LOVE

A lecture given on 5 November 1951

Restoring the Ability to Love

Most of the preclears you work on are loused up because of love. It is one of those things that happens in the best of lives. There are tornadoes, electrical storms, Democratic elections and love; these are major cataclysms that happen to man. There are the seven ages of man, and they are the seven ages of man’s trouble— and each age is named "love."

First it is love for the parents, and then it is love for this and love for that, and then all of a sudden this individual, man or woman, meets another human being. He is feeling rather bored at the moment and says, "You know, I’m in love. I’ll be in love, that’s what. Yeah, that solves everything. I’m going to be in love. They say it’s great....

"By golly, it is great! Yes sir, I’m in love.... It’s getting worse! Much worse!"

He gets to a point finally where he is saying, "The whole world turns on the subject of love. You should try it sometime. It happens to you. You just never know when it’s going to happen next. You haven’t got anything to do about it. Most wonderful feeling in the world." Then he goes home and finds out that his girl has run away with her old man’s chauffeur.

Unfortunately, if he has carried himself to that extreme and has gotten himself sold enough on this thing, then the sudden cessation of it is such a terrific personal invalidation of his own postulate, he not only doesn’t dare admit it was a postulate of his own at first but he has to validate himself by shooting his brains out or by dying of grief or by refusing to eat and going around worrying his friends by not shaving for days. You may think I am being sarcastic, but this happens to be, gruesomely enough, the cycle.

I guarantee, if you were merely to pick up, with the process I will give you later, all of your former emotional experiences with regard to this subject, that you would be able to go out on the street and fix your attention upon any human being and say "I’m in love with that human being," convince yourself utterly and go home in the happy daze that you used to be in when you were sixteen or seventeen and were writing notes during class. That is right. Love makes the world go around, but, believe me, you make yourself go around.

The mechanism called love is actually no different than any one of these other emotional setups. The mechanism is no different; the manifestation may be more cataclysmic, but it actually is simply another endocrine- system setup, and the difference is that it gets an enormous amount of propaganda.

A lot of people make a lot of money out of love: jewelers, flower vendors, song writers, manufacturers of poisonous drugs; Hollywood wouldn’t know what to do for a plot if it weren’t for love, and then there are marriage fees, hospital costs, undertakers’ fees (" Do you want one with silver handles or a scarlet satin lining?") and so on. In short, it is big business. And it is very, very interesting and it has a lot to do with a lot of things.

Now, love is simply another mechanism of the endocrine alarm system. (That is the technical name of that system, by the way.) It is quite an accident, but love falls into the same bracket. You talk about this one emotion, you might as well be talking about any of them. They are the same thing, except different glands are monitored. That is about the only difference; they produce different reactions.

I would hate to lean upon your credulity to any degree. I have learned better in the last year and a half than to lean on anyone’s credulity; it crumples and I fall down. As a result, I would rather just skirt over how come we know about this and tell you what we know.

Once upon a time there was an algae, and this algae was a very self- satisfied, self- centered individual. He just got along fine. When he decided to have progeny he went pop! and there would be a new monocell. He did it all himself. After a while, however, he got tired of the storms and the similar experiences of just lying in the sun and converting minerals and sunlight into protein and carbohydrate. It was rather dull; there was an insufficient amount of randomity entirely. So he decided to evolve into a higher form— the fool!

He went on and evolved into higher and higher forms in the best Darwinian fashion, and finally he got to a point where his form was pretty complex and he found out that it was very, very difficult to procreate by going pop! It didn’t work worth a nickel. So something new had to be added.

Now, the point is that to avoid this monocell type of procreation there has to be a sharing of this system on a male- and- female- cell basis. What they do originally is start out both male and female, and then cross. And if you want to open up any book on biology, genetics or anything of the sort, it just happens by accident that they are right. That dope is fairly straight. It is wrong in a couple of places, but it is fairly straight.

So, these chromosome groups cross over, and the first thing you know, there is another growing organism. Of course, a monocell is able to procreate by itself, but when it gets into association with another monocell to produce a more complex organism it is much better to swap and to put out a spore of some sort which then grows. This is different— a new idea.

When life gets up to the point of this new idea, there are two cells which unite. The funny part of it is, though, that this is not the first time there has been a cellular colony. The sponge, for instance, is working on a monocellular basis. A sponge simply gets to be more sponge, more or less on the idea of subdivision and so forth. It is simply more sponge and a subdivision of the monocell.

The sponge, jellyfish, or any one of these things is still more or less operating on the monocell proposition. But when you get two jellyfish together, reproduction has to be done differently.

By the way, the sea has evolved the most fantastic forms of this sort of thing. A male octopus, for instance, sheds a tentacle, which then goes swimming off to a female octopus. This is fascinating. Nothing I say is really incredible compared to what you will find in the books of the naturalist.

Anyway, the organism at this stage decides that for its own protection it will just keep two cells near to hand and together. This is before the bivalve period, but we will pick it up at the bivalve period. One of your early ancestors is a bivalve— which is to say, a clam, a mollusk, an oyster or something of the sort. The evolution from the sea to the land goes through the field of shellfish. Those are bivalves. They have two hinges, and each one of those hinges has a responsibility in the life of the whole being. But at first those two are simply there so that they can get a procreative swap, and they put out spores. Later on they get so they operate the shell and so forth.

Along about that period of time we start to get into trouble, because each of these organisms is operating on its own control center, which is in itself and only in itself self- determined. So one says "Open" and the other one says "Close," and each motion cancels out the other motion; the shell stays closed. One finally says, "Well, all right. Open, then." The other one by that time has gotten mad and says, "I’ll close." They still don’t get anyplace. This situation goes along for quite a while until those two control centers— they are two brains, actually, operating the same shell— learn to work with ARC. And for the first time we get emotion lifting its ugly head. How do two separate entities control each other so that they will cooperate? That is a problem.

Control center A and control center B are both occupying the back hinges of a shell. They finally get hurt too much by non cooperation. You can imagine what happens: One side says, "Danger! Close!" and the other one says, "I don’t see any danger. Stay open." Then in comes the danger— crush. They learn. One side keeps getting the shocks from the other side; then one side finally starts to measure up and then the other one starts to measure up, and they work out this system which you yourself happen to be carrying around at the moment. You may not in the next few generations, but right now the left side of your head controls the right side of your body and the right side of your head controls the left side of your body. It is crossed. Why?

You know, if the government of the United States at Washington were only moved to the center of Russia, and if the government in Russia were only moved out to Denver or someplace, you would certainly never have any war between the United States and Russia.

Eons ago the human body had to work this out, because you are units of two, not units of one. And these two were definitely and continually at war with each other; they would not cooperate worth two cents and a plugged collar button.

So, that is a beautiful system of control, isn’t it? "I’ll handle your side and you handle my side, and then we will succeed. Because if I don’t cooperate with you I’m going to get hurt, and if you don’t cooperate with me I’m going to get hurt, so therefore, by golly, we’ll survive!" That is the way they evidently worked it out, because we are still carrying in our own bodies the evidence of this system of control. You can also find it in other ways in Dianetics. It is pretty easy.

What has this got to do with love? It doesn’t have too much to do with love but it has an awful lot to do with the endocrine system.

There was a stage before this which is very important. We have the control center on each side operating only its own side, and we have chaos. We have this same situation which exists between the United States and Russia. They are both mad at each other, fairly angry, all the time, because one says "Open," the other says "Close"; one says "Close" and the other says "Open." Or they say "Let’s both open," and at that moment they could both be wrong so one starts to close but the other won’t. You get the idea?

One of the methods they used to- force each other into operation was this: One would get hurt and evidently he could develop, out of that pain, fluids for the control of the other one. If he didn’t get done for him what he thought ought to be done for him, he would pass something relatively poisonous across the line. It was an inner control of fluids or something. You could probably go back on the track and find this beast which is still not cross- hooked up at all but is running in a state of "duarchy," and it is very unworkable.

The endocrine system accomplished an enforced ARC just as the cross control system did, so that you actually have two systems at work: one is a simple nerve setup whereby the lines cross, and the other system is where one side monitors the other with backfire material. It says, "I’m scared; you’d better be scared too! " and shoots this fluid across. The other one says, "I’m not scared. I’m not scared. I’m not scared— yes, I am too!" There is circulatory fluid injection, in other words, going both ways here. One side gets scared and injects fluid into the other one and the other one starts to get scared and realizes what the score is. That is the alarm system. One starts to get sick, in other words, if he can’t have his way.

This first experiment in a dual- control mechanism was successful, and it carried forward successfully until very late on the evolutionary chain, when a central brain unit began to be formed, left and right, up to the level that the self- determinism of the organism became tremendous. It became so tremendous that it could transfer and associate facsimiles in the methods which we call thought. It was thinking before, but not very much.

So now we get up to a thought basis. What happens?

You can actually restimulate one of those old, old non cooperative facsimiles in a marriage. What are you trying to do in a marriage? Trying to get somebody to cooperate. If they don’t cooperate, what is your choice? By theta facsimiles, you try to build them up or push them down or get them in some parity so that you both have the same course of action so you will both follow the same goals.

A marriage composed of two individuals who are not attaining or seeking to attain a similar goal is a failure. That is the first requisite of a successful marriage. That is why business marriages don’t succeed very well: they don’t have a single goal. Two people try to get parity of action and they follow this system.

It is a funny thing but both of these units do not stay in equal control. Sooner or later, down the line, one of those control units really goes into force. One of those units takes over and starts to control the whole body. It does all the thinking for the body. If someone were to lay open your head (like a psychiatrist would if you were under treatment; that is their idea of treatment— they are humorous fellows— and they have braces and bits, they go in on the skull and examine it and look it over, and after they have classified it in their notebooks and so forth they put a patch on it or something and send the fellow back to the cell), you would find that one half of the brain is well furrowed— it is used a great deal— and the other half is practically unused. In other words, it hasn’t been doing any thinking to amount to anything; it is very smooth. Whereas the used side of the brain, where its motor control switchboards are used, is very active. It looks active, it bears a different appearance.

To give you some sort of an idea of this, 50 percent of the brain area is not in use for anything, really. It furnishes a subcomputation level and it uses its own theta facsimiles but its muscular controls are monitored by the other side of the brain. The whole body runs, really, when in a good state of mind and so forth, with just one of these centers, and this unit ensures the obedience of the other one. The other one doesn’t just obey, it quits.

This is backed up by another little observation that maybe some of you have made. Have you ever seen a child who naturally used his left hand and then was suddenly forced to be a right- hander? The second that you force a child to be a right- hander you have taken his natural control area, which happens to be on the right side of his head and makes him a southpaw, and you have invalidated it. You have invalidated its control of the body, and when you invalidate its control of the body, the other control center has to take over. It is in apathy and it is not equipped to be in control of the body and it does not have a history of body control or anything like it. So the individual goes into a very fine state of jitters, apathy and so forth. In view of the fact that an average of 50 percent of the human race are naturally left- handers and 50 percent of the human race are naturally right- handers, somebody back down the line decided to be a real arbitrary in the society and they started making everything for right- handers: "We’re all going to write right- handed now." Fifty percent of you, I am sure, are natural left- handers; the percentage is that high. But this switch happens to a person so early and happens over such a long period of time that he is very seldom aware of the situation.

You watch mothers: A little child will start reaching out with his left hand; he will reach out for his rattle with his left hand and Mama will say, "Ha- ha- ha- ha- ha- ha— right hand, dear."

"Waaah! "

"No, no. You have to reach with your right hand."

Did you ever see anybody teaching a dog to shake hands? He always insists on the dog shaking hands with his right paw! We are all crazy on this subject.

A little baby starts to drink milk, reaches for the bottle with his left hand—" Na- ha- ha- ha, no, dear. Here— the right hand. Now you can have your milk."

"Waaah!" But it doesn’t do him any good.

One of the most spectacular recoveries that an auditor can occasion is to find one of these latent southpaws and swap epicenters on him. The new epicenter, oddly enough, is not well equipped to handle its job, but it was the naturally stronger epicenter. This is like starting in with virgin territory. The fellow will forget large chunks of vocabulary, he will forget certain skills he had and he will fudge around. He won’t be able to write well with his left hand for a while, but if he keeps at it he will stabilize on the right side to think with. What has happened is that the theta facsimiles are stored on the side of the control center.

Occasionally I have had a sudden unexplained recovery in a preclear and I haven’t understood what the devil happened. I didn’t understand until relatively recently what I was doing. They get the funniest sensations when this thing happens. Half of their head goes numb and the other half sort of lights up, and odd things happen to the nervous system.

One half of every brain can be considered to be in natural apathy, and if you force someone to run on the half of his brain that is in natural apathy you have really set him up. This is a "good" control mechanism. It makes an obedient child, but it sure makes a dumb one. You can find this in preclears if you want to. I dare say there are a number of people who know that they began life as southpaws— just at a guess I would say 50 percent of the human race.

Now, the rehabilitation of this is relatively simple. All you have to do is pick up the invalidation’s of the correct side of the brain. You just pick up all those efforts to make the fellow do things with the other hand, with the other side of his body, and his various usage’s in that direction. Just pick up the original ones and he rehabilitates.

What has this got to do with emotion? It has a lot to do with emotion. If a person has been shifted over to the null side of his head, he has been shifted out of control of the immediate alarm reaction system. He finds it difficult going monitoring his endocrine system; he finds it tough. He has a struggle about it. He will eventually get it hooked up, but it is always a bit of a strain.

If you ever want to see a flood of emotion turn on, just switch those epicenters on a preclear. Now he has virgin control of the endocrine system and lights brighten up, rockets go shooting off and life looks glorious all of a sudden! Of course, there may be a lot of things he won’t have any particular recollection of.

What are the blank areas of your early life? The blank areas of your early life are due to many things, but in part they are due to the fact that the other epicenter is carrying the facsimiles, so the area looks blank to you. You take a preclear back and all of a sudden his whole childhood turns on. What you have done is swap the control centers. That is only one of the manifestations of occlusion, but it is one that you should be alert for.

What else happens? An individual is running along at nine years of age and he is just running fine on the control center that he is supposed to run on— right or left, whatever one he was supposed to run on. It was the tough one; it was the one that won all the way along the line; it was the one that always shut the other epicenter up; it was the one that was always tough. He is running along till he is nine or ten years of age, taking life in stride— whap! whap! "Don’t do this, don’t do that"— standard childhood. He is taking life in stride, and all of a sudden he runs into a failure— crunch! The epicenter that is in control of the individual is then invalidated, and it can be invalidated thoroughly enough to swap control centers on the individual.

He runs along on the next center for a certain period of time and then all of a sudden it fails in life. What happens? He swaps back to the first center. And so it goes, back and forth, back and forth, down, down, down the tone scale.

You want to find out where these points of swap are? You find emotion; you find this fellow’s emotional curve. By "emotional curve" I mean the experience of a change of emotion. The fellow is happy and then all of a sudden he is sad. Get him to recover that curve— happy to sad. In other words, work him until he can finally monitor himself happy and then sad, and then you will find an incident where he was happy and all of a sudden he was sad. Get him to reexperience this a few times. "When is another time it happened? Happy- sad."

"Yeah, happy- sad."

"All right. Now, cheerful- apathetic."

And you will run right into the service facsimile. This is very simple. You just work with him until he can reexperience an emotion. He thinks over this emotion; he remembers a time when he was happy and then he was sad.

"Did you ever walk up to anybody and you were very, very cheerful and they threw cold water on you? Do you remember such an incident? All right. How did you feel when you walked up to them? And then how did you feel right afterwards? Okay. Now, can you get that sensation again? Now can you get the sensation of being sad, and all of a sudden being cheered up? Being sad, then all of a sudden getting cheerful about something— something like that."

The curve of emotion, the point of emotional change, is what you want. And the only reason in the world you want it is so that you can find the place where the fellow suffered it most strongly. You will find there the service facsimile chain, l because he had this thing laid into him, he had to hold on to it, and it swapped centers on him.

It was generally followed by a severe illness. It was a failure, a failure so marked that it convinced the center then in control that it was no longer in control of the environment. That center was going along in the belief that it had some control over the environment, and suddenly it discovered it did not have any control over the environment and it went into apathy. Its alibi and excuse comes along immediately afterwards, of course; the alarm reaction system sets in in a period of three hours to three days, and you will find an illness setting in at that period— such an illness as measles, scarlet fever, mumps, whooping cough, any one of these, or later in life other illnesses like gall bladder infections, lumbago, arthritis and so forth. These are failures.

Center A convinced center B by sending over a theta facsimile, sending over an emotional reaction. The individual then sends to the outside world an emotional reaction. What I am talking to you about is interpersonal relations, not just love.

Here is the relationship: First it starts out as a bivalve, and one side has to get along with the other. They have a lot of trouble doing so. When bivalve one influences bivalve two, the only way it can influence two is by handing out a theta facsimile, and if two doesn’t take it and cooperate, then it gets it back by the alarm reaction system. It gets back the endocrine reaction and so sickens. But back at this stage of life it was real sickness. It was a sickness caused by releasing a fluid which when it wouldn’t stay released but got walled up and sent back made the originator sick.

And you dramatize that, but it is an emotional dramatization. You feel unhappy, somebody makes you sad, so you hand them a theta facsimile. They are not cooperating with you, you find out that you either can’t control them or they are not going to cooperate with you, and so you try to hand them a theta facsimile to make them sick, knock them into apathy quick, make them feel sorry for you, make them stop, make them less strong. You say something nasty, do something— anything— in order to knock this person down to a point where he will cooperate or be controlled by it.

Your initial impulse is simply to be happy and get going in life, and everything should be all right. Then somebody says or does something and right away you go into this system. You will hand out this theta facsimile and if they won’t take it you are stuck with it. You failed to affect them.

Now, a failure in magnitude to affect another human being results immediately in illness— three hours to three days. And when it has real magnitude on it, in childhood, it will swap these centers.

Take a little child who is doing fine, and then all of a sudden one day he comes in and they have given his bicycle away. He says, "My bicycle! You gave it away! You’ve got to bring that back! You got to straighten this thing up!"

His parents say, "Well, it was our right to give it away; we bought the bicycle."

"But it was my bicycle!" And the first thing you know, he says, "Blankety- blankety- blankety- blank!" He makes the mistake of thinking he is tough enough.

The parents say, "Nope, none of that! You can’t get cross, you can’t get angry, can’t have your bicycle. Further, we were going to buy you another nice bike, but now we’re not going to do even that."

The child, with his anger and dropping tone, handed out an entheta facsimile. He tried to do something to the parents. In other words, he dreamed up something for them. Sometimes when you get back along that strata of life, it is very interesting what a little child is thinking: "I’d like to put your eyes out, you big monster! "

But if he hands out that theta facsimile the parent turns around and fastens it on him. The child will get it back, and he will get back the same facsimile. It is a service facsimile.

What you would like to do to others is what is wrong with you. This is interpersonal relations.

Now we take love: there is no difference. An individual comes along and he says, "I’m in love. There have to be future generations. Two can live more cheaply than one," and other propaganda. Now he gets anxious about whether or not he will be cooperated with. What has he asked for? He has asked another human being for the maximum amount of cooperation in living a life. And he knows instinctively it can’t succeed unless they have cooperative action, a similarity of goals, a similarity of operation, a similarity of likes and dislikes.

He is anxious about this, and when he finds out that the human being upon whom he has fastened his endearment is not the person, exactly, with which to accomplish this duo, he starts this operation of forcing the other individual to be.

Jealousy, anxiety and all manner of things will set in then, because the individual is trying an impossibility, actually. If it succeeds, it is lots of fun, but don’t forget to sweep it up afterwards.

You are asking for another human being to either cooperate perfectly with you or be dominated utterly by you— one or the other. And any mechanism you use to accomplish this high degree of similarity is going to come back and kick you in the teeth.

You ask a fellow, "Who did you used to be in love with? You used to be in love?"

And the fellow will say, "Hey, yeah! How did you know?" Silly question!

"Well, I noticed you haven’t been feeling well here lately and so forth. When did she leave you?"

"Well, it’s been three or four— how did you know that?"

"Well, you just did look kind of down in the mouth about it and so forth. I noticed you bought a new pair of glasses the other day."

"Well, yeah, my eyes have gone kind of bad."

"Oh, how long have they been bad?"

"Well, a few weeks."

"Did they go bad after the girl left you?"

"Yeah, but what have they got to do with it? I don’t want to have anything to do with these things."

"Now, did she ever criticize your appearance or anything of the sort?"

"Yes."

"Well, did you want her to look at you?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I did, if you want to put it that way. Not really look at me, you understand. But there was this other guy!"

"And she looked at the other guy? Yeah, well, what did you say to her the last fight you had?"

"Well, how’d you know we had a fight? Aw, I guess I was pretty mad; I said I wish she’d never look at anybody else, and nobody’d ever look at her."

He handed out "blind" facsimiles, and she didn’t come back to him. It didn’t work. So he got them right back in his face, and now his eyes feel bad. So he goes and gets glasses.

How do these two cooperate? How do a man and a woman cooperate? How do two friends cooperate? How does an individual cooperate with the rest of his group? How do two women who are friends operate together? How does the boss cooperate with his staff? Any one of these things are all out of the same kit: emotion. Unfortunately, in order to communicate with your fellow man you also have to slightly agree with him and feel some affinity with him. In order to feel any affinity for him whatsoever you have to, to some degree, communicate with him and agree with him. In order to agree with him in any way, you have to feel some affinity for him and communicate with him. Here is the triangle of ARC at work. One point of this triangle of affinity, reality and communication cannot work without the other two points entering in.

We have this tone scale from zero on up; there are various emotions plotted up the line on this tone scale, very interestingly.

What does sympathy mean? If you take a tuning fork which vibrates at the rate of 512 vibrations per second and you have another fork sitting over to the side which is capable of vibrating at 512 per second, when you hit this first fork and then damp it, the second fork will be ringing. Then if you hit the second one and damp it, the first one will be ringing. Sympathy means "at the same vibration of."

If someone you love is bored you are apt to be bored. If someone you love is angry at something, you are apt to get angry at it too. If someone you love is afraid of something, you can encourage them and encourage them and try to keep them from being afraid of something, but you will generally wind up being afraid of it too. If someone you love is in apathy, you try to cheer them up and cheer them up and cheer them up, and there you are in grief. And then you really try to cheer them up and you are in apathy, too.

Why? It is because you have to have the same goals, purposes, vibrations— whatever you want to call it— in order to cooperate. You can’t be in communication with somebody without assuming some of their liabilities. In other words, you are in communication along this emotional level.

How do you straighten out a busted love affair? How do you straighten out a good, solid, juicy, horrible, knockdown- drag- out love affair which, like 110 percent of them, has at least threatened to go on the rocks? How do you straighten out any personal relationships with anybody? You will find out that everybody is suffering from this one malady— interpersonal relationships. An individual has to be able to feel like he can lick the world with both hands tied behind him, or he is not well. How do you rehabilitate this? The fastest way I know of to change a person on the tone scale is to address emotion— rehabilitate his emotion.

What in particular do you hit to bring him up? About the first thing that you will find accessible in a case is sympathy. "What’s a time when you felt sympathy for somebody?" Sympathy— let’s get moment after moment after moment in this person’s life when he experienced sympathy for somebody— particularly when he experienced being sorry for something he had done to somebody else. This is the real facsimile. This is bivalve side A doing something to bivalve side B and getting it right back again. This is being sorry for having done something to somebody.

You get this sympathy reaction up and you are getting up what is freezing your preclear on the tone scale. He has naturally been in sympathy with an awful lot of people, and when he has been in sympathy for what he himself has done— he thinks— then he is in horrible shape about it because he doesn’t feel he has the right to get rid of this. So he sort of punishes himself, and as long as he retains any of this feeling of sympathy for individuals up and down the line, he is static with those individuals on the tone scale.

How do you change someone on the tone scale and free him up, then? What is the first move? The first move is to pick up sympathy— any and all sympathy, and particularly sympathy he has felt for individuals to whom he has done something.

This is quite important. In the field of psychoanalysis they used to talk about "guilt complexes." They were so guilty charging money for this stuff that they got fixated on guilt complexes. They kept saying, "What are you guilty for?"

The poor patient would say, "I do feel a little guilty."

"Well, now, when did this guilt originate?"

"Well, I was pretty young, I guess. I do remember one thing: I hit the cat once."

"Ah! There we have it! Now, are you sorry for having hit that cat?"

"Yes, I’ve been sorry for a long time."

"Well, see if you can be sorrier about the whole thing! Now, that’s what’s wrong with you! That’s twenty- five dollars, please. Dismissed!"

You can always find these guilt’s. But the easy way to find them is by picking up an individual’s sympathy. You start picking up his sympathy— sympathy for this, sympathy for that— and all of a sudden the preclear is looking right straight down the barrel at something he himself did for which he felt awfully guilty, and you have found a nice guilt setup. When he decided to feel guilty about it is what you want then. When did he decide to feel guilty about it?

If he felt sympathy for this person, he must at some time or another have elected for the first time to go into communication with him. He must have elected for the first time to feel some affinity for him. He must have elected for the first time to agree with him on some subject or other. You can just pick that stuff up at great speed. You will never see another jump up the line quite as fast as what you get by just picking up these areas of sympathy and knocking them out, desensitizing them just as locks. You will see quite a jump, because he is picking up, at the same time, his decisions to feel sympathetic. And the decision to feel sympathetic is a decision to be very frailly mortal. It is also a decision not to be self- determined; it is a decision to be monitored by somebody else’s emotions.

So, when you are working with the emotional curve and when you are working with a general emotional setup, it is very important for you to first start tuning in and see if you can get the fellow to sort of tune in on how it feels to be happy, sad, bored, griefy— any one of these things. See if he can get that feeling again, no matter how faintly, then run him on into sympathy. He will feel the sympathy. You will have him writhing on the couch—" Why did I beat that little dog? Why?"

"All right. Let’s pick up the first time that you felt sorry that you’d beaten the little dog."

He gets that and then he says, "Well, the devil with the dog! "

The dog was maybe in apathy, and this would have fixed this individual in apathy. The dog, after being beaten, goes into apathy, and then he feels sorry for the dog. This is sympathy for the dog, and this means he goes into apathy too! And there he will be hooked up on the track at apathy. So you have released an emotional stop.

You start working from there into the emotional curve of happy- sad, happy- sad, times when he felt that he was really controlling the universe around him and all of a sudden realized that he wasn’t. You will find all sorts of situations in early childhood. They will be succeeded by illnesses, and the illnesses are full of postulates and these decisions are full of postulates. You will run right straight into the toughest period of an individual’s life.

You take that service facsimile and run it out. You run it out not because it is dangerous but because you want to get the postulates out of it. You want to get the conclusions the preclear drew— his choices. Those are what you want out of that service facsimile. You will find that an individual has a few of these. You can find them by tracing this emotional curve.

When you have gotten through with that, you can dress it down to the point of the first time the fellow decided that he didn’t want to monitor his own emotions— it was more fun to let somebody else monitor them or something of the sort— or when he gave over to the environment the right to monitor his emotions for him. You will find his first decisions to like things or not to like them, to be emotional about them or not to be emotional about them, the first time he decided not to get excited, the first time he decided to get excited. You will find these initial postulates, and what you do is run these out and you will have a case running with free emotion.

It is very interesting how a case behaves after you have done this. It may take a little bit of processing on your part, but if you want to free somebody’s emotions up and just work on emotions, that is the process.

Now, there are many other things than emotions; there are psychosomatic illnesses and so on. But you will find these things in the service facsimiles. and what I am giving you now is a nice codification on how you get to those service facsimiles.

Let’s take a fellow who has been going around limping— long years he has been limping. Who did he want to be lame? Who else was supposed to be lame? Who was he in sympathy with who was lame? And more importantly, who did he injure, and then feel sorry about injuring, that was lame?

An individual is going around with various physical manifestations— arthritis, bursitis, sinusitis and so on. Who did he try to give these facsimiles to? What was he doing to people that he felt sorry for? Just follow this emotional curve and you will unravel his psychosomatic illnesses. It is so simple. "When did you feel sorry for what you did?" By tracking the preclear back very carefully, all of a sudden you will find, a few minutes earlier, the preclear handing out an entheta facsimile. He was mad; he was in action, doing something that he shouldn’t have been doing that he was later sorry that he did. But earlier is the period when he was handing out the facsimile, and the moment he felt sorry about it is when he received it back. Now he is hung with it; that is a service facsimile.

There is another combination that you work right in with this. There are only three possible efforts, as you know: to start, to stop and to change. If you aren’t getting a fellow’s emotions free enough, fast enough, go into it on this line: "When did you decide to stop somebody from being emotional? When did you decide to start somebody being emotional? When did you decide to change somebody? When did you decide to keep somebody from changing? When did you decide to start somebody, stop somebody, change somebody," so on and so on— just those three questions.

You will find times when the individual has failed in the effort. He tried and tried to change some individual; he tried and tried and failed and failed. And every time he failed to accomplish his mission, what happened to him was he started changing himself all over the place: left, right, up, down, back, forth— anything. He tried to change this human being, and this human being wouldn’t change. So his facsimiles that he was handing out came home to roost, and he emotionally started shifting all over the place trying to change himself, because he tried to change somebody else.

There isn’t anybody who has not tried to change another human being, who hasn’t tried hard and failed at it and who hasn’t afterwards felt kind of stuck. The point is that as the individual tries to change himself he will fail in that too, so he goes into apathy on the thing.

First he will go into apathy on somebody else. He fails and goes into apathy. Then he tries to change himself but he doesn’t succeed in changing himself so he goes into apathy about himself. That is when you consider yourself a hopeless case. It is because you have earlier considered somebody else a hopeless case.

Now, who decided to change you? You remember somebody trying to decide to change you? In order to invalidate them, to make them wrong when they were trying to change you, you got into a situation where you couldn’t change, you didn’t change, you wouldn’t change, and you stuck yourself right there. You hung yourself up on the track.

Somebody came around and they said, "Yak, yak, yak," and after a while you got kind of tired of it, but they said, "You’ve got to eat with your left hand, you’ve got to drink your milk with the right hand, you’ve got to do this"—" to the rear march, to the rear march, to the rear march, to the rear march."

You finally got sore, and you said, "The devil with this! I don’t like all this changing. I’m not going to change! I am going to hold on right here." That is a decision, and you are stuck with it.

It isn’t that you shouldn’t refuse to change. But you shouldn’t stick yourself. So after you have refused to change, always go back and pick up the postulate; knock it out.

There is hardly anybody who hasn’t known somebody who tried desperately to change him— for his own good, for his own bad, whatever it was, it didn’t matter.

And there isn’t anybody who hasn’t had somebody around who was trying to stop him. He would do something— start talking for instance— and somebody would stop him. It was sometimes only on this basis: "Oh, just a minute, dear, while I pass the salt."

"Well, now, as I was saying, I was down at the office and so forth, and the boss said "

"Dear, do you want some more ham? Go right on, I’m listening. Do you want some more ham?"

Then, of course, there are these less subtle characters who try to stop you merely by saying "Shut up!" This is frowned on in the society. "Pass the salt" is considered better.

There isn’t anybody around who hasn’t had somebody who was trying to start him—" Get going! Do you realize that it’s seven- thirty and you’re not up yet?" That hangs you up with a life- long ambition to lie in bed!

Now, when somebody does something antipathetic to you, the only way you can invalidate them is to resolve not to do it. They hang you with it. They are not trying to get you to cooperate; they are trying to dominate in some fashion or nullify in some fashion, so they hang you with it. So you have to do the reverse to make them wrong— even though doing what they say was what you really wanted to do, which gets you rather upset sometimes. It gets the communication channel sort of mixed up. The best thing that you could possibly do in such a case is go live in a cave and be a hermit somewhere, because living with the human race, these things are going to happen to you. But we can straighten it up now.

You find somebody who decided to stop because somebody was trying to start him all the time or trying to change him all the time, and you will find him hung up at a certain period of life. What has he done? In order to really stop, he used a theta facsimile, but he used a theta facsimile to stop them. He said, "You stop right now!" but that didn’t work, so he got the thing back and he is now stuck with it. He is stuck with it continually because he is saying "I’ve got to stop this person. I’ve got to stop this person. This person wants me to move, wants me to change and so forth, and I won’t, so I’ll stop them," and he winds up by stopping himself and getting this theta facsimile.

I don’t care how severe the engram is, if it weren’t for this mechanism it would never come into being on an individual. You get an individual whose ears are too floppy or something of the sort, for instance: he has wished off some sort of a theta facsimile. The sonic shut- off case has just been trying to stop somebody for years— he has stopped sound, stopped everything.

You can free up sonic pretty easily with effort and so forth. But don’t neglect this emotional side of the picture. You start turning on somebody’s emotions and you will start freeing him up all the way up and down the track, because you can’t start picking up emotions without picking up postulates.

Here is the way the picture really looks: A postulate goes via the endocrine system into physical motion. The fellow makes a decision and to get it into physical motion he has to have this endocrine- system relay. He has to check in his endocrine system, in other words.

In Effort Processing, you process the actual physical motions, actions and reactions— the actual physical level. That is Effort Processing.

Then there are Emotional Processing and pure Straightwire Postulate Processing. You do all three of them on a preclear.

Think of what would happen if you could resolve a busted love affair every time somebody came to you, and fix him up so he could fall in love all over again with all the delirium of dizzy youth. Look at what they pay song writers, and all they are supposed to do is reestablish nostalgia and give background music to a new postulate. And you can put postulates in; you don’t have to think up a tune to do it. You turn the switches and pull the levers. Out goes the old love and in comes the new one— nothing to it.

As a matter of fact, I solved one minor case of this sort of thing simply by picking up all the times the individual had been walked away from by the person who had jilted him. We just picked those up as locks. Finally he didn’t care about it particularly, because he had reexperienced each time the sensation of sort of losing her and that desensitized the emotion of trying to hold her.

The individual is trying to hold this person in love with him, and there he sticks himself. You start freeing it up this way and the rest of this becomes very simple because all you have to do is- just knock out the sympathy he felt— any time he felt sympathy on this line. There goes the love affair.

Love is supposed to be completely untouchable by hypnotism; you are not supposed to be able to change true love. Don’t monkey around too much with true love with Dianetics, because you can change it. Fortunately and happily, all you have to do is pick the person up the tone scale a bit and then get him to realize that all he has to do is just postulate that he is in love again and let it cook for about three or four hours and he will be in love all over again. So you can remember this.

Don’t expect to process, broadly, husbands and wives who are in relative emotional instability with each other and have them stay married. The chances are only about fifty- fifty that this will happen, because you are liable to start hitting this emotional strata, and they will knock out some silly childish postulate on the subject of "I’m so desperately in love with Jo- Jo the Dog- face Boy and here my Bill looks just like Jo- Jo so therefore I am in love with Bill." Most of these computations are about that rational and they are highly upsetting, because love gets acute and painful when it sweeps down to 1.0 on the tone scale, which is propitiation. It gets pretty painful, it gets pretty onerous and it gets pretty ornery.

You can’t change love with hypnosis, but you can sure change it with this processing.

I am not advising you to go out and fall out of love. You can make the little clinical experiment of walking along the street and saying you are going to fall in love with somebody. If your emotions are at all free, it will work.

We all agree that love is a wonderful thing and so is life. What is the difference? What, may I ask, is the difference between love and life?

But there is nothing more excess- baggage to have around than an old, decayed, moth- eaten love affair. It is not something to keep in one’s hope chest. The thing to do is lock- scan out the old and postulate in the new.

Now, there is nothing lousier in the world than sympathy. If you want to kill somebody, start sympathizing with him. A fellow walks in feeling fine and you say, "Why, you poor fellow."

And he says, "What’s wrong with me?"

You could actually walk up to a fellow on the street and say "Why, Bill, what happened?"— sympathy.

"I don’t know. I felt good."

"You do? Well, that’s good, that’s good. We’re awful glad you feel good."

You could have this fellow home in ,bed in no time. The mechanism is not telling him he is sick; it is just showing him low- tone- scale sympathy.

There is a chain of evaluation alongside the chain of conclusions. So, when you start picking up postulates along this line— you start picking up these moments of sympathy— you should also ask for the evaluation of the situation. In other words, "Why were you sympathetic? Why did you feel that way? What was your evaluation of the situation at the time?" You will get him back earlier; he felt so sympathetic that he- has forgotten he was raging mad just before that. Because as a person comes down the tone scale into low- order sympathy, believe me, he goes through anger and fear and grief and he gets down there in the sympathy band. This person he has been scolding finally is in grief or something of the sort, and he feels sorry for the fellow. He is sorry now for what he did.

Once in a while you will find a preclear who is going around being sorry for the whole human race or something of the sort. You don’t have to scan out the whole human race; just find the area where he first sinned so greatly, in his mind, that thereafter he had to feel sorry for everybody.

There is a class of literature in this country represented by "true stories," "true confessions," and so forth. This great literature has one hooker in it which is common to all the stories in it. The story runs, "I was just a little sewing- machine girl and I went to the big city, and he was a wolf," and so on. There is this horrible, muck- dripping crime of some sort or another that is just awful! If you were to turn the magazine up, blood would run out all over the floor! Then all of a sudden, afterwards, she comes to realize that she has sinned. This gets her down low on the scale, and the editor then lets her close off the story and the reader thinks this is fine.

This should tell you right away that people realize that this is really hell, that this is really punishment to be down along the sympathy bracket.

If you start feeling sorry for anybody, you had better find out what you did to him, because you certainly did something to him or somebody like him before you started feeling sorry for him. Anger is destruction, and you go down the tone scale; then you are afraid you have destroyed it, then you are sorry you have destroyed it, and then you are sure you did.

So it is very simple. The gamut of human emotions follows likewise in love. The fellow says, "I am now in love. All of the songwriters say love is wonderful; therefore I am wonderful, the whole world is wonderful, she is wonderful, everything is fine, we’re wonderful, we’re cooperating fully." He doesn’t realize at the time that she has three other boyfriends, that she feeds her Pekinese all the bonbons that he brings her, that she parks chewing gum under theater seats, and numerous other things. Gradually he finds out that he doesn’t put gum under theater seats, he doesn’t feed Pekinese bonbons— he doesn’t like Pekinese. In other words, he finds there are dissimilarities, so he goes out of adjustment. And the second he goes out of adjustment he gets anxious because they are not the same, and then the next thing you know, they are having little tiffs, spats, and so on. They have gone down in a nice antagonism and so forth. Then jealousy rears its ugly head and they get into rages and fights and yak- yak. And one usually is sitting back saying, "I’m just not going to say another word, George. You answer me!" Here you have the two halves. One of them has to go into apathy and the other one into the domination of anger in order to get any cooperation, in the first low life forms, and that same cycle is going on.

If you get two people, both of whom insist they are the control centers, they just fight forever, but they kind of come down the tone scale a little bit. And then one day something horrible and explosive happens and they are both sorry for it. Now they are both in sympathy, they are both in grief and both lives are ruined.

You should repair these situations whenever possible.

Now there is no more reason for you to avoid moonlight, no more reason for you to avoid these popular songs on the radio. You can go ahead and listen to them, because all you have to do is swamp up these old love affairs and then fall in love all over again.