge. This is the most neglected field in Dianetic processing as far as material is concerned.

Now, the release of affects was supposed to really be the stuff in the field of psychoanalysis. That was the real stuff, that was the McCoy. But what they meant by release of affect was running a grief charge without getting anybody into it much. They knew that if you could get somebody to cry real tears for a while he would be better afterwards. And after that sage observation they left it for fifty years.

The London publisher of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health got hold of a copy of Science of Survival, and instead of being very upset that the science had advanced to the degree that it had advanced, he wrote and said, "It must be a vital science which contains many truths to demonstrate so much growth and expansion in such a short space of time."

The basic formula that gave us the atom bomb was known in the days of James Clerk Maxwell. This was contemporary with Sigmund Freud. From the days of James Clerk Maxwell and Sigmund Freud till now, in the field of the physical sciences we have gotten atomic fission, but in the field of psychoanalysis we still have the libido theory. In other words, there was very little growth in that field. It did not have a postulate which gave it vitality.

The idea of a release of affect— that a person could cry and would then feel better— is about as far below your knowledge of running a grief charge off a person as that is below getting a full- blown, prolonged laughter line charge, in the amount of good these actions will do. The amount of good a line charge will do is terrific.

You know it is tough to run a grief charge off a lot of cases— very tough. But when you run two or three grief charges off a case you will find. that it will make its greatest single advance.

Now, they were noticing this in psychoanalysis just by getting a person to cry, not by running off the grief charge. I worked a girl one time who had been worked by psychiatrists. The standard beginning on processing then was to ask "Who’s dead?"

"Gee! my husband; he was killed in the war."

"All right. Let’s return to the first moment you heard about this."

This was totally unexpected by the preclear. "Why, I have been in psychoanalysis for five years and we managed finally to work all that out. It took us about three years to do it, but we worked it all out."

I said, "Are you sure you worked that all out?"

"Oh, yes! Oh, heavens, yes. I can think about it, talk about it, and it doesn’t worry me— no concern at all."

"Well, who told you he was dead?" She went right into it and she cried about one quart per eye. I finished running this about three hours later, wondering why the devil I had gotten myself into this, and in the meantime being very sympathetic: "Yes, dear, yes. And then what did your father say about it?"

We suddenly discovered, after about two and a half hours of running, that her little girl had walked into the middle of this and she had not even seen the little girl. The little girl was carrying the same grief charge, and this woman had often wondered— very mystically out of Jungian philosophyl— whether or not the soul of her husband had not entered into the child to some degree, or if there hadn’t been druidism in effect on account of you paint children blue, and so on.

I am being psychoanalytically logical; don’t laugh. Have you ever read any books on the subject of psychoanalysis? You can just crack- a book and read a paragraph at random to a bunch of people and they will all say, "You’re making that up!" This is particularly true of Horney.

Anyway, this little girl had walked in and gotten the full impact of it, and she had been pretty badly off ever since. She had been sick, and Mama had not been able to figure out why her little girl was sick, because the child had never known her father or known that her father was dead, so obviously the death of the father couldn’t have affected her in any way. But two and a half hours through this grief charge, we finally found out that the child, who was just barely walking, had walked into the room at the beginning of this. She had been standing there goggle- eyed listening to everybody ever since. She was very frozen- faced, and so on. Mama was so far off the groove with this one grief charge that she didn’t even know that the baby knew or had been around during this incident concerning her father’s death.

That was pretty far off, and they had been working it out in psychoanalysis for about two or three years. They had been talking about its implications: "Now, how did this affect your libido? Did this remind you in any degree of druidism, because, you see, you put blue paint on children and you bury the beer...."

Most people think when you talk about old, formal, straight- line psychoanalysis that you are just kidding them, that you are being mean and ornery about the whole thing and that you are not being factual at all, because they haven’t studied this stuff. It was a literary stunt, actually. It was tremendous. They assigned everything to sex, and then later schools said, "No, it’s wrong to assign it all to sex; we’ll have to assign some of it to social activity," and so on.

Actually, there was a lot of valuable material in this field. The speculations of Breuer and the speculations of Sigmund Freud were tremendously valuable. They are background in Dianetics; they are definitely on the straight line back. The conclusions they drew, however, were sometimes very, very interesting. One of the conclusions they drew was that if a person just talked long enough he would get well. So they let him talk for seven years.

The release of affect was the high point of that subject. In Dianetics, you can get a release of affect by running a grief charge. Sometimes it is very hard to spring one off a case, but if you run a grief charge off the case the person feels better right away.

Believe me, though, that is nothing compared to how much better they feel if you can spring a line charge.

There are people in insane asylums who are trying to run line charges but there is nobody to punch them along, to punch the charge up so it will really start rolling out. If you took a hebephrenic— the psychotic who sits and giggles— and if you could just cut him into the engram so that he would go right in on the line charge, he would probably turn sane on you.

But a line charge is still to a large degree in the field of an art. It is also in the field of art to get somebody to blow a grief charge. You really have to work hard to blow a grief charge off some people. Some person who is riding normally around 2.5 insists on staying at 2.5 and you just can’t get him down to 0.5 long enough to run a grief charge on him. For some reason or other, his case stops resolving; he starts reducing engrams instead of erasing them, because he is so hung up on grief.

The job of getting someone to run a grief charge is a very difficult one only because it requires art on the part of the auditor. The auditor has to be to some degree a good actor. The auditor has to be very sympathetic; he has to know how to make his voice sound sympathetic.

Now, a line charge is often started before your very eyes and you don’t take advantage of it. Any time a preclear finds something amusing, hilariously amusing, finds something very humorous in his prenatal bank— like the dog is dead or something like that— and laughs for a moment or two on it, then goes on to the next phrase, laughs and goes on to the next phrase, and then laughs and finishes off the engram, if you sit there and let that preclear do that, it is just like holding your fingers open and letting somebody pour gold dust through them, because this case is rigged to run a line charge.

I used to think, watching the benefits of a line charge on a case, that there was only one reason to start running an engram, and that was to find line charge. If you could get a line charge and get the preclear started out on that line charge and keep him going on up, and if you could keep him running on it for about twenty- four hours, you would have on your hands a person in the best shape you had ever had a chance to look at. There would be a terrific difference in his tone. But because there is a slight art to keeping one of these line charges running, auditors neglect them. I tried last year to teach some auditors how to do a line charge and they looked at me kind of blankly.

A lot of it is in the fact that the auditor wants the preclear to get well. This is helpful on an auditor’s part. If you want the preclear to get well, you can get the preclear into line charges, grief charges, almost anything you want. So you first have to make up your mind that you want this preclear to get well. Don’t pass over that one lightly. Say to yourself sometime when you are sitting alongside the couch, "Do I want this guy to get well?" If the answer is no, ask yourself, "Why don’t I?" If you ask yourself a couple more questions, you will probably find out he resembles Uncle George, and you always did want to break Uncle George’s skull. And clear that one up.

In other words, clear yourself up a little bit with this preclear so that you really want this preclear to get well. That is the first thing you ought to do in auditing. That sounds very Pollyannaish, but it is a truism and it is very important.

The next time you audit somebody, try that. "Do I want this person to get well?" Just ask yourself the question and answer it honestly, and if you find you don’t then find out why. It is because he resembles somebody or something usually, and you can spring it out.

Now, if you whip that one, your next step is fairly easy. Ask yourself, "What is this preclear most likely to run?" Take a look at the preclear. Where is he on the tone scale? What is he most likely to run?

This preclear is hanging around 0.5 or something like that; are you going to run a grief charge off him? If you throw the usual 0.5 into a grief charge, pulmotors and the Schafer prone pressure method of artificial respirations will be of no avail. He will go down for the last time into that grief charge and he will stick on the track. Even people above that level will stick on the track; people up around 2.5 will sometimes stick on the track in a heavy grief charge. So you don’t want a grief charge on this 0.5.

Somebody at 0.5 requires Straightwire. You are working him up the tone scale. How would you like to get him up to the top of the tone scale like a rocket plane?

You can actually take what would be a very light lock to a 3.0 and run the 0.5 into this situation. Get him in an occluded situation, get him moving a little bit on the track, just pilot him along. You don’t care what he is getting; you are watching him, not his past. You bring him into this time when he got up on the step of the ice wagon and the ice wagon drove off and somebody said "Whoa!"

That was a holder, so there he has been stuck on the track for years. And you get the time he was in the automobile and released the brake and it ran down and bumped into a stone wall slightly, and Papa came out and said, "Stop it." That was a big holder, so he is stuck there too.

In other words, you pick up a little bit of this and a little bit of that, keeping him moving each time, reducing what you are hitting each time, but carefully watching this preclear to a point where he finds something that is funny to him, something he thinks is funny. That is not something you think is funny. It normally will be something that hasn’t anything whatsoever to do with humor the way you understand humor. It will be some remark like, "Oh, I am so sick and sorry, I can’t go on any longer; I am just going to die and give up." All of a sudden the preclear will laugh, "Haw- haw- haw, that’s silly! "

This is like knocking over the first of a row of dominoes. He suddenly says, "Oh, it’s Aunt Agatha talking and she is saying, ‘Oh, I’m so sick and tired of going on; I am going to give up and I’m not . . .’ Haw- haw- haw- hawhaw!" That’s the first one. Now, if you just drop it at that, this domino will fall over away from the others. You could knock out every lock on which he will laugh by knocking them over on top of the fallen domino. Two years later you would still be doing it. But you could also catch this first one tipping and, as the auditor, tip it the other way and knock the whole row down right on up through to present time.

If you are good at it and if you don’t let him suspect that that is really what you are trying to do, you can start line charges going which will last for days. There are many ways to keep them going: You can say, "Please don’t laugh anymore! It’s serious! I tell you, it’s serious! Do you realize that’s your dog’s death you’re laughing over? Now, be quiet now, be serious. Don’t laugh about . . ."

"Haw- haw- haw!" He goes off on the line charge.

"Look, I came here to audit you, not to sit here and listen to you laugh. Now, I don’t see anything funny in that automobile accident. I’m not going to sit here and listen to all this laughter and so forth. I want something sad, something sad, you understand? Something very sad. "

"Haw- haw- haw- haw!" He is off to the races again because he has just found a whole chain of "sad." He has found somebody who was always sad.

Then, as he runs down a little bit, as he gets to a point where his sides are about ready to burst, you give him a newspaper. You say, "Now look, read this and be quiet and don’t keep up this uproar anymore; you’ll probably disturb the neighbors. Just read the newspaper and I’m sure you won’t find anything in that because there’s nothing but death and destruction."

"Death and destruction— haw- haw- haw- haw!" Off he goes on death and destruction. "Four killed in automobile accident— haw- haw- haw- haw!" And then he reads this news story about a little girl who got lost and drowned, or something of the sort. "Drowned— haw- haw- haw!" and he is off on "drowned."

Actually, there is a line charge on every entheta line. It is on the theta side of the ledger, and what evidently is happening is that you are getting a reversing polarity on these charges. It is sort of like the tendency of a body to remain in motion after it gets to a certain speed, if you can imagine such a thing. If you can get this fellow up to that speed with a line charge and you can keep it rolling— and the main way you keep it rolling after it gets going is just by not stopping it— the first thing you know, this fellow will have blown more doggone chains! He will come back to battery on this faster than on anything else I know.

How do you do this? Actually, it is the art of inserting— and I say art— the right interested remark at the right moment. If he started to laugh and you suddenly said to him very mechanically, "All right, let’s go on to the next phrase," that charge would stop right there. You sounded bored.

But if you are interested and you say, "And then what did she say?" he will start on up along the line. "Well, what did he say? What did these people do?" He will tell you about something they did and the next thing you know, he is on his way across the boards with a line charge.

I have actually gone clear down into the prenatal area— early basic area— and gotten an engram all stirred up, then left it obviously unreduced and hanging in mid- air when the preclear started to laugh. He got on to a line charge and came right on up to present time with this line charge.

Do you go back and try to get that engram? No. You find some more line charge, because he will find the line charge. You can’t tell him what is funny and what isn’t funny. As a matter of fact, he will keep on laughing mostly because he thinks you are amused for him.

It is very hard to be around somebody with a line charge without laughing. So you laugh, but try not to laugh at him too much. And occasionally you should try to kid him about it, and seem to try to break it down and stop it: "Now come on, this is serious! Let’s get all those deaths out of the case. Deaths, see?" Off he’ll go again.

Now, auditors are evidently most successful in this when they go into collusion. They can just bat a preclear back and forth between them. He comes out of a session running a line charge, and if some other auditor is there he can start feeding him stuff.

If you get this fellow going at a high enough velocity, you can feed him repeater techniques without any harm whatsoever. You can feed him holders, bouncers, groupers— anything you want to— and he will laugh them off. He will hit the next chain on the thing and come roaring up along the line. You may wonder sometimes whether he is actually laughing on line charge or what, because it can become quite alarming. Say something to him that couldn’t possibly be in the prenatal bank, like "Empire State Building," and get him to repeat that. He won’t get a line charge on it unless it is occluded by entheta.

Imagine my astonishment when I gave this to a preclear once, though— "Empire State Building"— and had him practically knock the plaster off the walls. He had worked there for four years, and he spent about an hour and a half laughing off the four years.

It is interesting that the only psychotherapy known in Italy in the days of Giambattista Basilel and Boccaccio was laughter. They would write their stories around the basis of the guy who finally made the princess laugh. That was the psychotherapy which was known— the princess laughed. "The Goose Boy" is one of those stories: The princess had been suffering from a melancholy and she had been disturbed in the head for years. Then she was looking out the window one day and all of a sudden this fellow walked down the street carrying a goose, and he looked so silly carrying this goose that she laughed. So naturally the king gave her hand in marriage to this boy because he had made the princess laugh and cured her melancholy.

This was psychotherapy in the Dark Ages in Italy and through Europe. This was all the therapy known. Many a day in many a land, laughter has been the only psychotherapy. If you could finally make the person laugh he would be all right. You can see why that would be.

But imagine our astonishment in Dianetics to find out that there is a mechanical method of making them go into these things. Could we have made our fortunes ! Of course, any princess who had been in a melancholy for years would be low on the tone scale, and you wouldn’t really want her as a wife, but you still would have had a kingdom if you had been a Dianetic auditor a few hundred years ago. That is rather far- fetched, but you never know— you might get back on the time track sometime and find out that you have self- determinism in terms of time. So, I just wanted to prepare you and show you why you should learn about line charges.

A line charge is something that builds, and it is something, actually, that the preclear starts and the auditor keeps going. The auditor has to keep it going and he has to keep it going in such a way that the preclear will not suspect that the auditor wants it kept going, really. The ARC has got to be pretty high here. If the auditor sits there waiting for the preclear to cry, the preclear will never cry. As a matter of fact, I have made a preclear cry merely by saying mean, nasty, ornery things about the dear, dead departed. The preclear begins to defend this person who was an antagonist a moment ago. You agree with the preclear and you say, "Why, yes, your father used to beat you and he used to do this and he used to do that. And, you know, I would be awful mad at a guy who did something like that."

"Well, don’t you talk about my father like that!" Here is Father as an ally. The next thing you know, tears come off Papa’s death. This is just a way of getting around.

The same way, if you keep working hard enough for a grief charge, you are liable to get a line charge on laughter. You keep this up and you could get a very fast reversal. The preclear will get back there, get something silly and start laughing, go to the next phrase and start laughing, go to the next phrase and start laughing again, and about this time you come in with the appropriate remark (anything you happen to feel at that moment that shows that you’re definitely in spirit with this) and it will just add up those two theta entities to a point where this line charge will start to roll. The second it starts to roll, you keep it rolling a little bit further. If you can get one of them going, keep it going.

Don’t be alarmed, by the way, because the preclear will swear he is just about to die sometimes. I have had them beg, plead, get down on their knees and say, "Please, don’t make me laugh anymore! Please!"

You say, "All right, I won’t make you laugh anymore; I didn’t want you to laugh in the first place. If you want to go laughing about things like that, that’s your hard luck."

"Hard luck— haw- haw- haw!" and he is off again.

The longest line charge I know of was seven days. That preclear wasn’t worth much, physically, at the end of seven days, but he was sure sane.

Of course, you shouldn’t think that a person will be a complete releaser just because you have gotten a line charge going on him. Actually, a preclear generally shouldn’t suspect how good a line charge is, because then he will try to get one. He will sit there and say, "Is this the line charge? Is that the line charge?" in the same way that some of them sit there and say, "Should I cry about this? About that? It couldn’t be that. No, I can’t cry about that. I’ll have to try to cry about this next one." That goes into a point of psychodrama.

Psychodrama is awfully interesting. You get a bunch of people in a loony bin and scatter them all around a room and you have them act out what they would like to do, and of course you get them dramatising. Actually, it may have some therapeutic effect.

Back in Elizabeth one day I was passing up the hall and I heard a fellow say, "You don’t mind if I pretend I am crying, do you?" and I thought, "Can this be Dianetics?" The fellow was a proponent of psychodrama and he figured if he simulated tears then he could get into an incident where he could cry. I remember that fellow five months later was still trying to make people start to cry in present time so they would get into a grief charge.

Theoretically it ought to work, but I have not seen this work. On the other hand, it might work in starting a line charge; it might work— this is utterly untested. Have the person pretend he is laughing; he has to find, then, something to justify his activity, so he will find something to laugh about. You might start it out along that line.

But the point is that line charge is only good when it is practically uncontrollable, and this is certainly working on the control side of the ledger. That is simulating something so that it will work. Just in the same way, if the preclear thinks that his auditor wants him to laugh he won’t laugh.

I have really gotten some good ones by persuading the person how sorry it all was, how sad life was in general. I would tell him very seriously, "Now, in this session we are going to try to blow a grief charge, so I want you to be very solemn about it and I want you to see if you can’t get into the mood of blowing a grief charge. Let’s feel sad, and let’s go back to some time when something horribly sad happened. Let’s not corn it up or anything like that now; let’s be real serious about this," and after just a little of this he would start to laugh.

Why is this happening? The real holders on the track, the real action phrases on the track, the real action incidents on the track which act as holders, groupers and all the rest of it, took place when "I" said "Move" and no movement was possible, or "I" said "Stand still" and the body couldn’t do it. "I" kept saying, "Stand still, stand still," and the body couldn’t do it. So there is still tied up in the switchboard an "I" command that says "Stand still" which means "move" to the motor controls because there is a cross in the switchboards. Or there may be an "I" command that says "Get away," and the motor controls pull up closer.

There is a hypnotic command "The harder you try to remember, the more you will forget." That is what is technically called a tensor reaction. In other words, if you get the subject’s hand rising, the harder you try to restrain the hand from rising, the faster it will rise. And this is actually true! You can touch the hand and the second it feels restraint it really gets going. The reason is that there is a backwards reaction; there is a cross on the switchboard.

You should understand this, because this is negation in little children. They have been held when they should have been moving and they have been moving when they should have been held and various other things have taken place, and they have gotten crosses in this switchboard.

Now, the first thing that a person who is trying to get away does is just try to get away. Then he tries to get away a little harder, he gets mad about getting away, and then he feels some grief about not being able to get away, and then he goes into apathy. Unconsciousness and apathy are practically synonymous with death— unconsciousness, apathy, death, they are all about the same line.

What has happened is that "I" has gotten a whole bunch of these situations which are muscular apathies— can’t move, gone into an apathy about moving and so on. Boil- off accumulates on top of apathy incidents.

When there is enough apathy in a case, there is an inaction as far as "I" is concerned and a muscular kickback in the switchboard. What happens to ARC? It is completely inverted, you might say. Instead of ARC at the top of the band, at the top of the tone scale, the ARC is at the jagged- vibration level of the lower part of the tone scale.

What we want to do is somehow or other, magically, suddenly convert that into a smooth wave— convert that suddenly in all these incidents. What is in there is a flock of apathies. It is exactly in reverse to what it should be. So when you ask this person to be happy he is going to cry— when you are dealing with his aberrations— because you are dealing with entheta down below 2.0. So, you start talking about entheta to an individual— talking to his theta about his entheta— and you are talking to the opposite side of the spectrum.

In other words, the harder he tries to remember, the more he will forget. The more he tries to cry, the closer he will come to laughing. That is negation. That is the child who says "I don’t want it." He is in apathy about this particular item he has been asking for. This is the reversal mechanism, negation, down at the lower part of the scale. So any time you want line charge off a case, don’t ask for it, ask for the reverse and you are liable to get it.

Sometimes you will get the reverse, too: Somebody may be so close to a grief charge that when you ask for the grief charge he gets it. Most of the time if you pester and badger a preclear enough you can actually pester and badger him into at least an anger charge of some sort. But self- determinism on the subject that the aberrations surround has gone to zero— apathy. Self- determinism is at zero.

Now, with self- determinism in a completely reversed state, what would be the physical reaction and mental reaction from a complete inversion of all of this charge? It would go from apathy to tone 4.0 and it would turn fast. That is the kind of charge you would get. It is like an electrical discharge. You can build up a certain potential in a static machine and start it jumping across a gap in an arc. You can keep that arc going as long as there is enough charge on the condensers, and with a line charge that is what happens. All of a sudden this current starts reversing and it will keep on reversing faster and faster and faster all the way up along the line.

But you won’t get a line charge when you ask for it. You have to find it. You get it under any pretext. You just watch for it and when it suddenly turns up you take it. Your natural inclination as an auditor would probably be to ask the preclear for incidents that are funny, but the only things he is going to laugh about are death, destruction, agony, suffering, hard luck and failure— just horrible things! "Oh yes, that’s the time the cat got her head chopped off— that’s funny!" and he is on his way.

You get this growing, reversing charge all the way up to the top. And every chain there is, from the engram which started it on through to present time, has a potential line charge on it. That is something for you to remember.

A case which has proceeded without running a line charge— I don’t care how many hours this case has proceeded without running a line charge— is a case which has not picked up much self- determinism. You can almost measure the amount of self- determinism a case has picked up by the amount of line charge he has run, because this line charge is "I" picking up command of the organism, picking up command of the situation and picking up command of the environment through knocking stuff out in the past environment.

And it is an art getting one of these things running; it is a real art.

But remember those rules (if any art has rules): You wait for the preclear, of his own volition while you are running him into things in the bank, to start laughing. Then without acting overtly, you wait till it is obviously a little bit out of his control and then punch it with a remark. You at least tell him you are there by just making some remark— a remark that won’t cross him up.

Don’t tell him "Oh, please, let’s go on laughing," because he will shut up. He will stop laughing right there because you are the environment and now you are agreeing with him, and that will suppress the whole charge. You are more likely to keep him going by saying "Well, for God’s sake, stop laughing, and let’s get on working!" All of a sudden you can just sort of feel this guy start pulling against you, and he is pulling self- determinism back out of the environment so fast he is just screaming all the way up along the line. So you say, "Oh, all right, so you’re going to laugh. So I’m going to sit here and wait for you to quiet down, but let’s get on with it, huh?" And if you put just the right insouciance, just the right note of falsity, into your own voice— showing him you don’t really mean what you are saying— you will kick him right on up along the line; the line charge will keep rolling.

But you could make him self- conscious enough, you could invert him enough in those first stages, to really stop him. However, there is practically nothing that will stop a line charge once it is really rolling. I have seen a man’s wife wringing her hands, saying, "Oh dear, he’s going insane! Now I know he’s insane! I told him not to take up Dianetics!"

Then all of a sudden he said, "Insane!" and started right in laughing again.

And she said, "Oh, there he’s off again." "Off again— haw- haw- haw!" And then he said, "Please make her stop talking! She’s killing me! Oh, ‘killing me! ’— haw- haw- haw!"

That night his wife went over and slept with the neighbors.

A line charge gets up to a certain velocity and the preclear can’t do anything more about it. There is enough volume of entheta converting to keep it rolling and rolling. You can get him up to a point where he is in a good, high, stable 4.0. He is pretty well off afterwards.

Then a funny thing will happen: Some auditor will come along and audit him soberly down into a lot more engrams and get a lot more entheta free that is not converted— then more and more engrams, tying up more and more theta. This takes him right back down the scale.

But all that entheta that has been more or less pulled up to the surface will convert again. If you audit him, you will get him into another line charge. Let it roll if you do, and it will all turn back up and his selfdeterminism will come up to the top. That is another way of bringing a preclear up the tone scale.

However, a person who is very low on the tone scale is the person who will get this too- much- entheta- around manifestation. He gets audited and audited and audited and he gets more and more entheta drifting around, and his sense of reality is very poor and so forth. This person is one that you ought to have been auditing on locks or something like that; he shouldn’t have been in engrams.

But that is the way you could take a case that has gone clear to the top of the tone scale because of line charge and put him all the way back down to the bottom again. Just run too much for him to handle for a while and he will be a mess. I can guarantee it.

To my way of thinking, no case has really had the business, no case is really going to be very stable, until you have run off some line charge. The cases that are lowest on the tone scale are actually most likely to hit this manifestation. I have run a preclear who was just about as close to being spun- in as they can get and have all of a sudden hit this manifestation, and I have kept it rolling and had him come out pretty stable.

Of course, "everyone knows" that one has to experience pain in order to get anywhere in the world, and "everybody knows" that it is all pretty sad after all and that laughter won’t get anybody anyplace, but in Dianetics it doesn’t happen to be true.

I have noticed around the Foundation too many sober- looking preclears and too many sober- looking auditors. You ask somebody how long it has been since anybody ran a three- day line charge and they tell you it has been quite a while. The answer should be yesterday or that one just finished this morning.

Now, I wish I could give you a nice set of mechanical rules, but beyond telling you that it works in opposites, beyond telling you to pick it up just at the moment it starts rolling and give it a good kick, beyond telling you for God’s sake don’t stop it but keep it rolling, beyond telling you that he is going to laugh about things that he should be sad about, I can’t give you very many directions concerning it. I hope you can get the feel of it.

Before anybody knows the exact mechanical rules behind something, it is a favorite thing to sort of expect him to get the feel of it, and true enough, one will very often get knowledge in that fashion. A person gets up to the point where he gets the knack of it. For instance, nobody knows how to play golf. But a fellow goes out and he happens to hold the clubs a certain way, and he walks up to the ball and hits the ball. He goes on playing golf for a year, and then one day he takes the club and hits the ball and the ball goes 220 yards and lands on the green; he goes down with the putter and hits it once and it drops in the cup. He goes to the next fairway and hits it out onto the green with a brassie and then he gets up to the green and takes two putts and it goes in— and all of a sudden he is playing golf. How it happened, he doesn’t know. (Of course, he would know much less if you said "How did you suddenly do that? How are you doing that?" That is always "helpful.") But he has caught the knack of it.

Now, the funny part of it is that that knack is something depending to a large degree upon self- confidence. I know when I was very young I used to feel self- confidence about things. I used to get out and play tennis, for instance. Somebody would say, "Why don’t you come down and play some tennis?"

"Tennis? Let’s see, how do you play tennis, keep score, and so forth? You hold the racket. . . What are you supposed to be able to do with tennis? What are you supposed to be able to do with a tennis racket?" I would go watch for a while, and then pick up a racket. "Oh, you make a serve, you cut; that goes across the line and the ball goes in that direction. That makes the ball roll along flat. Very simple." Then I would step in and play a game of tennis— and I mean a game of tennis!

It never struck me that there was anything difficult about it. You were supposed to take hold of the racket and hit the ball. You were supposed to keep the ball on the other side of the net and inside those white lines, and you were supposed to put the ball in a place where your opponent couldn’t get at it. And there was no art to it; it was just what you did, that was all. Then somebody would come along and say, "Well, that’s lobbing," and the next one would say, "You know, your service would be better if you put your foot just over there."

Maybe you can remember taking up a game or something of the sort that you just knew you could do, and you felt such a self- confidence— like looking at a tractor and saying, "I could drive a tractor," and stepping up on it, taking hold of the levers and driving the tractor!

That is, by the way, the way the mind and body are supposed to operate, oddly enough. The speed of learning is fantastic.

This is the way it is with running line charges. One day you get a good preclear and the preclear suddenly hits a line charge potential, starts to run it, you say the right thing in the right place— you get this feel about it— and after that you can run line charges off anybody.

I can tell you one more thing about it, though. It is a matter of belief. This is a heck of a thing to start throwing into Dianetics! It is a matter of belief. But I put a lot more into that word belief.

Belief could be summed up into good, high ARC. You can practically wish a preclear well. You can practically wish him into sanity and health, actually. This is fantastic, but once you get the knack of how you do it, you can do it. And one of the ways you get the knack of it is you believe he can get well! You know he can. That is step number one: You know he can get well. There is no doubt in your mind. You have observed things happening around you, you know what this processing can do, you have seen it happen to people and you know this works, so you know that he can get well. Furthermore, you believe in his potential to get well and you believe, too, and you know that you want him to get well. Those are all important. You want him to get well, you know he can get well, and you are not going to force the fact on him that he is going to get well— except that you just never admit to yourself or to the universe in general that anything else is going to happen to this case but that he is going to get well.

Then you more or less stand and wait with that knowledge, selfconfidence, belief and so forth toward that preclear; you wait for him to find out. You don’t try to sell him on the idea; you just run engrams, you run locks and you go through all the mechanical operations, but you are waiting for him to believe in himself. You are waiting for him to find out that he can get well. You are waiting for him to find out that he can do it. And after that there is no stopping you, because the second he finds out, you can do anything with this case, because he can do anything. Locks, engrams— so what?

Once in a while you will get a preclear with the feeling as he starts into a session that all he has to do is find basic- basic and then tear up all the engrams from the beginning of the track clear on up to present time and he will be Clear.

What reduced the feeling? I can tell you what reduced it: the auditor! The auditor didn’t believe it! He knew doggone well you had to run out those engrams one by one and phrase by phrase and pain by pain and you had to go over them so many times and all the rest of it.

What you are dealing with is not any hocus- pocus. It is simply how much high- level theta can you attract and generate between you and the preclear. How much feeling of being alive can you help him generate? And if you can just swing it in, you will believe in him, you wait for him to believe in himself, and after he believes in what he is doing himself he is on his way.

I swear that a combination like that can start at the basic area of the track and knock out everything on up to present time. Two of our research auditors had a sort of idea like that, so they were trying to force people to do it, but that was different.

All of a sudden the preclear knows he is right on the verge, he is trembling right on the edge of being a bomb that will sort of explode and he will be okay. That would be line charge ne plus ultra.

Line charge, then, comes up to such a point that you can envision a whole conversion suddenly taking place in the case— all the entheta suddenly changing into theta. Theoretically it can happen, and more than theoretically, it has happened.

We know the mechanics of aberration. In this scientific world today, we are supposed to accept scientific evidence. We can produce all the scientific evidence we want. We can take somebody off the street, take him into an auditing room and produce the same effects. And we can take not just one person off the street, but man after man after man and woman after woman, and we look at their minds and how they operate and why they are acting that way and all the rest of it in the same way. We could plant engrams so that they would act some way. In other words, we have the mechanical rules. That is in accordance with modern science.

We have another thing which is very definitely in accordance with modern science: We are handling an energy— a highly volatile energy— the source of which we do not know.

Now, what that energy source is, how you attract more of it, how much of it is replenished— these are questions that have not been answered at this time. But we know there is an energy there. How much energy is available to any one human being? That we don’t know.

I know that it is possible for a fellow to get one idea of such magnitude and velocity that he can pick himself up and for six months practically walk on water. He can’t get sick and he doesn’t need rest.

This is not a manicl operating; a manic operates entirely differently. A manic is hectic. It wears the person out physically, and in addition to that a person is not reasonable in a manic; also with a manic, the interests of the person are not diversified. They are very, very definitely channeled.

Nevertheless, these things can happen. You have to differentiate this from the euphoria, the false "feeling good," which occurs on an engram manic- phrase restimulation. It is not the same thing. The manic is not rational— that is its first test. It is not reasonable and the person isn’t reasonably meeting his situations; he just "feels good." He just feels good, and he is happy when he should be sad.

This other hasn’t anything to do with being happy. This other has to do with horsepower or manpower or theta power, whatever it is. All of a sudden the person can get up along that line. One- morning he wakes up and suddenly he has decided not to be sick anymore, so he gets well. All the gunpowder, velocity and everything else is over on the theta side of the ledger— ARC. How much that can do, I don’t know.

There is nothing in this world today which is more thoroughly invalidated than theta. That is to say, "You’re no good," "If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?" "My golly, he’s conceited; he thinks he can do anything" —invalidation after invalidation.

How can you live in a 1.1 society and be at 36.0? The point is that if you could get up to 5.0 or 6.0, the amount of enturbulence which would have to be thrown at you to bring you down would be so catastrophic that it would swamp an army.

Theta definitely is the boss hand. I can give you lots of examples of theta being the boss hand in the thing. It is function controlling structure. There isn’t any reason you have to go through these engrams over and over in order to reduce them. It is mechanically set up that way, but there is really no reason you should. Neither is there any good reason an auditor has to be present when a preclear runs engrams, and that is a silly one, too. But he does have to be there.

You do have to go through those engrams over and over, unless by himself a man gets an idea promoting his survival, which is at such a pitch that he goes up in survival potential so high that nothing can stop him for a while. This can last for months. He gets tremendously successful suddenly, inexplicably. Or an auditor gets hold of him, blasts into some line charge, knocks that out, and he and the auditor working with him all of a sudden feel like "Well, run the doggone case out." Engrams and secondaries fly in all directions and then the guy is walking on top of the world and he doesn’t sag back anymore.

That is the pitch you are trying to work up toward. You are not trying to do a mechanical job like trying to sort so many boxes of soap. Actually, the job you are trying to do is a tremendously inspirational job. Your preclear will get as well as you can boot him up along the line with line charge, with personal belief, with ARC and so on. It depends to such an enormous extent upon you that you had better get your own belief in yourself pretty high up the line and stop walking around looking at that tone scale chart and saying, "Well, I can’t do anything anyhow because I’m only a 1.1." From this moment on, just start considering yourself at 6.0 and all will be well.