MIMICRY

A lecture given on 10 September 1951

Being Someone Else

I have really been having a picnic with Self Analysis. Think of it: You hand something to a preclear; you don’t have to throw him on a couch or do anything with him and something happens.

In the last few weeks I have done quite a bit of testing and working people with Self Analysis who know nothing about Dianetics. (At least three of these people, if they did read the text, probably wouldn’t know what it said.) It turned on some visio. One of these people was very startled and he told me, "You know, it’s a funny thing, and I don’t know whether you’re supposed to do this or not, but I was working the questions last night and I saw a picture of what I’d seen once."

I said, very patiently, "Well, that’s visio. You can do this in memory."

I talked to this person again today and he said, "You know, I’ve seen a whole lot of those things and, gee, they look real!" There have now been three cases of visio coming through.

Now, when one does research, one is not always concerned with the health of the preclear. So I gave this book to a person who had been grabbed out of the bosom of her family and rushed off to the local jail on a warrant issued by a psychotic sister. This girl was not psychotic, but this warrant was issued for her incarceration as insane.

They had three doctors come in to see her. Nobody told her these people were doctors. She was furious at being put in prison with nobody even giving her a warrant; nobody would give her an attorney, nobody would let her call anybody. All of a sudden these three strange- looking characters showed up and looked her over and started to ask her questions. She bawled them out too, but she shouldn’t have done that because they were psychiatrists. They showed her! They sent her up to Larned. She was held in jail locally for seventeen days; none of her friends or anyone knew where she was. Then they sent her up to Larned and held her there for six weeks, in the course of which she was given three electric shocks, fortunately without sedation— but unfortunately for her, standard electric shocks. These shock treatments knocked out all of her teeth, which is not unusual in electric shocks.

It seems unusual to put a human being in a prison without a warrant and hold him there for weeks. It seems unusual to give him a kind of treatment which may result in death from cerebral hemorrhage or in knocking out all his teeth or in breaking his spine, but it happens that this is standard treatment in the U. S. A., 1951.

If anybody ever got really mad at you, all he would have to do would be to go down to the police station and say "He’s insane— he threatened me, threw a terrible scene," and sign a warrant. The cops would come down, pick you up and put you in the clink, and off you would go into the wild blue yonder. If you happened to die in the process, that would be all right too. They think this is covered by law. The only trouble is that it is not covered by law.

These practices, by the way, are sanctioned by laws in only three states of the union. Kansas is not one of them. The only legal basis for these practices resides in the possession of a medical doctor’s degree. The medical doctor is understood to have, but has never at any time in history been assigned, the care of the insane. There are no laws anywhere that have ever been passed in any legislature that give the insane into the care of psychiatry. Isn’t that interesting?

We have a country in which a lot of civil rights were fought for at one time or other. In 1776 the boys had an idea that we should have freedom. It took them till about 1835 to really realize all of that freedom with their various modifications to the Constitution and to get everybody to accept them and agree upon them. At that time we incorporated something England had had for an awfully long time and had gotten in the Magna Carta, known as the freedom of the person from unreasonable seizure— from writs of seizure. In other words, your home couldn’t be searched without somebody getting a proper warrant for it and you could not be jailed, held or punished without being confronted by your accusers. It says that in the Constitution of the United States. Nowhere at any time has any law been passed anywhere which denies any human being, regardless of his condition, those rights.

So, as I look around in this society I can see that somebody is out on a limb. I have a nice little collection of cases where things like this have happened to people. One of these days if I have a little time I am going to go out and buy a saw!

The rights of human beings are understood to include— understood to include— the right of a person to his own sanity and the right of a person to his own life. Unfortunately, these things have to be pointed up more strongly. There are, then, two civil rights which have to be emphasised. They already exist but they certainly have to be emphasised and clarified. I don’t care if it takes two new amendments to the Constitution; they had certainly better be in there. But they are being violated daily; they are violated daily in this community. All someone has to do is say "He’s insane" and civil liberties disappear for that individual.

In New Jersey they have an underground railroad. There is a person who is not a doctor, a psychiatrist or even an engineer— just somebody that was pulled in on a civil- service job and put down at a desk— and if somebody says "So- and- so is insane," this person takes that individual and sits him down at the desk, talks to him just long enough to get his name, age, address and next of kin— or he gets it from the relatives— and the person is on his way. If this person can manage to reach a telephone he may compel a hearing to be held, but that hearing is not necessary. The first thing that happens to the individual when he gets to the institution is he is given an electric shock— without any hearing. Isn’t that wonderful! He obviously was insane or nobody would have given him electric shocks. That is good "logic."

But you can see that there is evidently something wanting in the great civil codes that our forefathers set up with so much blood, sweat and tears. I don’t think a lot of little men in white coats should be allowed to tear them up and throw them away just because they happen to be disciples of Manichaeus or somebody.

Now, this girl was in a state of apathy. She was in the kind of a state of apathy where she didn’t know she was in a state of apathy. She did not realize she was avoiding her friends and did not realize she was not taking care of herself or any of her possessions. So I thought this was really something. She can still read; she likes to read stories. I had a little bit of difficulty instructing her that the disc was rotated on the questions. She tried to read the text and drew a complete blank.

I turned her loose, and she has evidently had about five sessions with Self Analysis now by herself. Yesterday she went out through the top of her head, but perfectly sanely. I don’t think the girl was insane in the first place, though she was certainly in a state of apathy. But she got mad at what had happened to her. This was the first emotion that she had displayed since last spring, when this occurred— the first emotion of any kind. She got mad and went around and started to collect all of her belongings from various friends and so forth, and she found out that the institution had marked them all with her name and practically ruined them as garments, so she got madder than ever.

It suddenly occurred to her today that she was angry and she remarked this with considerable surprise. She remarked additionally that this was the first emotion she had displayed since last spring. And also she realized suddenly that she had been out of communication with everybody, so she was calling everybody up and telling them what happened to her— not in a manic state, but she was explaining to them why she hadn’t co Jme around and seen them, because she had been upset since this had happened— and just because her sister had told all her friends that she was crazy did not mean she was crazy.

Of course, if her sister were around now and this girl suddenly started displaying the fact that she was annoyed at having been held down brutally, incarcerated and so forth (you are not supposed to be annoyed about that sort of thing; you are supposed to be "well adjusted"), I imagine another warrant could be issued for this girl. The most violent statement she has made on the subject has been that she doesn’t think it should have happened to her and she is pretty sore because it did.

It is interesting that there are three psychiatrists around town right now who are way out on the other end of that limb. Only I don’t happen to have the price of a saw at the moment.

That was the first step in placing Self Analysis in somebody’s hands where it might have proven dangerous. It seems to be coming out all right.

Now, an individual can be very easily surveyed as to his past, his background and his former environments. It can do you a lot of good as an auditor to know what kind of people this person has been associated with, and it might do you a lot of good as an auditor to be able to spot the kind of treatment this individual has had habitually in his own home, both as a child and later, in his teens and so forth. There is a little rule that you can follow on this: A person cares for himself or fails to as he has been cared for. He behaves toward himself as other people have behaved toward him. He has the same regard for himself as other people have had for him. All this applies to an individual in an aberrated state. There is a natural plane of self- care— an optimum— across the boards of the various dynamics. But where this care of the individual has been interfered with in this— 3.0 society, where this has been aberrated, you will find the individual aberrated to that degree.

In other words, there is a state of regard for self, care for others and so forth which gradually, as a person goes on living, gets less and less selfdetermined. So, where the self- determinism of an individual has been interrupted, he is caring for himself or regarding himself exactly as his self- determinism has been interrupted. In other words, as long as he has selfdeterminism, he has pride and personal regard, he takes care of himself and he takes care of others around him and so on. But where that is interrupted, he substitutes for the self- determinism the treatment he has been accorded by other human beings or by the material universe at large.

This is a very elementary derivation of the control system which I have been telling you about. You have "I," and an impulse from "I" comes down to the motor switchboard, and as long as "I" is in control of the switchboard he can control the organism and handle it and regard the organism through this line without aberration. The aberration comes in as a result of the environment taking this individual’s self- determinism and interrupting it at this switchboard. So "I" can go on ordering or thinking or doing anything "I" wants to do but it has no effect on this switchboard with regard to the subject in question where his self- determinism has been interrupted.

For instance, take somebody in an insane asylum, where they are supposedly trying to make people sane: everybody is working hard to make them sane and that is all they can think about is making them sane; they are going up and down the halls just pounding their brains out trying to make people sane and pounding the patients’ brains out until they get sane. It is pretty arduous. They make them sit in rocking chairs; they make them rock themselves all day. They handle them as automatons—" Stand up. Lie down. Eat. Stop eating. Go here, there"— as though they were handling robots.

The more an individual is handled in that fashion, the more interruption there is of the person’s self- determinism and the less sanity there is.

It is a strange thing, but you cannot drive an animal insane unless you have first made a pet out of him. In other words, it is pretty hard to interrupt this self- determinism, but it is first interrupted by the process of handling and taking care of the organism without regard to its selfdeterminism. This theory of conditioning and raising human beings is the "I know best" theory, the "Mother knows best" theory and the "other people know better" theory. The result is an organism that is being handled by the environment. And wherever that environment has come in and interrupted this self- determinism, thereafter there is in this organism a shadow of how that self- determinism was interrupted.

This we know in Dianetics as dramatisation. Regardless of what "I" wants to do, this package of conduct, this engram, goes into restimulation and goes straight into the motor controls, into the organism and the environment.

If it were merely moments of analytical awareness when this person was being handled by the environment, the aberration would be very slight. But his awareness gets caved in and deteriorated by engrams— moments of unconsciousness. For instance, this individual goes unconscious upstairs and he wakes up downstairs.

This whole system is postulated then— without even worrying about what he perceived during unconsciousness— on the fact of going unconscious in one place and waking up somewhere else, and there being something missing out of the time track. Just this much interruption is a demonstration to "I" that "I" hasn’t been on the job.

Now, "I" knows just that much and becomes a little bit aberrated, but in addition to that, the higher levels of "I" that do the monitoring and commanding of the body are not in control during this period and as a matter of fact are cut out, blotted out. So the organism is subjected, in this motorcontrol area, to the full impact of perceptics. The perceptics are never really received or nailed down or filed or anything else; they are just thrown in here. And from this is created a straight stimulus- response mechanism by which anything that is in that package can be restimulated and go into operation in the environment. That is a dramatisation.

This picks up, then, as locks, every way the individual’s self- determinism has been overcome in the environment. So, a little child goes through a long prenatal period and gets born— all of which is a very rough deal— and then gets up to a point where he is a year or a year and a half old and he hears people all the time giving him "Take your bottle," "Put it down," "Lie down," "Pick up your feet," "I’ll put you in the crib," "Here." He starts to walk in one direction and everybody says, "No. That direction!" Of course, he is insane by the time he is two, and his sanity further deterio- rates until he becomes "normal."

Take a look at the level and the amount of aberration which an individual receives just along the line of a regular prenatal period, a birth and an infancy, and then think of what the potential self- determinism of the individual must be. Think of how much this self- determinism has been interrupted and how often. That there is still some vestige of it remaining is fantastic! It couldn’t possibly be.

So, here is this stimulus- response mechanism: The environment comes along and says "Boo," and this stimulus- response mechanism is "Bah- bah." The environment goes "Boo," this mechanism goes "Bah- bah," and "I" wonders what the devil is happening.

Did you ever have the sensation of being just roaring, furiously angry about something, and yet have the idea you didn’t want to talk like that? That little faint voice, that little faint desire that is way back in the background during a dramatisation is your self- determinism trying to enter and say "You are not really mad at him. There are more reasonable ways to resolve this." This is the feeling "If I could just stop doing this for a moment, I could think this over and come to a solution." That is self- determinism trying to take over from a jammed switchboard.

We have, then, innumerable packages of dramatisations; many of them are just lock dramatizations like "Eat your spinach, dear," and "No, you can’t leave the table now. No, you can’t go and play." These are the very lightest of all light locks, which are just words. But earlier down and heavier are times when the child has left the table and gotten shoved back to the table, times when he has wanted to go outside and play but got hauled in because he wouldn’t come when called and all this sort of thing. The child really gets manhandled.

Also, there is another package in there, which is just general regard, just overall observation.

After a lot of prenatals and after birth and infancy, an individual gets so much heavy occlusion in the motor units that there are a lot of substitute "I’s." You can actually conceive that this area has been taken over by other human beings. Other human beings have issued these orders, given these dramatisations, handled the individual and so on. Every time a human being came along and did this, each dramatisation and each moment of dramatisation has a control ability over the organism. The organism would not dramatise unless there was an apparent little piece of self- determinism there making the organism dramatize. The self- determinism has long since walked away, but now there is an echo of it and so the person has the semblance of a lot of little tiny self- determinisms.

Every engram and every individual in every engram has potentially determined the organism to do something other than what it ordinarily would do. In other words, every bar between self- determinism and action is a bar interposed there by another personality. It is as though another personality had stepped in. "I" said, "Walk," and the other personality said, "No, we’re too scared; we’re going to stay here." But it is a shadow of a personality. Somebody has been there once; there has been pain and so forth to back this thing up and make it authoritative, and this individual has walked away but the shadow remains. There is a shadow of a personality there.

Now, these shadows can add up in two ways: by specific engrams and specific commands, and by valences. There are two ways to get these other units of self- determinism into the organism. Any individual has shadow valences and he has shadow self- determining attention units there; either one of these two things can do it.

For instance, all of a sudden the person is acting and talking like Grandpa. This is a valence which has become so powerful that the "I" of the individual can only filter commands into the organism and the environment through the valence of Grandpa, which converts them. Then the impulse from "I" to do something is converted by a valence of Grandpa; this is a mechanism that says, "Let’s see, Grandpa smoked a pipe, therefore you have to have your lip hanging down." The fellow says, "Let’s smile," and though he intends to just smile, Grandpa didn’t smile that way, Grandpa smiled with his lip hanging down. So "I" says, "Smile," and it goes through the motor- control units and comes out as Grandpa’s smile. Or he says, "I want to buy a purple hat," but Grandpa always wore orange- colored hats. So he goes down and picks up the purple hat and when he puts it on it is an orangecolored hat. He says, "I don’t want an orange- colored hat, I want a purple hat," and he buys the purple hat but he is unhappy with it because the filter said "orange- colored hat." He will finally manage to lose that purple hat and will go buy himself an orange- colored hat and then he is happy— because it is coming through this unit.

But is he happy? No, he sure isn’t! He realizes everything he is doing is being filtered, converted, changed. He puts out a thought impulse, it goes into a converter unit and the next thing he knows, he is doing something that somebody else would have done in that circumstance. And he doesn’t even have the thought that he learned this by mimicry.

There is a whole learning process which is natural and which doesn’t have to be aberrated. I know it would sound awfully strange to a lot of people that you don’t have to beat the sanity out of an individual to train him, but it is true. You don’t have to kill an individual in order to train him. That is a startling and revolutionary statement.

There is a mimicry setup in the mind. Any conduct of which a human being is capable can be, itself, aberrated.

A person learns by mimicry. For instance, take learning archery. An archer can come up to you and say, "You hold the bow in your left hand and you pull back the string with your right hand and pull it back to your cheek. Then don’t look at the arrow, look right straight at the middle of the target, and let it go suddenly with the three fingers of your right hand."

Now, as far as I have gone, could you just immediately go and shoot a bow with those directions? Not unless you had seen it, not unless you had seen somebody do it, because those words depend for their very definition upon basic mimicry.

A person has had to observe somebody leaving the room to find out what the words leafing the room meant. In other words, basic mimicry teaches one the language, then somebody comes along and tries to teach one with illusion. That is going around Robin Hood’s barn to reach the goal.

So the easiest way to teach archery would be for the archer to strike a pose and shoot an arrow and then have you strike a pose and shoot an arrow. Then he strikes a pose and shoots an arrow and you just watch him, and if you are not very aberrated, if you are a good, quick study in mimicry, you can actually take over his valence very easily. And if you are really good, you can look at a fellow once or twice as he does something that takes a lot of skill and do it exactly like he does and get the same results. This is a wonderful short- circuit to learning. You can learn fast that way.

But that quality gets terribly aberrated. Charge builds up and all of a sudden valences of specific people— such as Grandpa, Grandma, Mama, Papa, Brother, Sister, teachers and so forth— move in. These mimicries will get so strong that they actually become individuals, not only with their full characteristics but also with their illnesses. You can see how tough this mimicry thing can get. Actual mimicry is light, useful and self- determined; a fellow can change his mimicry anytime he wants to. He is self- determined in this mimicry; he can mimic or not mimic as the case may be. This is just like imagination, which is not dangerous until a person fails to know when he is and when he isn’t imagining; then imagination becomes aberrated and dangerous. But until that time it is good.

So, the individual under his own self- determinism can command his own mimicry, but then he is forced into mimicry so often, so much, over and over again, that all of a sudden he is no longer in control of it. A mimicry— in other words, a valence— takes over with him. It can become much more powerful than he is, at which time he is insane.

Now, it takes an enormous amount of charge on a case to get a valence up to a point where it will actually absorb the individual— a lot of charge, a lot of grief, a lot of this and a lot of that. But take a person who is really insane and start running him and you can watch him go across those valence wallsl— just click! click! click!— into dogs’ valences, cats’ valences and so forth. And he is in it, all the way in it! There is no reservation, nothing of him left outside of it. He won’t talk to you when he is in the dog’s valence— he will bark. That is just mimicry blown up fully with full charge, and it becomes an individual inside the individual and takes command over the "I."

When "I" is finally and completely submerged by valences and dramatizations and circuits, the person is insane. That is a technical definition of insanity. That is an auditor’s definition of insanity. When the valences, circuits or engrams of an individual have absorbed the aggregate attention units which are really "I," and when "I" is really absorbed, that person is insane. Therefore a person could become a circuit psychotic, which would be a computational psychotic; a valence psychotic, which is an imitative psychotic; or a dramatizing psychotic. The three kinds present three different kinds of view.

The paranoid, for instance, normally becomes the computational psychotic. That is a circuit. It is phrases out of engrams which have composited into a group of computations. And those computations now, not "I," are driving the motor units. The computations are dictating the actual computing functions of the mind.

Next is the valence psychotic: Mimicry builds up into a valence which becomes more and more charged until all of a sudden the individual is a valence. This valence, also, can be a false or synthetic valence, such as Napoleon or something, or it can be no valence at all— not being anything. He can be thrown clear out of valence— in other words, bounced out of valence. Any one of these combinations can occur.

The dramatizing psychotic is a very easy one to recognize. This person goes around repeating the same words and the same phrases and usually the person is too far up the time track for people to do anything with him. If you could do so, all you would have to do with a dramatizing psychotic is shove him down the time track toward the basic on that chain, knock out the basic on that chain, discharge the chain and bring him up to present time. It takes a lot of doing.

If you could get some grief off this psychotic, you would take enough charge off the case so maybe he could move out of that dramatisation. But sometimes there is really no charge on the case to amount to anything and you are just dealing with a peanut- whistle mind. So you just say "Come up to present time" and he does, and then he is sane. You could walk down the halls of any institution and just take patient after patient, look at them, smile and say, "Come up to present time," and maybe one, two or three on a floor would suddenly turn sane.

It was pretty hard trying to get preclears once, a few years ago; it was very hard. One would go around to a psychiatrist and say, "Could you let me see if I could do something for Mrs. Wumphgullah?"

"Do what for her?"

"Well, I might be able to alleviate her condition. You know, she’s had this postpartum psychosis for some time, since she tried to kill her maid, tried to kill her baby and tried to murder her husband. But I think something might be done for her."

"Why, do you realize that Mrs. Wumphgullah’s husband still has eighteen thousand dollars— I mean— I mean, this has got to remain in professional hands!"

And one couldn’t get Mrs. Wumphgullah and do anything for her until the husband no longer had any money. I had that happen on several patients, by the way.

Now, nobody is allowed in an institution except patients, other patients and patients they call psychiatrists. And I thought and thought and cudgeled my head and got a crease between my eyes worrying about that till finally I came up with a happy realisation that with all the swamis, fakirs, masters, adepts and men of God I had known, if I couldn’t pass for one I ought to quit. So I turned my collar around backwards and went down, and nobody objected to letting these poor psychotics say a few prayers. Of course, it is awfully hard to audit someone on his knees alongside of his bed, but if you have to, you have to!

Nobody considered it was very remarkable because "everyone knows" that religion does things occasionally which are quite strange and wonderful. And nobody considered it very remarkable that after you had walked out of Cell 25 the person in Cell 25 wasn’t insane anymore. Of course they asked questions, but you were careful to say a prayer after you got through telling them to come up to present time, so they didn’t know what you were doing either.

It is wonderful: You go up against the field of the insane and you really have to act insane to find out anything about it.

Anyway, those are really the three types, not only of psychotics but also of neurotics, because neurosis comes up on this level too.

The more rational or the less insane a person acts, the more complex may be his behavior, the more complex may be his reactions. So on the neurotic level the problem looks awfully complex. Now take individuals who are sane, and their reactions are extremely complex; they have more data and more computation. This is where people got the idea that the mind’s problems could not be resolved.

Now, there is one little gimmick which I want to acquaint you with that you may find amusing, and if you pay attention you may lose a few aberrations.

When an individual is treated in a certain fashion over some period of time and where there is an enormous amount of unconsciousness, the individual becomes confused as to who is "me" to some slight degree and he will start to treat the organism with the attitude of the filter— the former treatment to which he has been subjected. When he starts to treat the organism in any way, it will get filtered through former treatment and so changed.

For example, if you take a girl who has been jilted or something like that, you will find she has a tendency to leave herself. She has been left and this says that she is not worth much. The interposition says she has been left, and there is charge on it; her own self- determinism is filtered by this action that she has observed, so she treats herself as somebody that she would leave.

This doesn’t mean that she goes into the valence of her former lover. In the past you have treated all of these manifestations— mostly all of them— as manifestations of valence, and I am showing you that just plain, ordinary, run- of- the- mill circuits and locks act in this fashion too. Because this is not valence; she doesn’t go into the lover’s valence. "I want to stay home tonight and sew," she says to herself. All of a sudden she will have a feeling like maybe she shouldn’t stay home tonight, maybe she ought to go out someplace and walk— she just ought to sort of leave; but when she leaves she may walk faster and faster. What she is trying to do is leave herself— all this is perfectly rational conduct— and she will go on trying to leave herself to a large and remarkable degree.

But that is not so observable in people as, for instance? their treatment of their physical person. When loverboy shoved off he invalidated her, and in addition to invalidating her he went through this dramatization of leaving which laid in a lock— a charge— and sometimes a secondary. This invalidated her. Her worth and value is not as great as it was before because he showed her that it wasn’t, so she has a tendency to regard herself and her person with the same disregard that she was shown by the person who left her. After this person leaves her she has a tendency to neglect herself. She thinks, "I will dress up," and instead of dressing up she just lets herself go. She is treating herself as other people treated her, as another person treated her.

More important than this, her self- determinism when she was a child was interrupted, let us say, on the subject of clothes. She was made to keep her clothes clean. So now when she comes along in life and gets her clothes dirty she gets mad at herself. She forces herself to keep her clothes clean. Let us say that her natural response to a beautiful day would be to get out and walk, sit on the grass and enjoy herself. But she can’t sit on the grass and enjoy herself because she might get her clothes dirty. It doesn’t even matter if she is wearing old clothes; she still has this slight reaction in this regard. She cannot extrovert because she is being forced, although the person who did this forcing may have been dead this long while. She forces herself into certain activities, but "I" doesn’t do the forcing. "I" just starts to- do the action and she gets a filter reaction of forcing herself to do what she has been forced to do.

"Let’s take a bath. All right, take a bath. I’m going to take a bath, but I have to force myself to take a bath. I don’t want to take a bath, but I’ve got to take a bath." You see how schizophrenic this begins to sound? Nevertheless, schizophrenia— multiple personality— only starts to take place when these interruptions get built up and charged to a point where the person has enormous valence walls. Everybody has tons of these little tiny shadow valences.

Now, let’s take new shoes: A person says he wants to get some new shoes. He obviously needs some new shoes, but days and days and days will go by and he doesn’t get any new shoes. Obviously, shoes have been painful to him in the past. But the funny part of it is that what he is really dramatizing is not distaste for those shoes but having been denied shoes. He can’t have shoes. If he won’t go buy himself shoes, then there is a period in his life when he was forbidden to have shoes, one way or the other. That is bringing the concept of this down to its most elementary form.

It is identical: A person neglects himself— he has been neglected. A person gets angry at himself or treats himself angrily— people have been angry with him in about the same way.

A fellow knows that he could never hold down a good job. Now, we have gotten this in phrases, so we know we are looking for the phrase "You’ll never be able to hold down a good job." But we don’t see how far this will go sometimes. This person won’t let himself get a good job. There is a sequence in his life whereby he was prevented from being tops in something. It might have been very early, but he has been actively prevented from taking care of himself over a period of time. He can dramatize that, then, for the rest of his life.

Maybe this man is a very brilliant engineer and his friends all say, "I wonder why Bill insists on being a janitor?" Somebody wouldn’t let him become an engineer and is still not letting him. This circuit says, "You can’t become an engineer." And yet he is an engineer. If he doesn’t pay any attention to the fact that he is an engineer he can’t become an engineer and he can’t work as one. That is the reductio ad absurdum of these things.

Now, an individual sits down to the table and there is a dessert. He would really like a second helping of dessert but he doesn’t eat a second helping of dessert. He wants one but he doesn’t eat it. He has been denied a second helping of dessert; and he has been added to, to the degree that somebody else has infiltrated this. This is preventing "I" from having another helping of dessert. What you want to clear up with the individual is, who used to prevent him from eating dessert? Who used to prevent him from eating candy?

But an individual can actually assess his own conduct. He can actually assess his own conduct by asking this of himself: What does he consider to be optimum conduct in the care of self? Optimum conduct in the care of self: it has to do with the three main lines of food, clothing and shelter. What is his optimum conduct regarding food, clothing and shelter as far as he is concerned? And then all he has to do is assay— look over— the number of items which he denies himself, which he doesn’t have or doesn’t permit himself to have, and the number of items which he has or the number of things which he does which are not good for him to have or do. He can just take this optimum conduct level and go down the line and find out on each subject of his life— food, clothing and shelter and its sub- divisions— where he departs from it, and just remember the series of locks whereby he was denied or enforced away from what he considers the optimum. This can only be done by an individual for himself.

You can see why: because by self- determinism alone, genetic pattern, education and observation, from individual to individual, each one has a different opinion, really, of what is optimum for self. And it is "I" that has this different opinion. It isn’t an aberrated opinion. Don’t fall into the idea that everybody in life, if they were all cleared up and didn’t have any aberrations anymore, would all be the same person. They wouldn’t be. So you have to get the individual response.

The fellow can sit down and do this himself, actually, if he realizes that he is doing it on the basis of "What do I really want, now? What should I really be doing for myself in life? Do I have too much of this and too little of that and so forth? What are my optimum reactions in life? What am I trying to do? Not necessarily what am I trying to do wrong but what am I trying to do?"

I doubt there have been very many people who have asked themselves that question in the last few years: "What am I really trying to do in life after all?"

"What is my goal?" is what you are asking yourself. That goal, of course, could be summed up in the broadest terms as survival of self on each of the dynamics. But "What specific sub- goals have I appointed for myself? What are they?" You may think to yourself, "You know, I had some once, but I don’t quite remember what they are. Oh, yes! I remember, I was going to be an architect. Well, it’s too late now." That means that there are just about eight too many filters to let the thing still come through, because, believe me, if you ever wanted to be an architect, you still want to be an architect. And you had better swamp it up, l because you probably won’t be successful at anything else.

What does a fellow want to be? What is he trying to do? Where is he going? What does he want out of life?

This is actually just an assessment of "What care should I be taking of myself? Where should I be directing myself in order to achieve the ends I want?" Then just strip them down: "Who are the preventers on all this and how did they do the preventing? Who were the enforcers on all of this and how did they do the enforcing?"

Understand now, I am talking about locks; I am not talking about engrams. I am not talking about self- auditing to find the phrases, with no reality on them, which will account for a certain line of conduct. I am sorry to say that that occasionally has efficacity.

I knew a fellow one time who was going to blow his brains out. He knew Dianetics, but he had been run for about four months on this type of auditing and it hadn’t done him any good, and he was going to sit down and blow his brains out. He sat down to do this and he thought, "I wonder if there should be a phrase?" So he started running it and he got so engrossed in running it that he doped off and he didn’t get around to killing himself that night.

Anyway, what I am talking about is Straightwire. You can get good reality on these various lines. You can make yourself, in other words, a table of this and just think it over: "Who used to deny me clothes? Who used to insist that I wear clothes? Now, why do I fail to take good care of my shoes? Who wouldn’t let me take care of my shoes? What is preventing me from taking care of my shoes? Did anybody ever fail to keep me in shoes the way I thought I should have been kept in shoes, if I had to be kept in shoes at all? Did I ever have a pair of shoes that I liked and wanted to wear but wasn’t supposed to wear?" Wasn’t supposed to wear— therefore you had to forget them, so you forget your own shoes. If you liked a pair of shoes you had to forget them. That is easy.

"Now, who was it that used to insist that I get a haircut? Who used to insist that I bathe? Who used to be very insistent on the subject of bathing, particularly before one went to bed? Who was it that gave me the idea that any time you wore clothes which looked good, they had to be uncomfortable? Looking good and being uncomfortable, are these synonymous?

"Who was it that told me I had to eat my meat? Who was it that told me I had to eat the things on my plate I disliked so that I could have the things I liked? Is it possible now that I am eating the things I dislike that I never do get around to the things I like? Is there any line of food I could eat which would please me? And if so, when was it denied to me? Who used to insist all the time that I couldn’t eat things I liked, I had to eat things that were healthy?"

That is the kind of Straightwire that this evolves. A fellow can give this Straightwire to himself by just making a list of what he is doing. It might result in a little bit of fun.

When you are dealing with a preclear, you can look your preclear over and find the presence or absence of clothes or the presence or absence of good health— because a person who is in bad health is a person who is really trying to keep himself sick. When a person is in bad health he has got a set of locks— you can count on it— which contain somebody putting him into bad health. That is also hypochondria.

After you have gotten through all that with your preclear, you can take a look at him and say to yourself, "I wonder who didn’t want him to be as sane? Who didn’t want him to be quite as bright? What concessions is he making and who made him make these concessions to the minds and thoughts of other people around him? What made him think that he wasn’t quite as good as he was? Who treated him in such a way that he doesn’t think he is as good as he could be? Or, who treated him in such a way that he thinks he is so much better than he actually is, that they have overridden his self- evaluation? "

In other words, who has thrown out of adjustment, above or below, the self- evaluation of "I"? "You’re too good to play with other little boys," "You’re an awful little boy," and that sort of thing. By the way, you are not looking for phrases when you are doing this; you are not paying any attention to phrases. What you want is the actual demonstrated physical action, if you can possibly reach it. You don’t want people standing around saying what they think they think about someone thinking. What you want is to find out how they acted.

There is a most remarkable little section in Self Analysis. I expected it to do more and it did more. It is just on the simple basis of spotting people who have walked away.

One individual had just had a car repossessed and was about to blow a grief charge, and we simply picked up the number of times he had seen the car drive away from him. There was enough tension on that to blow off the grief charge without hitting it, evidently. He didn’t give a damn about the car after we ran that. He had evidently been riding on a lower engram of some sort, and every time he had seen the car go away from him he just kept filling in more and more locks, more and more locks. Somebody would go away, he would say "Goodbye," and they would say "Goodbye," and then he would have a lock. So when the payment company came around to pick up the car, he had a nice big secondary. But it wasn’t a valid secondary. It was handled simply by making him recall the number of times the car had driven away.

Now, watch how an individual handles his car. Who has interfered with his handling of his toys? If he has been interfered with enough in handling his toys, he is going to neglect to handle his car. And that can come up to the point of neglecting to drive his car when he is sitting at the wheel with the thing going thirty or forty miles an hour. It goes a long way.

But you can do quite a bit of this. That is one of the simpler ones.

Actually, I have given you a very quick survey of the types of psychotic and neurotic levels, and how you achieve sanity. All you have to do to achieve sanity is just get "I" in full control of the organism.