ADVANCED PROCEDURE

A lecture given on 3 December 1951

Rehabilitating Control of Memory

I am going to give you some new material. It is amazing that we rather consistently find faster ways of doing things. A couple of years ago you could get a case going with a routine of "Get that phrase (snap!), get that phrase (snap!), get that next phrase (snap!)"— and people would get well. You could run out engrams and people would get well and so on.

Of course, an engram has some effect in its key- in on making a person make a postulate. A person decides something, but the data he is deciding it on may be an engram. Actually, all that you need to do is kick out his decision— regardless of what it was based on— and the case will free up, because there you will have knocked out the actual, effective key- in of an engram. It is gone when you get the first time he makes a decision based upon its data.

So what are we running engrams for?

I imagine anyone, at one time or another, has gone down the street saying, "Why do I keep thinking of that? I’ll think about something else," and then looked in a store window, admired a dress or something of the sort. "But I keep thinking about that thing. Why can’t I get rid of that thought?"

Or maybe you are familiar with the tune that keeps running through your head. You say, "I don’t want this tune. I’ll think about another tune." "The music goes round and round and it comes out here" may be what is going through your head, so you say, "I’ll think about something else. I’ll think about ‘Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar’ or ‘Slowpoke’ or something of the sort." And you try to but all you get is "The music goes round and round and it comes out here."

What is wrong? You have gotten hold of a memory that you haven’t owned— a memory which you have never considered belonged to you and which you are not working with. That is all. It is not in your realm of handling or action. And the harder you try to shove it away, the more you are saying to it "I don’t own it," so it keeps sitting with you. And the harder you try to put these insignificant obsessions away from you, the more they come in. It isn’t the magnificent obsessions that worry us, it is the insignificant ones. What you have done is just refused to own it, refused to take the responsibility for it, refused to have anything to do with it and of course you have said "I can’t handle it." So, naturally, there you are. You are stuck with it. That is a psychosomatic illness.

A person has a memory which contains a lot of pain and he says, "I don’t own this, I blame it, it’s no good, I don’t want it, it can’t do anything to me," and the thing keeps moving in on him. It isn’t being controlled by the w individual. The individual is not controlling this one. And the more he says "Doggone it" and "Consarn it" and "It’s no good" and "I don’t want it," the tougher the thing gets, because he is saying "I can’t handle it. I wonder why it’s cutting my throat off; I can’t handle it, that’s all. You know, it’s a terrible thing but every time Mary" (that is somebody else he can blame) "says something like that, I sort of get this catch in my throat. Doggone Mary anyway for doing that to me. I wish she wouldn’t talk that way. It makes my throat hurt to listen to her talk! " He says this rather violently, and he says it again and again and again and he thinks it again and again and again. The first thing you know, he is going around trying to talk and he can’t.

He goes down to the doctor and the doctor says, "Well, we have a remedy for that. Lie down on the table so we can cut your throat." And of course, the fellow is "not responsible" for the initial facsimile, but he did ask to have the operation.

So a few years go by and he doesn’t have any of this sort of trouble, but then one day he says, "It’s funny, my throat feels bad. Throat feels very bad; I can’t understand why my throat feels bad— terrible. I bet it was that operation that doctor gave me." Now he has disowned the operation; he is taking no responsibility for it. He has said, "It shouldn’t have any effect upon me because I don’t own the thing; that memory does not belong to me!"— which also says "I can’t handle it"— so now he is getting a sorer and sorer throat.

There is no difference between a thought and an effort in the actual field of operation. You think something and anything that affects this thought that you are thinking can get fouled up in what we call an aberration —a mental aberration. If you have a pain with that same memory, you can feel the pain. When you feel the pain of that memory, that is a psychosomatic illness. In other words, here is a memory and it has all these perceptions in it and it includes a perception of pain and everything else, and pain can be remembered.

This is a new concept. This phenomenon was not known a relatively short time ago. As a matter of fact, memory itself had not been well identified. I don’t even think you would find a precise statement of how anybody came to remember anything in the old textbooks.

Here you have a memory; it contains force. What is this memory? It is perception of the physical universe, let’s say, or perception of somebody talking, which is also the physical universe. This memory is a perception of the physical universe. What comprises it? You were just standing looking at something and you were not feeling any pain particularly, but the odd part of it is that when you recall the incident you can recall it thoroughly enough to feel the weight on your own feet. And what is that? That is just another perception. It is like sight. It is the perception of weight.

In other words, a perception is a perception. And when you have something strike your hand, that is a perception along another nerve line which you call pain or force. If you want to remember the incident, you will get the force again. What is it? It is just another perception.

So what is a memory? It is just a package of perceptions; that is all. If you want to really start remembering something hard, you can get everything that goes along with it. And if your mind is in good working order— you are up the tone scale— you can select and discard memory at will. Any sort of memory that you want, you can select it or discard it at will. You can remember "Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar" and then stop remembering it.

You can start and stop any cycle of memory, then, and you can do it so thoroughly and so fast that the old- time boys back there— the psychiatrists —thought that there was an "unconscious mind." They thought this unconscious mind had some horrible effect upon the individual and it was waiting at any moment to spring on him, and it contained all sorts of green slime and horrible urges from the animal kingdom. They really dreamed themselves up a good one there; there isn’t anything dizzier to be found in Grimm’s Fairy Tales than their account of this unconscious mind.

Anyway, it was just waiting to grab this individual up. And the whole effort of the prefrontal lobotomy, in which a big hole is drilled in the skull by a psychiatrist, is to let out the green slime of the unconscious mind. That is the basic philosophy back of it. They drain it very carefully, and then they plug up the hole again and put the fellow back in the cell. It’s a nice experiment; it shows the human skull can have a hole drilled in it!

But we have the modus operandi, and the "unconscious mind" works this way: You remember something and you can’t get rid of the memory. The reason you can’t get rid of the surface memory is probably that there is something else under it— which you can remember too. There is no trouble remembering it, but people just don’t look underneath to find out what is holding the memory in place. It is held there because there is something earlier that probably says "I mustn’t think about this sort of thing, I mustn’t remember it and I don’t want to have anything to do with that." So when anything comes after that which equals it, you have memories you can’t handle. The next thing you know, a person begins to believe that he is being acted upon by the environment in some peculiar fashion: somebody is hypnotizing him or the walls have an effect on him and so on. This is the mechanism of restimulation of an engram.

Now, an engram is particularly tough on this memory basis because at the time it was received you agreed not to feel it or know anything about it. It was received with all perceptics; you can prove this without any trouble. But when you were very young you agreed to your first tonsillectomy or something of the sort, and you agreed not to feel it or know anything about it— generally with anesthetic.

Anesthesia is very new; I don’t think it is over about seventy or eighty years old. They know practically nothing about it. How they can be authoritarian about anesthesia, I don’t know, because nobody has ever studied it. They know that people suddenly go "unconscious" and it is a good convenience to the doctor because the patient doesn’t squirm.

During the first years of its use, this was its avowed purpose. They had so much trouble cutting open the stomach of some patient or doing something of the sort while he was wide awake that they couldn’t hold him still. However, somebody got this happy idea. They had known about knockout drops for ages; why nobody thought of knockout drops for surgery, I don’t know. Earlier than that they were using rum; they would get the fellow drunk and then he would be relaxed and they could work on him. But they finally started using chloroform and nitrous oxide and all sorts of odds and ends— anything that would make the patient relax so that they could whittle. But they had never studied what happened when they did this to a person.

You just study it a little while— take some Effort Processing— and you will find you can knock a person back into his appendectomy just as quickly and easily as snapping your fingers.

So here is a memory package about which the person has agreed not to know anything. Little Oswald is about to get a tooth extracted, and little Oswald is about three. You say, "Now, you sit in the dentist’s chair, and the nice dentist is going to play a game with you and he’s going to put this over your face, Oswald, and you’ll go to sleep and you won’t know a thing about anything. That will keep it from hurting; it won’t hurt if you don’t know about it," or something of the sort.

Little Oswald says, "Uh- huh. Okay." Sure— he doesn’t want it to hurt. So this is just another way of postulating that it isn’t going to hurt. Now, he can actually remember this incident, but by the time he has done this about forty or fifty times, one way or another— he has gone unconscious over and over again— he loses control of these things completely.

Then all of a sudden, one fine day, one of these facsimiles shows up. It is just a memory. Maybe it is a time when he got hit in the head with a baseball bat when he was a child or something of the sort, and he gets a headache. So he says, "That’s funny. I wonder what’s causing the headache?"

Now, cause for headaches has been assigned by this society to the nerves. The nerves have been blamed, sometimes bone pressure, sometimes this, sometimes that; but they have never blamed a memory. As a result, it is very simple how you get rid of a headache in this society: you take Bromo Seltzer.

If you can make people postulate that when they take Bromo Seltzer the headache goes away, then you are all set: you can sell a billion tons of the stuff. As a matter of fact, out in the oil fields they use some particularly horrible- looking mud. You could get a patent on this mud and then buy enough radio advertising to get everybody to make an absolute postulate that this mud would do something very fascinating for them, and it would. There is nothing to it. You just get the person to make the postulate and it will come true.

It is sort of gruesome, but they teach little children this story about the three wishes: A fairy godmother comes along and gives the child three wishes; the child uses two of the wishes and such horrible things happen that he uses the third one in order to get rid of the first two, and they are all gone. That has been a standard fairy tale for generations. The only horrible part of it is that it is true: you get your wishes. You have gotten out of life just exactly what you wanted— what you said you wanted at the time. And then life has played you the horrible trick of continuing to give it to you. It is like starting to feed a child something because it is "good for him"; then he objects, and you start feeding it to him because he is objecting!

So, this is the trick about memory. You have made postulates— that is to say, you have made decisions. You have said, "Well, I don’t want to go to the party."

"Well, why don’t you want to go to the party?" somebody says.

You think, "Well, I just don’t want to— well, that isn’t polite. I really can’t tell them over there that I think that furniture they’ve got is perfectly horrible and the booze they serve is dreadful, and I sure can’t stand the way she cackles every time he tells a joke." So you say, "Oh dear, I have a headache." You will get one, just as neat as you please.

The amount of integrity which life demands of you is wonderful. You may have never trusted yourself and maybe people haven’t trusted you and you haven’t trusted other people and everything else, but do you really keep your word! You really keep your word. You say, "You hurt my eye! I have a bad eye." Forty years later you have still got it.

Such terrific integrity really should be rewarded! And I am doing my best to reward you for this integrity by showing you how you can bundle it all up and throw it away and boot it out the window quick.

Now, I want to go over Advanced Procedure and Axioms and go through its steps. This material may seem a little bit strange, if you haven’t gone over it, but nevertheless it is material which ought to be covered.

In the first place it is new enough so that the students are still arguing about it. A student can have the most complete, utter, widest self- determined range under the sun, he can make up his own mind and do anything he wants, as long as he will do Dianetics exactly as I tell him! There is a good reason for this. A lot of material has been waded through— an awful lot of material. And what you want to do is to take a student and make an auditor as good as you can as fast as you can. So you want to teach him a highly standardized procedure which you know works well and won’t fail him if he practices it as it is written. His first order of interest in the matter should be that procedure, and when he has that one down, there is a lot of phenomena to worry about. I think, in Dianetics, I have isolated about two hundred hitherto unknown new phenomena about the mind. That is quite a large number and they are not all listed.

Every once in a while I am completely amazed to find in the mails Technique 23, which was discarded in August 1947 as unworkable. And this is a "new technique" that somebody has suddenly sent in—" brand- new."

There have been other techniques sent in or circulated in the field which were explored as research techniques or simply discarded as unworkable or even as being aberrative in themselves.

Now, actually, auditing and submitting to being audited is bad. It has to be done on a lot of cases that are down around the neurotic level. And it has to be done definitely on cases that are in the psychotic bracket. But it is bad. Why? Because it is one human being handling another human being’s memory. And the first moment that an auditor starts to handle the other human being’s memories, the other human being relaxes on his control of his own memory.

Sure, the auditor can get rid of a bunch of bad memories for these preclears and he can straighten up a lot of chronic somatics and everything, but unless he gives back to his preclear control of the preclear’s own memory at the end of the session or the end of the system of processing he is using, he has left his preclear up in the air. All a preclear has to do is merely take back the possession of his own memory; it is very simple.

When you think, you are evidently handling these memories, these facsimiles in their various combinations. You control them so fast, you control so many of them— in the most aberrated and horribly abused and brutalized period of your whole life you still sort these things through so fast— that no electronic computing machine can equal it on its relay switches. The memories are translated into physical action in a tenth of a millisecond— that is a tenth of a thousandth of a second. That is how fast it is done, and that is a physical action. The only reason it takes any time at all is that there are synapses opening and closing, and it takes a tenth of a millisecond for a synapse to pop and let the impulse through into the nerve channels.

Memories themselves don’t have speed. When you are handling memory you are handling something other than physical objects. But it is very odd that the more aberrated an individual becomes, the more memory appears to him to be a physical entity. You get people way down at the bottom of the tone scale— very aberrated— and to them, words are things.

For instance, you are talking to somebody and you say, "I think I will go down to the fair."

It doesn’t strike this person that you are going to go down to the fair; what strikes him is the fact that you have said "fair," and he says, "Oh, it isn’t a fair!"

And you say, "Well, what is it?"

"It’s a display. That’s really what they’re having down there."

"I thought it was a fair."

"No, it’s not a fair; it’s a display."

"Well, all right, I’m going down to the display."

And he sighs with relief.

People go around with this terrific anxiety about words. They won’t follow the track of an idea, only the words— unit by unit by unit, words. Have you ever been interrupted by somebody who did that sort of thing to you? That person was so concerned about words that he was practically at the level of consciousness of an engram itself— that is the truth— because it is only in the depths of an engram that words get that literal. In the depths of an engram words get pretty literal.

So, Advanced Procedure is then slanted, not toward handling a person’s memories, but toward reconditioning the ability of the individual to handle his own memory— to handle his own memory packages. All you do for him is straighten him up to a point where he is handling his own memory packages. It is up to him from there on out.

Now, the speed of this technique is not slow. I was informed that the reason the boys were having a little bit of trouble with this technique was a misconception on time; a little search on the matter turned up a misconception on time. I don’t know how the boss instructor ever let them fall into that error, but he did. It is the speed with which this is done that counts.

There are fifteen acts that one performs with a preclear, one right after the other. He does these in rotation.

Actually, there will be a self- help book out, not too long from now, which will be put in the preclear’s hands and the preclear will be doing most of these things himself; the auditor will just cheer him up and say, "Good boy! Good boy!" and so on. Then the preclear will get down to a point where he says, "My ‘gungahosis’ was much worse this morning," and then the auditor says, "I’ll be right out!" The auditor goes out, audits out the preclear’s service facsimile, gets him straightened out, gets him in present time and lets him finish off the rest of the case himself. That is going to be the process.

But auditors will always, at one time or another, be confronted with neurotics or psychotics. This is the procedure you use. And all you use each step for is just to make sure that he can get to the next step. That doesn’t mean that you do each step exhaustively.

Take Act One: A good auditor normally always has done Act One. He merely evaluates himself with regard to the preclear.

Let me give you an example of this: Last summer somebody brought his wife up from a nearby town; his wife was in very bad shape. I heard later that week that the fellow had gone home and taken his wife with him. Why? I asked the auditor, "What’s the pitch?"

"Well, I couldn’t do anything for her. I couldn’t get into communication with her."

This would have made the first psychotic I ever heard of that you couldn’t get into communication with. Sometimes it’s a little difficult, sometimes you have to keep dodging razor blades and so forth, but you can get in communication with them. So I thought for a moment and I said, "Did you ever know a person who looked like or sounded like that psychotic?"

The auditor said, "Oh, yes!"

"Where?"

"Well," she said, "I was working in the psychiatric ward of an eastern hospital and there was a woman that looked just like that, and she picked up a platter and broke it over my head!"

Of course the psychotic went home the next day! This auditor was scared of her. The auditor took one look at her and said, "Well, this woman goes psychotic and breaks platters over your head. And I don’t want this psychotic to get violent, I want this psychotic to be quiet— go off someplace."

Now, that was a dirty trick on this psychotic’s husband; he had had some hopes, he had brought his wife up here, and all of a sudden boom!— nothing happened. You don’t want to do that. It happened because the auditor had omitted Act One.

The auditor merely asks himself whether or not he wants this preclear to get well; that is all. Does he know anybody that this preclear reminds him of? Does he know of any reasons in the past that might lock up and make him make mistakes with this preclear, on purpose? He just reviews the case. If all of a sudden he finds himself taking more than three or four minutes to do this, he really has an awful lot on the bank with regard to this person and he had better take some time. But normally you could flick out a couple of locks that something has reminded you of in just three or four minutes. It is that fast.

Your next act is to just find out if the preclear has you as the auditor tangled up with anybody. What we are doing here is group processing. The auditor gets himself so that he doesn’t feel antagonistic or upset about the preclear through some misconception, then he does the same thing for the preclear.

"Did you ever know anybody that looked like me?" you ask the preclear.

The preclear says, "No, except my uncle George. As a matter of fact, he went after me with a butcher knife. Yeah. Yeah, you did remind me of my uncle George— yeah, that’s right. Ha- ha." And you go on to the next act. That is how long that takes.

Sometimes you will have some preclear who will be very shy: "Now, come on, tell me what you don’t like about me."

The preclear says, "Oh- ho, nothing! I like you, I . . ."

"Well, now, is there anybody I remind you of? Anything like that?"

"No- o, no. No, nobody— except my father."

"Well, what in particular about me reminds you of your father?"

"Well, there is something. Oh, yes. Oh, yes— you’ve got red hair."

Now, don’t give the preclear a bunch of sympathy on this angle, because normally this stuff will blow unless your preclear is very badly off. In that case you are going to be using Acts One, Two, Three and Four for hours and hours and hours on this preclear, because these first four steps are how you treat a psychotic.

But if this preclear has any kind of recognition, if he is not too horribly bad off— he is above "normal," in other words— this happens quickly.

So you go on to your next act. You have now been auditing him for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, with your usual preclear. Act Three consists of cleaning up present- time facsimiles for the preclear so that the environment is not confused.

"Were you ever in a place like this before?"

"No— except jail in Memphis."

You make him aware of the fact that he has a couple of facsimiles— a couple of memories, in other words— tangled up.

As a matter of fact, you could take a lot of people and do that one step and say, "Now, your living room— what former living room does it remind you of?" And they would think for a moment and the next thing you know, they would get an association with something in some former living room that maybe wasn’t so good or they would get a time that they were hurt. Maybe when they were little children they were hurt or they were spanked continually in a living room. You get them to looking around and all of a sudden they will identify something.

For instance, a person has been having very bad back pains lately— lumbago or something— and you trace it back and find that it was a time he got spanked. He got spanked looking at a vase. Somebody turned him over their knee and spanked him, and right in front of him on a dresser or on a table was a vase, and he has a vase that looks like it sitting in the living room. Somebody else in the family brought the thing in. Every time he passes by that vase he gets a little twinge of lumbago— because he has never owned up to this spanking. The spanking was a great injustice. It shouldn’t have happened to him! Father was to blame for it— the person has nothing to do with this facsimile. Of course, then, the facsimile can do anything it wants to do, and there is the vase sitting there and he passes by the vase and he gets a little twinge of lumbago. The individual finally gets pretty bad, and then he gets "normal."

You will find out that anybody’s environment has this sort of crossed, mixed- up, confused association with other environments. And the place you are auditing your preclear should seem very safe to the preclear. So you find out that it reminds him of this past living room: Let’s pick up a couple of postulates that he didn’t like the thing that reminded him of this place, and all of sudden he gets comfortable. Up to this time he has been a little bit nervous; you haven’t had his full attention. Now you have his full attention. You have been auditing him for maybe twenty minutes.

The Fourth Act is establishing accessibility of the preclear with himself. In some cases this is going to be kind of long because it contains past, present and future problems. You may find your preclear so concerned with the present time that he has utterly retreated from present time. He is clear back down the track someplace; he doesn’t want anything to do with present time. Or he thinks present time is so dangerous that he doesn’t want to come into it. You just get him to sort out the relative values of the things in present time and what they are hung up on in the past. All of a sudden the fellow will make a decision that present time is either dangerous or it isn’t dangerous, because he has been hung on a maybe. He is in present time, maybe— but it is maybe. "Maybe I’m safe in present time and maybe I’m not. Maybe George is going to be this way or Bill is going to be that way, or I may not get married next week, and the whole trouble of the thing is the car might break down . . ."

You say, "Well, all right. What objects don’t you like in present time that you live with? What objects don’t you like?"

"Don’t like the Ford!"

"Why don’t you like the Ford?" He has never thought about this before; he just knew he didn’t like the Ford.

"Well . . . I wrecked a car like that once! That’s right."

"Well, are you going to wreck this one?"

"No! "

"Well, all right, that settles the Ford."

Now we can get a little more complicated about the thing: "With what persons are you living that you feel a little bit upset about? How about your boss?"

Your preclear sort of grits his teeth and growls, "Oh, he’s all right. He’s an old crab. That doesn’t worry me. I wouldn’t worry about him anyway!"

"Well, who does he remind you of particularly, or what situation in your life does he remind you of?"

By the way, I blew a grief charge on this with a preclear one day, just on that question. All of a sudden he was in tears. The boss was the barrier— the big barrier— to this person’s earliest ambitions. The boss had been symbolized completely as the guy who made him punch the time clock, who made him work. He had to have a job, he had to be self- supporting, he had to be responsible. This fellow had wanted to go to sea and he couldn’t quit his job. Who was forcing him to keep the job? The boss! And he had never figured this out. The boss "forced him to keep this job," but he didn’t need this job! We sorted this all out and we finally found out that the boss was identified with his grandfather, and all of a sudden his grandfather and his boss flew apart. I tried to call the preclear three days later but his wife said he had left— he had gone to sea.

It is very "dangerous" to process people. They are liable to do all sorts of things. They are liable to get rational on you, and being rational about the way they live their lives is not necessarily being completely in ARC and in the groove with everything and everybody in their environment. Do you understand that?

For instance, you have this preclear and his name is Bill. Bill’s parents think he is a nice fellow now. He used to be kind of wild, but he is a nice fellow now: He is married, he has settled down and so forth, and they approve of him. Everybody approves of him. They think he is in fine shape. But we take a look at Bill and we find that Bill has chronic somatics. Why does he have chronic somatics? He is trying so hard to be approved of by everybody in the environment that there is no Bill. He has gotten to a point where he is up against a lot of people, and there are a lot of people in the world who like you as long as you do exactly as they tell you. And the second that you won’t do exactly what they order— no matter how irrational it is— they don’t like you anymore. People use this as a modus operandi of controlling you. As long as you do what they want, whether it is good for you or not, they approve of you and you are supposed to be happy. There is one way a man resigns all of his independence in the world.

So here are your circumstances, then, on this Fourth Act. We process Bill and Bill finds out all of a sudden what he is doing. Bill is liable to blow out of there, or the next time you see Bill, there has been a knockdown- dragout fight someplace or other and "it is all on account of Dianetics." Dianetics has been blamed by the family.

All you did was restore something of an individual’s life, some of his living characteristics; that is all you did for him. You just made him a little more alive. But there are lots of people in the world to whom a "live" object is something that has to be stopped, quick.

Now, you could work with past, present and future problems for a long time, because the funny part of this is that each one of these acts is a complete therapy. It is a complete package up to Act Four.

But we get into the Fifth Act and we merely have an assessment. It is very interesting to get an assessment. We find out if the preclear has certain idiosyncrasies or certain aches or pains. We want to know the source of those aches or pains. We want to know more or less what they are, because where each ache, each pain, each mental idiosyncrasy that he doesn’t like exists, he has a memory for which he will not take responsibility and which he cannot handle. It is important for you to know this: Everything that is wrong with any human being in his whole life stems out of refusal to take control of and full responsibility for— and therefore, refusal to be able to handle— a memory of some sort. He keeps pushing this thing away and it keeps coming back on him, and he blames it on something over here, he blames it over there and he does this with it and plays volleyball with it and does anything but just use it as a memory. The second he settles down and uses it as memory, its ability to harm him goes away.

Later on I will talk about cause and effect, but I want to tell you right here that that is the way you find excitement in life. That is the basic method of finding excitement in existence. You elect an antagonist, you elect something to be outside of your sphere of control, and you get action!

If you are bored or something of the sort, try it someday. Try it. If you have an automobile, the automobile is still probably running on its factory reputation. You can’t do too much to an automobile. Mother Nature is in there kicking when it comes to raising flowers, so you can’t do too much in this bracket. So take something in your own sphere of manufacture, like making a dress or building a table or something of the sort, and refuse to take over the responsibility for your tools and what they do. You will have fun. Refuse to take over responsibility for the finished product: If you can finish it, it will be because somebody else helped you, not because you did it. And it works out that way with your whole life.

Actually, as you go through life— no matter how well swamped up your case is, no matter how able your mind becomes— in order to have some action in life, some excitement in life, you still have to elect an antagonist and elect another antagonist over here and elect another one there. You say, "I’m not responsible for this sphere, this sphere and this sphere." That is how you get action.

You know why psychiatry doesn’t back up Dianetics? I elected them as a field of randomity. It makes a good fight! There never needed to have been one. All I would have had to have done was look at the first psychiatrist that I ran into about Dianetics and sort of say to myself, "I take full responsibility for you, you jerk, even though you are a jerk." I could have said I would take responsibility for psychiatry— responsibility for electric shock, Metrazol, prefrontal lobotomy, their institutional practices. I could have said, "It’s all right; that’s the best the boys could do at the time; there are better ways to go about it now." Probably now it would be the order of the day of the American Psychiatric Association that any psychiatrist would be shot who didn’t use Dianetics. But I say, "Electric shock— rrrhh! Prefrontal lobotomy —rrrhh! Institutional conditions— rrrhh!" Of course, we got a fight! But it has been interesting.

That should give you some sort of an idea of the breadth and scope that you can encompass. So, Act Five is just an assessment. You find out what is wrong with him.

Act Six is establishing the preclear’s service facsimile chain. You aren’t running it out at this stage; that comes later.

The Seventh Act is there not so much as an act as it is to find out whether this individual is actually running on his own control center. Is he a southpaw who has become a right- hander? Is he a man who is trying to be a woman? Is he a woman who is trying to be a man? Which is it? What is it? You just establish that to your own satisfaction so that you are not going into this thing cold. You won’t leave anything unfinished in the case if you find out this person has been a southpaw and then been a right- hander and then been a southpaw. Or this woman all of a sudden tells you rather timidly, "Well, I was in love with another girl at school." You say, "Yeah? All right," and you put it down in the book. Something happened in school that shifted her facsimiles in such a way that she behaved a trifle as a man for a certain period of time. There is something wrong there. But its wrongness is just the wrongness of running on the wrong control center.

You have two control centers— two sides to the head, two sides to the body. You can cut either one out or cut either one in, but one of them is the natural top boss. When that natural command center of the body fails, the sub- control center— which is not a natural command center— takes over. It is normally kept by the natural control center in the lower range of the tone scale. Therefore you can occasionally turn an insanity off just like clicking a switch, because the sub- control center is quite often in the insane bracket.

If the person is running on his correct control center, everything is right as rain; he is reasonable and everything else. But he has controlled the other side of the body by putting the sub- control center of his mind as far into apathy as he possibly could put it. That is how he can control it. And when a person knocks out the main control center and the other control center suddenly turns on, you have this phenomenon of amnesia. This is the old gag of a person getting hit in the head and losing his memory and being another person for six months. He has just swapped control centers.

You will get a gradient scale of this, where it is not so sudden, not so abrupt.

And then you get, also, the phenomenon of valence— a person shifting through a number of valences, which is the manifestation of schizophrenia.

Now, the Eighth Act is very important. It requires that your preclear know good, sound Straightwire and Lock Scanning procedures, because all you are doing is just loosening up the bank a bit. You are just getting the person to recover pieces of his life and so forth.

It is amazing. You start running start and stop, and you finally all of a sudden discover that the preclear has somebody in his vicinity who makes him wait all the time, and this waiting and this antagonism toward not moving, waiting and so forth, has brought the preclear into a state of boredom, and that is what has brought him into the state of boredom. That is all that is wrong with him. You just run "wait"; you just scan through all the times he ever had to wait. All of a sudden he will come up the tone scale, because, of course, what is he doing with those facsimiles?

Somebody else is making him wait, and he suddenly gets hold of the facsimile and decides that he can’t control it— that he can’t control his own memories, that he would like not to.

Or he has a postulate where he says, "I’ve got to stop this; I’ve got to stop it; I’ve got to stop smoking. Now I’ve decided; I’ve made up my mind I’ve got to stop smoking."

After an individual has postulated that he has got to stop, of course, he becomes a liar if he starts again. That is why trying to break a habit is so heartbreaking to an individual. He has already made a postulate which gave him the habit and then he comes along later and says he doesn’t want to do this. That is a direct negation of himself and so he doesn’t stop the habit.

All you have to do to stop a habit is knock out all the times when you decided to have that habit. You will find that you could stop a fellow from smoking cigarettes in an hour or so without much trouble.

The whole point is why? I understand that there is an $18 billion research program going on at this present time which is going to investigate the enzymes in tobacco so as to stop cancer of the lungs. It is wonderful what people will spend money for. If you were sure that was the cause and you had $18 billion to spend, you wouldn’t be spending it on investigating the enzymes; you would just say, "Well, that’s probably the cause; let’s just stop everybody from smoking." For $18 billion you could probably clear everybody in the United States of smoking without much trouble. Of course, it would disrupt commerce and the United States Treasury Department wouldn’t like you.

It is highly doubtful if these enzymes have any effect whatsoever upon cancer.

We have worked on cancer a bit in Dianetics. We haven’t specialized on it to any degree, but evidently cancer folds up rather rapidly. It is linked with a couple of very peculiar engrams clear down at the bottom of a bank. Evidently when you knock these things out (just at a guess: we haven’t enough cases to really establish it), the fellow doesn’t have them anymore; it goes away.

So, the Eighth Act is just to get your preclear moving well on the track. Life then looks a little better to him; he can get to these facsimiles a little bit better.

All this time what you have been doing with him is giving him some cognizance of his own wits and how they work. That, all by itself, will establish an improvement in an individual. You are building some confidence in his ability to think. You are showing him things about his mind he didn’t know existed. When he knows they exist he comes up the tone scale, because at the top of the tone scale is "I know," and the bottom of the tone scale is "I don’t know." All these guesses that he is making are in between.

The Ninth Act consists of running emotional curves until the preclear has the curve of one attempt- failure engram cycle. You do this until the service facsimile is located.

At that point you go on to Act Ten, which consists of running out every thought and emotion in the service facsimile.

What we call a service facsimile is just that particular rough experience which a person uses to excuse the things life has done to him: "Well, I was perfectly all right until Agnes left me. Yes, everything stemmed from there." "I was all right until the bank failed. Since that time . . ."

All the person is doing is excusing what he is doing at the present moment. He is using an analytical moment or action to explain to the rest of life and to himself how he is failing. Underneath that thing will be an engram— a bad physical experience— somewhere on the track. You run that out by effort and it will show up.

There is the real auditing in the case, right there. And you can spend quite a little time in that because when you have gotten that out, it is gone.

Now, you can leave the case right there. You could probably leave this case walking if it hadn’t walked before and so forth, and just stop the case right there. But if you want to fix it up so this case doesn’t get sick anymore then you keep on from there.

The Eleventh Act consists of running out all sympathy on everyone— all dynamics. You just lock- scan out every time an individual has felt sympathy for anybody.

I had an example recently when the housekeeper started coming down with a bad throat. It was very strange— she had been very sympathetic for three days to her sister who had a bad throat. Now she wonders why she is sick.

The doctor says, "Well, we don’t understand quite what it is, but it seems to be going around." What is going around isn’t a bug, it is this contagion: "Poor Eleanor; Eleanor is so sick today. Yes, you poor thing. Poor Eleanor, poor Eleanor, poor Eleanor.... I think I’m coming down with something too."

Now they languish, and then somebody comes along and says, "What’s the matter, Isabel?"

"Got a sore throat; I can’t talk."

"Oh, poor Isabel, poor Isabel.... I think I’m getting it." In such a way you get an epidemic.

It isn’t because you want to become a hard- hearted fellow that you scan out all sympathy; it is just that you want to get to a point where the human race can’t affect you that strongly or where you can choose the effect, because your past points of sympathy fixed you so that you lost your power of choice by having used it. You became sympathetic in this direction and sympathetic in that direction, and all of a sudden your power of choice went off.

Then you run the rest of the emotion off the case. You will get some very interesting material.

The Thirteenth Act has to do with postulates— just swamping the case up on postulates: everything the person has said he was, wasn’t and so forth all through his whole life.

Now, the Fourteenth Act may require just a little more Effort Processing; there may be some Effort Processing needed. But what it is actually is a very nice complicated procedure (which could also be used earlier), which consists of several buttons that you don’t know about yet. In other words, you haven’t got all your buttons yet.

There are three important things in this new book coming up. It has a chart of all possible things that you could hit in a case. There is cause and effect, and out of cause and effect we get full responsibility. Then there is the big boss button of all— the "serious" button.

I hope I have made the point with you that these fourteen acts are run as fast as necessary to get the preclear up to a point where he can hit the next step. That is as long as you linger on any one of those acts. It might look like a lick and a promise to you, but actually it isn’t.

Now, there is a possibility as we progress on this that there will be some change made in what happens in what act. But this is a form of operation which I can assure you will remain very consistent. And if the first four acts get changed at any time in the next six months, it will be because we have found the magic syringe which you point at the preclear and squeeze and the preclear goes bang! and he is Clear.