AN ANALYSIS OF MEMORY - PART II

A lecture given on 26 November 1951

Regaining Control of Memory

Now, Advanced Procedure consists of fourteen steps in auditing— fifteen, actually, although step fifteen is a recheck. It puts together a new approach to auditing and it is relatively fast. It tells the auditor what to do and when to do it. It also would space a preclear along at various stages so that the hit- or- miss addresses to cases wouldn’t occur.

The material which I am giving you here is to some degree a summation of that, but more importantly, it goes in on Act Nine, running all emotion on the case. And the button I am about to give you comes under that heading. It is not in the book, but the book is very inclusive.

Now, a unit memory can often be seen, heard, felt and so forth, all over again. In other words, full perception of the memory itself is potentially possible. But here is a little bombshell for you that wipes out something in the first book: That is not particularly desirable, it is very far from necessary, and when memory is on to the extent of a wide- open case, watch out!

Almost any case, no matter how occluded, has a few visios, a few little pictures. Almost any wide- open case, no matter how wide open, has a few areas of occlusion. An occluded case, when he tries to look at something he has looked at before, sees black, and lots of it! A wide- open case, looking at something he has looked at before, generally sees something else.

This is phenomena which was slightly known before but not to the extent that it has been used in Dianetics. This phenomena is present in anybody, and in old texts they said it was present usually in morons and children. But they knew nothing about awake returning; they thought a person had to be hypnotized in order to look at any of his memories. That should give you some kind of an idea how utterly debased the whole understanding of the mind was. Mind you, a person had to be hypnotized to look at a memory! In other words, not only could another person not do it for him, but also there had to be a special mumbo- jumbo in order to throw this fellow into some kind of a hypnotic trance, get him to sit very quietly and put himself wholly in the possession of a hypnotist, and then the hypnotist could handle what? The unit memories of the individual.

There is another point of error: We talked about returning. Sure, you can hang together your theta facsimiles to a point where you have a time track. There is a time track— there is a unit of time on each one of these facsimiles; but an individual handling his facsimiles can take any unit off the time track, move it into present time and take a look at it. Not only that, he can look at any part of it he wants to. And if he is just looking for the data and conclusions, we have what we commonly call memory—" I remember that I went someplace; I remember this and that." The person isn’t looking at anything; he isn’t really calling any part of this facsimile into play except one, and that is just the conclusion of the data, so that is very easily called back. Actually, the whole package comes along with it, and if he wanted to really look it over, if it had a lot of pain in it and if he was pretty low down the tone scale, he could get latched up in it just by remembering it.

I have run into some cases recently where individuals tried to remember something that had happened to them so hard that they got the memory package back, complete. That is psychosomatic illness. It can turn on, in full, everything! If you put a person on the couch, you can put him so thoroughly into a unit memory that he conceives of himself as being that size, the same tastes that were present come back— everything, complete, just as though he were right there. That would be almost full returning. It is not desirable. It is not even useful.

If you have been struggling for visio and sonic, I am sorry to have to tell you that that is so unimportant as to be useless. All you want is the data, if you want that. That is all you want.

But more important even than the data is the ability to handle these unit memories. Handle your memory and you have achieved very full self determinism. You can achieve a self- determinism above this point which makes it unnecessary for you to handle any memory.

Up in the 27.0 to 40.0 band is "I am." "I know" is in that band. Anybody in that band would know all there is to know about epistemology. All knowledge is there.

Have you ever seen a fellow walk out and pick up a set of golf clubs and knock a ball down the line 220 yards or something of the sort and say "Gee, I think I like golf"? He goes on and he plays golf for a few days, but then all of a sudden he gets terrible and he never gets that good afterwards. Have you ever seen this happen?

It is very simple. The fellow walked up, looked at the golf clubs and said, "I know"; he picked one up, knew, and hit the ball— bang! But after a few days he looked at a lot of duffers around him and he decided that he couldn’t possibly know, that there was a lot to learn about golf. The second he decided that, he became a lousy player.

Anyone, when he was young, has had the experience of walking up to a piece of machinery, equipment or something of the sort and knowing exactly what to do with it.

A child is a very natural actor until someone tells him how to act. He knows acting. After all, life is, to a large degree, an act. He can come on the stage totally lacking in self- consciousness and so forth, until somebody tells him, "Dear, are you sure you’re all right, now? You’re not going to have stage fright, are you? You’re not going to get nervous? No, you won’t get nervous in front of the audience."

Then he says, "Part of acting is getting nervous, is having stage fright. Well, all right, I’ll be nervous." It is just about that bad.

But "I know" is up at the top. It is that terrifically easy self- confidence, self- assurance of being able to do anything or to know anything. One examination by perception and you know!

Actually, inherent in this top level is also a full knowledge of physics. How do you think theta could build an algae with the terrifically complex organic compounds in an algae, unless it knew organic chemistry? That is a very complex subject, and the human mind, being low on the tone scale, has not yet learned how to synthesize some of the compounds contained in an algae. Yet the original life form put together those compounds. Interesting, isn’t it?

You have felt that there was an incredible amount of knowledge someplace back of you that, if you could just tap it somehow, would make you a very wise person. All you have to do is come up the tone scale to the top and you will tap it. It has some unfortunate liabilities, though.

I had someone walk down to tell me that I should tell the students about Advanced Procedure and that it is now in. He got about halfway down and I knew I should tell the students about Advanced Procedure. He got to me then and told me about it. He was probably running much too slow.

Somebody else came up and told me, "You know, today I was using some of the techniques you’re talking about." I thought of them yesterday; he thought of them probably at the same time.

If you want ESP, it is there. If you want hocus- pocus and telekinesis and God knows what else, you can have them all; they are all there. So what? If you had complete theta communication, if everybody’s theta facsimiles were available to you, if all knowledge were available to you instantly, completely, and if you had answered up all the way along the line on everything and you were perfection itself, you would be dead. That would be top static. Yet that knowledge is there, those things are all available if you want them— if you want them.

God help the mystic! Without any material bridge built through epistemology, the mystic goes hopping around from stone to stone in the raging torrent of the unknown. He gets himself trapped, caught, drowned, upset. It is a very dramatic life, being a mystic— very, very dramatic. Without being able to handle any of his theta facsimiles, he tries to handle all of the theta facsimiles. It gets complicated. He slows down to a very slow point without knowing how to speed up, and that is a terrific liability. We should bow our heads for thirty seconds for all those brave or ignorant people of the past who have gone into top static just for the devil of it. They have left their bodies strewn through Asia.

To enter mysticism without knowing the roads and bridges of epistemology is a very foolish thing indeed.

Yet there is a tremendous amount of research going on today. Rhinel is playing around down at Duke University. There is nothing wrong with his figures; he shows that ESP exists. There are all sorts of things existing that he plays with. There is also prediction. Of course theta hasn’t got any time; you might as well be able to read the thirty- sixth card as the first. Why? The second you get up in this upper band you don’t have any motion.

The evident reason for your existence is the gathering of a few experiences. But it is not gathering them to put them in the past: it is to have them now. And when a person feels that he is unable to have experiences now, he goes ransacking the past or he starts daydreaming up into the future, equally without action. The past is dead! The only moment you will ever know is now, and you will continue to know the moment of now from here on out. That is all there is! You can appreciate that: Try to eat yesterday’s dinner in your memory. Once you have eaten it about twice the theta facsimile wears out and disappears.

It is very amusing to go way back down the track and pick up some of the very early facsimiles. As a matter of fact, you could take an individual, and without his realizing what you were doing, turn on his invertebrate state. You could turn it on at the moment of his death, and he would get sad. He wouldn’t know what was happening to him. Or you could turn on some earlier state at a moment of ecstasy, and he would become very ecstatic.

You can take individuals, in short, and do almost anything you want to with their theta facsimiles, if you are up in the higher reaches of the scale.

An auditor gets what pleasure he gets, actually, out of manipulating the theta facsimiles of another human being. But it is kind of a joke, because they are somebody else’s facsimiles and that person should be able to handle them himself. You as an auditor come along and audit him, you put him back through the times when he had broken legs and you do this and you do that, and he doesn’t have any psychosomatic illnesses anymore. This is wonderful, but bluntly, it is a joke!

The second an auditor believes it is serious business, he starts to get aberrated and comes down the tone scale. He sits there and he says, "This poor preclear— lost his father, lost his mother, big automobile wreck smashed him, almost cut his head off. The poor little fellow was raised as an orphan and there he is. This poor preclear, this poor preclear. How serious, how awful." If this auditor is anywhere near a bracket which is running pretty slow, he will get a comparable facsimile himself and then all of a sudden he will have a stomachache or something. He is apparently getting the other man’s facsimile. Actually he isn’t, but he apparently is.

You can audit somebody and turn on a headache in yourself. But you only do it when you think "Boy, this past was really serious (sniff, sniff)." That is going into sympathy— a comparable vibration.

Actually, the real purpose of an auditor would be to let a lot of people work their way through this, show them how, maybe go into an institution once in a while and train up a few staff, give some talks to people, and use the subject of epistemology to produce a little more perfection and perhaps a little more randomity in the world. Co- auditing is not the best tool, but it was all the tool we had for a long time, so we did it. And we still have to do it for a little while, because people just don’t take off suddenly like airplanes or jet planes or rockets or something just by giving them this piece of information, usually. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they take off and go clear up through the top, too.

What is the quality of death? The only thing really serious about death is the fact that sometimes it hurts. What is the quality of pain? We find, oddly enough, that pain is where motion and emotion come together, and that pain is in motion and emotion but a lot in emotion. What is death? What is pain? How can we turn them on? How can we turn them off? We know! So automatically we ought to be well up the line here.

I told you earlier about responsibility and cause and effect. An individual has inherently all eight dynamics. He is inherently dealing not only with himself but with future generations, his family, his- group, all mankind, all life, and so forth. Potentially he deals with all of these things at the same time. Potentially he can do this.

If he offends on one of these dynamics, fails on one of these dynamics, he will fail on the other ones. In other words, if he goes out to hit Bill Jones in the nose and he doesn’t, or if he hits Bill Jones in the nose and then Bill Jones gets up and jumps on his head, it is odd, but he gets a pain in his nose. He fails! Don’t fail; that is the main point. Or if you do, at least have the good grace to die. Or run it out. You have a lot of choices.

Now, an individual at 40.0 is operating as pure cause. He is not operating as cause with motion. He is merely potential cause without effort or direction or motion— pure cause, without application. The second that he applies it, he comes down the line a little bit; he comes down the line till he gets to about 20.0, and there he is handling an optimum amount of motion. Then the amount of motion he handles slows down, gets very, very slow, gets slower and slower and slower, and finally gets to "normal," way down near the bottom.

The motion an individual handles— the optimum amount— is between cause and effect. You cause yourself to be, and then you get hungry and you eat. It is not optimum to be pure cause. You make an effort to be pure cause, but you don’t quite get there because you have a carbon- oxygen engine you have to keep going and it is tied down in the time stream. Pure cause doesn’t have any time in it, for one thing. And 20.0 doesn’t have any fixed time in it. But you start going down the tone scale and an awful lot of time gets wrapped up.

What groups a time track and occludes a person? Time! The person’s concept starts along the line of "I haven’t got any time." He makes the postulate; he says, as "I," "I don’t have enough time to do that. I haven’t enough time to do something or other. I want to do this with time, I want to do that with time." He starts saying, in other words, that he doesn’t have any time ! And the next thing you know, he hasn’t got any time in any of his theta facsimiles, apparently, and so they all jam together and he can’t handle them or spot them on the time track. Of course— he hasn’t got any time!

You will find that Axiom 68 says the single arbitrary is time. That is actually true. You can extrapolate from that. Have you ever heard someone saying "I haven’t got any time. I have no time. I am too busy. I’m not going to do that. You know I haven’t got any time to do this, and I am just rushed all the time and I am so tired. I’m just rushed, and I just haven’t got any time to do anything"? You inspect this person in the course of his day’s activities and you will find that twenty- three hours, fifty- nine minutes and sixty seconds are wasted. Why are they wasted? Because he doesn’t have any time, of course! That is a very, very central aberration.

What that does to a person’s concept of time, of course, is take all the time out, which of course takes all the theta facsimiles out because they are filed by time. What would you think of a file case that suddenly had all of its alphabet cards picked up and thrown away? It would be pretty hard to find something in it, wouldn’t it? When a person hasn’t any time, he has just picked up all the alphabet cards and thrown them away, because things are filed by time in his mind. That is a principal aberration.

You are trying to be a cause without being too much of an effect. You are trying to be a cause of something which will result in a pleasant, not an unpleasant, effect. And then having become the effect, you still want to be fluid enough in the business of living to be able to be a cause again, so you fluctuate between cause and effect. But when a person gets way down the tone scale, he is effect. When a person is up too high, he is cause. In the highest band he is cause without motion, and at the bottom he is effect, or motion, without cause.

A self- determined individual causes. He is causation, and he is causation along all dynamics. If he offends against one dynamic— he causes something to happen along one dynamic— or even wants to cause something along that dynamic and fails, he will fail on the other dynamics. He is cause along all these dynamics. That is very easy to see.

But what happens to a person down in a complete stimulus- response category? He is effect! Everything in the environment puts him at effect. A person who is completely psychotic is so completely effect that there was only one environment which affected him and he is still in it. He is stuck with one great, big, powerful facsimile and he is swamped with it. He can’t handle his memory, in other words, and so his memory is up in present time, which wipes out the environment. And a stimulus- response mechanism is "The environment is the cause and the individual is the effect."

Cause is very simple. You want to eat tomorrow, so you work today. The work you do today is the cause for tomorrow. But that is cause with motion in it.

Let’s say somebody had mounted a pheasant or something and put it on a window ledge, and you knew that you were allergic to pheasants and the pheasant made you sneeze. Therefore you couldn’t be cause today, so you won’t eat tomorrow. What are you blaming? You are blaming this stuffed pheasant.

Now I am going to tell you something horrible: The second that you blame anything, including yourself, you elect a cause. You elect something else to be responsible— you elect a dynamic to be responsible— and it becomes the cause and you become the effect at that moment. Do you see how this would be?

You fall downstairs and hurt your knee. And you say to Isabel, "You pushed me!" You suddenly have elected Isabel to be the cause. Just as certainly, you elected yourself to be the effect. And from that moment on, Isabel is going to be more powerful than you. The environment is going to be more powerful than you. That is all you have to do.

Now, if you as an auditor insisted and insisted and failed in your insistence to make somebody else handle your theta facsimiles for you— in other words, audit you— you elected somebody else to handle your theta facsimiles, you elected them as cause and you elected yourself as effect. You have made that person much more powerful than you.

And when you said, "The reason I am so aberrated is Mama," you elected her as cause and made yourself effect. You said, "It’s the teacher’s fault"; that made her cause and you effect. You said, "It’s this darn car"; the car became cause, you became effect.

You said, "It’s my fault. I am to blame for this." This says there is somebody to blame, then, doesn’t it? So, as a sort of a messed- up idea, you have considered yourself to be two people, one of which is over you in some fashion or other, and you are causing an effect, but you were mainly the effect because you are to blame. But this makes you more powerful than you— only you have to be the effect because you have blamed something, so you become the lesser entity of self. And the second you become the lesser entity of self, you become subject almost wholly and completely to your own past postulates as being above change.

And that is why you have to do Postulate Processing on individuals. You say, "I am to blame." "I am to blame" means that there must be two "I’s" because something has to be there that blames "I." So you say, "Well, this must be exterior to that and therefore the ‘I’ which I am blaming is me, and therefore I am the effect of this other ‘I, ’ so therefore everything that this ‘I’ has postulated over here, I am subject to. I am the effect of everything I have been!" And there is the aberration of past experience being valuable.

Furthermore, the whole society forces on you the idea that your past experiences are valuable. Every time you go in to fill out an application blank, you see "What school have you been to? What experience have you had?" This society is so crazy that it believes a fellow has to have an enormous amount of experience before he does anything. But demonstrably, this is not true, unless the fellow is way down the tone scale so he has to do a puppet- response training.

There are many people who know very well that they could go out, and after observing a set of tools for a little while and figuring out kind of how they work, could probably qualify as a carpenter or most anything. But there is a big aberration going on in this society that says "You must work sixteen years as a carpenter before you can come on this job as a carpenter. Therefore you must have had experience. Therefore past experience is valuable. If you have a lot of past experience, you eat today." And they continually make you the effect of your own past.

How can you escape being effect of your own past? How can you escape being an effect all the time? How do you escape, in other words, having the environment handle all of your memories for you, which is the same thing?

If you have elected yourself as an effect, then you have said "All of my memories are affecting me, too." Therefore you can’t, of course, handle them. You can’t put them away or bring them back or do anything about them; you have to suffer with them. You have got to run them, you have to do all sorts of things with them.

That makes it necessary to do auditing on you, and it has gotten now so it takes fifty or a hundred hours. You don’t have to spend that long.

Let me tell you this about this button: About the highest level of aberration there could be is something that you have elected as "time cause."

Let me have any two human beings and I will fix it up so one of them gets the other one up every morning, and regardless of their relative positions on the tone scale at the start of this operation, after a little while you will have the one who is being gotten up at effect and the one who is doing the rousing at cause. You see how this is? This person doing the rousing is time cause.

Who got you up when you went to school? Who got you up every morning? You didn’t get yourself up every morning, so you started every day with somebody else owning your time. How can you possibly handle theta facsimiles if somebody else owns your time? "Time for you to get up now." "If I have to call you one more time . . . !"

Then you go to school and you have bells. There are school bells and seats and all sorts of things. You sit down and you get up, and you go here and you do this and that: bells ring, you act; bells ring, you act; bells ring, you act. Those bells are time cause.

It gets to the point where, if a standard school bell of the kind they have in high schools were to ring outside your door, you might instinctively get up and start to leave. That bell is time cause.

Whoever you have elected as time cause, then, you have elected as your boss and the handler of your theta facsimiles or the handler of your memories.

No wonder you get worried about your mind. You appointed a guardian for these facsimiles every time you appointed somebody else as cause. Every time you blamed anyone or anything along any dynamic, you appointed a boss, and you made it so that you couldn’t handle your own theta facsimiles anymore on that subject.

Now, here are phenomena: A person has a visio— one visio. Let him pick up that visio, regardless of what it is, and have him run just one emotion off it, and it will go out. Get an occluded area and run just one emotion with regard to that occlusion and it will faintly come on and then go out.

You want to know how to resolve occlusions? Don’t worry about being in valence, out of valence, on your head or upside down— the devil with it. Don’t worry about visios or any of that. It doesn’t matter. The only place you want to be is present time. If you can’t find enough to do in present time, daydream something about the future. But get the past cleaned up so that it isn’t up against you.

How does the past get up against you? You elect somebody else as cause and you lose control of the theta facsimile of whatever you think they have caused. You lose the control of the memory for which you blame anyone along any dynamic. And how do you do this? You say, "I didn’t cause it." Therefore, how can you handle it?

What are you trying to do when you blame self, space, time, energy, organisms, trees, grass, rocks, God? When you blame anything, anywhere along the line, what are you doing? You are wishing it didn’t happen, and you are trying to do it over again. You want to change it! The aberrated solution is to blame in an effort to get somebody else to accept the blame. If they don’t accept it— you have handed them a theta facsimile, "This is your fault, you handle it," and they say, "It’s not my fault"— you get it right there in present time. You have it from there on out.

Any counter- effort which you experience has been blamed on something or somebody else. You have not taken the responsibility for it, in other words.

Now, how do you get any action out of cause? If you are just cause, you have to move from cause into motion in order to get any action. You say, "I will be." That is all right, you can be, but then be what? Now you have to have motion.

So, as you move out of cause, you are moving into the sphere of motion. And the way you get action and conflict and randomity, the way you get anything in motion, or even the way you get a human body and keep it running, is actually by self- determinedly appointing for yourself counterefforts for which you are not responsible.

The moment you appoint something else as something for which you are not responsible, it will fight you, just as sure as can be. I am not talking about metaphysics, now; this happens to be actually true. You say, "I am not responsible for what they did," and you will get the counter- effort of what they did. You can appoint a lot of counter- efforts this way and keep life very dramatic for yourself. In fact, people, when they get down along this band, spend their time doing practically nothing but fighting the things which they have appointed to be cause. And they keep on appointing these things to be cause, appointing them to be cause, and they get into trouble and they get into more trouble and they get into more trouble and more stimulus response, and go out the bottom of the tone scale. This is a sure way to kill yourself.

You could drift up toward the top of the scale and never have any randomity at all if you didn’t appoint some opponent. But keep control of what you appoint as an opponent and don’t get into the belief that it is a stimulus- response mechanism, because that is death.

Regret is the emotion which suspends in time, with you, things for which you have tried to blame other people. Any time that you went against another individual with punitive action and failed— that is to say, hurt him, maimed him— you felt sympathy afterwards. That is the emotional cycle of the incident. But how do you suspend that incident? You say, "I wish it had never happened." In other words, it is out of time: "I wish it had never happened." That is regret.

If you get a visio of anything, evidently it is because you failed afterwards and regretted it, and you are still keeping that theta facsimile next to you. You look at it and it is apparently a very innocuous visio. You can’t imagine how that got there; it is just natural that it would be there.

Just experimentally try to feel the emotion of regret; run up from the incident and run the regret for a moment or two.

Let’s say you see a visio of a person standing there and you "know" that nothing happened between you and that person, since you have a visio on him. So you run up the line two or three times from there; you run regret, and you find that was the individual about whom, the next year, you told somebody something and it cost him his job! And you felt sorry for it. You blamed yourself and you said, "I regret it." So you kept it around as a visio.

But suppose you blamed somebody else: you said, "It’s their fault." You would just bundle it right up in present time as an occlusion. You try to hand it to that person—" It’s your fault, accept it! "— and this person won’t accept the blame, won’t accept the fault, won’t break down. You are stuck with it— only you won’t accept it! And you regret their inability to accept it. Run that off and you will get the occlusion. It will pile up into view, whatever it is.

Now, there are four ways you can go about this. You can figure this out very simply. You have to run the times when you blamed somebody else, and when you blamed yourself, the times when you refused to blame somebody else, and the times when you refused to blame yourself. It all comes under the heading of regret. If you run all the regret off a case it will remarkably disenturbulate. More postulates will show up in less time, particularly on self- blame.

The moment when you went below 4.0 was the first moment you elected to blame yourself. The first moment you decided to blame yourself— you decided that it was your fault and that you were guilty— you dropped below 4.0.

That is right now a top- strata button, and that is very useful. Appointing time cause and so forth is a theoretical button. It is not as useful, but you can still use it. There is more to be learned about that button. You run off regret, you run off hide, trust- distrust, incidents of blame, run off some effort if you want to, and you have practically got the package.

All of this is listed in the fourteen acts of Advanced Procedure and Axioms— except, where it says "all emotion," be sure to cover regret.

You will wind up, on this process, taking full responsibility as an individual for the whole cockeyed universe. Then you will have to move down from that point in order to get some motion, and you will have to appoint a few villains. Otherwise you won’t have any action.

Just saying "I take full responsibility for this and that" has a certain mystical aspect; it isn’t very workable. But run it out to a point where you can accept full responsibility on these various things. The occlusions will be gone, and so will these remarkably visible visios.

Did you ever notice the visios on a past death? Why are they so brilliant when they are there? It is regret: "Poor me, I’m dead. Poor me." But on the shut- out ones you get only "Their fault, their fault, their fault— here I am dying and so forth; poor me— and it’s their fault. They did it to me, they did it. I’m not responsible. Here I die a martyr." You run that off a past death and it will flick into view. Run the blame of these other people and the regret.

Then, for those who don’t know that strange phenomenon, you can take almost anybody in off the street at random and run them by Effort Processing, and they will wind up in a past life or death. One day I took a salesman and processed him by Effort Processing for a few minutes. I just made him move against motions which he was receiving, and he found himself staring down rather dazedly at a Confederate belt buckle which he had been wearing.

In short, you can go back down the whole time track. It is very strange. If you got to the point where you were responsible for death too, you probably wouldn’t be able to kick off when you wanted to.

Anyway, here is the subject of cause and effect, responsibility and memory. The whole thing can be simply summed up into this line: If you can put a preclear into a state where he can handle his own memories, where his own memories aren’t handling him and where the environment isn’t handling his memories for him, you have really brought him up the line. This is so far above what we used to consider the state of Clear, I don’t think there is very much comparison to it. It is a method of getting there without running out everything there is in the past. It is a method of both getting rid of the past and having the past— and "so what" the past! You can take Present Time Processing and just process the various factors of blame in present time— what you blame yourself for in present time, what you don’t blame yourself for in present time, what other people are blaming you for in present time— and just process these things out and your preclear will suddenly start walking around about eight and a half feet tall.