DIANETICS: FIRST LECTURE OF SATURDAY COURSE

A lecture given on 10 June 1950

Techniques

Two people got into an argument— one was for Dianetics and one was against Dianetics and neither one of them knew anything about Dianetics. The argument had something to do with the fact that one of them maintained that if a spinal cord was severed and Dianetic therapy was thereafter immediately applied, the spinal cord would go back together again. Well, this doesn’t take place in Dianetics.

So in order to clarify some of these minor points, we were forced into the publication of a textbook before Dianetics was completely and utterly developed. Perhaps in another two or three thousand years Dianetics will be developed, but at the present time this is not the case. This is true of any live, young science.

The Dianetic techniques in the Handbook work, but since that book was written there have been about four major developments in the Seld, all of which tend to shorten a case and make it possible to achieve our results even more swiftly. As a result, I expect next week there will probably be a fifth one, and so on.

For instance, what is the push button between sanity and insanity? What is the difference between a neurosis and a psychosis? It does not appear to be a graduated scale, yet there is some definite difference.

The same techniques apply to the psychotic but we have trouble attracting his attention, and we have spent quite a few hours with the psychotic tapping away at the case, trying to get his attention. So there is a difference, which led to the fact that there must be a push button.

We have talked for some time about a one- shot clear. That is to say a person walks into the office and gets a shot of something in the gluteus maximus, rises two feet off the floor, settles back gradually, lets out a couple of pale screams and suddenly gets up and is cleared!

That may be almost a ridiculous goal, but it has been postulated for some time; and last night we saw the first inklings of the fact that it might be possible. In view of the number of biochemists who are working with us, we will probably have something approximating this shortly, at least to the degree that we could give somebody a pill and spill all the painful emotion on a case, which would be very valuable.

The difference between a psychotic and a neurotic (as far as we know now) concerns the concentration of painful emotion upon a case. Therefore, the object is to get rid of the painful emotion. There is also unconsciousness on a case, but what is unconsciousness? Well, that might be related to painful emotion. So, if you could convert unconsciousness into painful emotion artificially (there is a tears reaction between painful emotion and a release of affect, and because of that there is some kind of a chemical reaction taking place), there would be the push button. ,

But how do you get the push button? Exactly what chemical compound would be required? This may sound way up in the air, but you can expect Dianetics to go on advancing. Just how far it advances is in a large measure due to those people who know about Dianetics. I am making that very plain right here at the beginning that although the techniques of Dianetics work, do they work as well and as fast as they could be made to work? Where are the holes in the techniques which are slowing up cases?

It is no fun to sit down and slug away at a non- sonic, non- visio, dub- in case for four or five hundred hours. It’s no fun listening to large quantities of delusion over and over, knowing very well it is delusion and yet unable to inform the patient of the fact. One would merely try to move him onto something else and find his lie factory. But if we could simply short- circuit this so that he would go straight on through and not give us the delusion, and if we could turn on sonic and visio in everybody, that would be a big advance!

The subject of this lecture concerns the study of cases and a method which is under very cursory examination (and not yet ready for public release) but which is giving results in the vicinity of about 60 percent of the cases.

However, we only have a series of 30, which is not good enough in Dianetics. I have had series of 2 and 3 that have looked wonderful and then on 4, 5 and 6 it was a complete flop.

In running a series of cases in Dianetics we have very carefully tried to keep away from the tendency to be optimistic. The Handbook reads as though a wild- eyed utopia is now opening up for all. That may be true, but the work that went in behind that is very carefully not optimistic.

In this current series of cases there will be several people on whom this new method of turning on sonic will be tried, and we will have more information. So you are not a spectator. You are a fellow conspirator on the attack on aberration.

There is no closed shop in Dianetics. It is so far out of our control at the present time that if somebody wants to set up an office someplace in San Francisco after reading the last two chapters of the Handbook, unfortunately he can do so and unfortunately he will do so.

For instance, I received a letter from two people in New York stating, "We are setting up an office in midtown Manhattan to practice Dianetic therapy." I have never heard of them. Who are they? Lay analysts? Psychiatrists? But to stop them? It is not likely that it could be done.

The sole danger in Dianetics was that it remained underground and was known to only a few. If a person knows what is being done to him, and that he is feeling badly because Jinks is busy pushing his buttons, then the ability of Jinks to push those buttons is vastly decreased. Whereas, if we only put this out to a very few Jinkses who then go around pushing everybody’s buttons, and the general technique and theory is not known, that would be far more dangerous than releasing it widely.

The most dangerous thing in the world is to suppress science. It takes it out of general circulation where it definitely belongs and gives it into the hands of small power groups where it does not advance with the rapidity it should, and in addition is used to wreak harm against mankind. Things known to everybody are relatively safe, whereas things known to one or two become just that much less safe.

In a science you have first the axioms. Now you have cause; now you have effect; now you have application, and application is always an art. One cannot practice medicine with penicillin alone. You have to know a little bit more about it. There has got to be personal experience involved. For instance, you will know more having opened three or four cases than you could ever hope to know by reading. That is application. That is an art. So we have the art of Dianetics.

Book Three of the Handbook is mostly art. Therefore, erected on the axioms, erected on the cause, we now have the art of application, and that is a shifting theory. It says in the Handbook that we know nothing very much about painful emotion, which is absolutely true, but we can do things with it. We want to do better things. Why sonic was turned off we didn’t know, but we now have a good inkling of it; and having that, if we know it thoroughly, we can turn it on— and we should be able to turn it on euery time.

For instance, we have a gentleman who very recently had been a nonsonic, non- visio case, except for a few little moments in his life, now running in the basic prenatal area with sonic, tactile and visio.

So there is a brand- new way of opening a case now in existence which we will be using until we have figured it out even better. An advancing live science will do this. Dianetics doesn’t depend on faith.

To start this indoctrination, let me first stress two or three points of the Auditor’s Code. l The Auditor’s Code isn’t there because it reads well. That code is there so that Dianetics won’t hurt people. Any time one has the cause for insanity, one can also create insane people. For instance, a Colt .45 in the hands of a 2 year old child loaded and cocked is dangerous! So is Dianetics to that degree.

We recently received a letter in which somebody decided he didn’t like his uncle. So he invited him up to his house, hit him over the head with a lead pipe, read a lot of material over him, kicked him a few times and then keyed it in to "Music, Music, Music" and sent him on his way!

The uncle wound up in the local asylum and the person who did it was wondering whether or not he should really have any conscience about it. He had thought it over carefully and wanted some information as to how to undo the deed. Unfortunately he gave us no name and address. But that sort of thing is going to happen, as it has in the field of hypnotism.

Enter the field of the human mind with Dianetics and one starts to get behind the scenes of the great sacred American home. One gets behind the myth of mother, dear mother. One also finds out that hypnotism is very common in this society. I never realized it was that common before. I have taken enough pervert hypnotism out of banks now to discover that about half a percent of all cases run have had pervert hypnotism in the bank— a very large percentage. "You will forget all about this now, you will forget all about this and no one will believe you if you ever tell them, and you couldn’t believe it yourself if you thought you would remember it, and besides if you did tell anybody and if it was discovered, then your father and mother would throw you out." I found this in three banks of people when they were about 13 or 14.

So the axioms of Dianetics (not Dianetic therapy) can be used by a sadist to implant insanity. Fortunately when insanity is implanted by Dianetics, it can be undone by Dianetics, but that it is going to be implanted you can be absolutely certain.

What I am discussing here, however, is an accidental upset of a case. There is only one way that therapy can be thoroughly, completely upset and that is by a deviation from the Auditor’s Code. I want to make the Code even clearer than it is in the Handbook. One case, which was up to a good release, deteriorated because of a break in the Auditor’s Code, and one case was driven into psychosis by a break in the Auditor’s Code. The extent of the deterioration on this one case that had attained a release is minor and can be mended easily, but in the other one, although the Auditor’s Code break was only a very small part of it, it was very definitely a part. The husband screamed and hammered his wife around (she was an incipient manicdepressive with a history of breaks) and forgot himself so far in his paranoia as to give her all manner of irrational commands.

She is now in his valence.

The break in the Auditor’s Code occurred because they had previously done some co- auditing and then some man had walked into the picture and she, being a nymphomaniac, did what she had always done before Dianetics— she went after this other man. The husband then became insanely jealous and knocked her around.

Furthermore, he then started screaming such phrases at her as: "Go to sleep" and "Open up your analyzer" and "All that’s the matter with you is engrams, engrams, engrams, that’s all you’ve got. God damn you, get out of here. I don’t ever want to see you again. Don’t ever come back, don’t ever come back. You’re dead as far as I’m concerned, absolutely dead!"

He evidently did this in such a way as to slap her into unconsciousness and then he implanted these things.

That was a very violent break of the Auditor’s Code, but it could be broken and might be broken accidentally and unknowingly by anyone unless I make these points clear.

The Auditor’s Code says the auditor is uncommunicative. That should be better evaluated to say that the auditor does not evaluate, which takes in a large sum of information. All due respect to Sigmund Freud and the splendid work he did in the field of the mind, the introduction of his 1911 theory of delusion did an enormous amount to fill up institutions! Because by going out and using that principle on people, I could put people in institutions too.

The theory of delusion: Insanity starts by delusion. Childhood delusions become insanity and therefore what one remembers as having done is delusion. We pick up a college textbook on psychiatry and we can look up cases where the patient was informed that what she thought she was experiencing while in her mother’s womb was only a product of her imagination.

Freud overlooked the fact that the mind is well aligned only as long as it can assert its working principle to be right. The mind is right. It has got to think it is right. Even though it is working on engrams it has still got to think it is right. So it will justify engrams.

Take a person who has an overloaded engram bank, and for analogy let’s say that he has 10 monitor units left out of a total of 900 monitor units, yet he is still percolating, he is still sane. These remaining 10 monitor units are able to direct the organism and they are being informed of what the organism is doing. Therefore they can correlate themselves to existence. If anything happens to trip off these units and demonstrate to them absolutely and completely that they were wrong and had placed the organism in danger of death, you would probably have a psychotic on your hands. I haven’t tried it. I don’t intend to.

But it does work out that when a person is trying to recall incidents in the vicinity of people who know those incidents and he is challenged as to his information and somebody says, "Oh, no, that was Joe Ceppos that was there and the doctor’s name was Mule Baxter. Oh, you’re wrong," the patient is in an undefended state at that moment. He is depending on the auditor as a watchdog between him and life.

The auditor is supposed to get him to attack the engrams. Suddenly the auditor is apparently attacking him, particularly if the person is regressed. There he is with his hands full of doctor and birth, let us say, and suddenly the auditor chips in and says, "Oh, well, look, you weren’t born at home. I know. I asked your mother. You were born in hospital. Now come on, run this in a hospital."

All of a sudden the patient, who has been struggling with what is left of his analyzer while he is in this regressed state, is faced with a new problem of having to fight the auditor. So, you can count on him coming up out of it yelling, but much more importantly, the auditor’s ability then to audit that patient is very badly injured and the patient’s ability to run the engram has been undermined and is not easily restored.

One could say, "Well, all we’re going to do now is to go back to the moment when the Auditor’s Code was violated and we’ll run that violation as an engram," but it does not work too well because that violation may have restimulated an engram which might not be ready to pull. It might be one which is halfway up the bank and is very well set. Therefore, you are facing a problem of having to audit the patient into the prenatal area who doesn’t want anything more to do with it.

So there is the Auditor’s Code. Just the plain remark, "I think you’re imagining things, I don’t think your mother would do that to you," would do it. Hitting him in the head with a brick would be kinder. You will realize this if it ever happens to you, and you have my full permission to get up and slug the auditor who does this. It is very destructive. So the Auditor’s Code is not something that we can take lightly.

If the patient says, "So, there I was in the prenatal areal sitting on this chimney . . ." or as a homosexual said to me one day, "Why, here I am sitting here, and there is Mother," (this was about two or three months after conception) "and all of a sudden Papa comes in and hits Mother in the stomach with the full force of his fist and I go up out of the womb, hit the ceiling, open a parachute, float down, and go back into the womb again and curl up. That’s an amazing thing! Maybe she called him a homosexual?" Well, you don’t buy it, but you don’t tell him you are not buying it. An auditor knows very, very quickly what is imaginary and what isn’t in a case. It doesn’t have to be a flagrant fact.

One patient, whenever he starts to run what we in Dianetics call "garbage," runs off into a monotone. Anybody who audits him knows instantly when he goes off into that monotone and can say, "Now, let’s get back into the engram," and he quite obligingly does so. He could go on for two hours running this delusion, straight off. (However, since the lie factory was knocked out he doesn’t do that anymore.) But one can recognize it, and there are tests for it in the Handbook by which the auditor can tell whether or not a person is running delusion. That test however is not some aberree’s say- so.

I took one little boy one time whom I saw sitting on a stone wall lookin very contemplative, and he was so pathetically emaciated that I thought I would try to do something for him. So I kidnapped him every day when he came home from school for a while and gave him a release, l at which point his mother, seeing a strange change in the child, finally extracted the information from him that he was coming over to see me. Well, what was I doing? I was perfectly willing to inform her. So she came over because she just had to have something done about her donkeyextomy or something, and I ran her back down.

She had been going around with the happiest little tale about having given birth to this child you ever heard, and he had had this tale told him but it was very far from the truth. Mama thought this was true. So this little boy could have gone home and said birth was a certain way, and Mama could then have said, "Oh, no. That wasn’t true. You were born in a buggy," and so on, which would have upset him.

We took Mama back in this case and found out that this beautiful little tale about birth was told to her immediately after she was in labor, while she was still in a shaky state of mind, and it had gone into the conscious mind, but in actual fact was not what had happened to her at all.

The doctor in birth in this particular case was a very nice guy and he did not carry the child by the heels out into the hall to go locking for Papa to get a cigar because Mama had been delivered. This tale was at the end of the birth delivery and Mama was completely deluded about it.

The birth actually was a very quiet affair. Mama was fond of saying how she had screamed for 50 solid hours whereas the delivery had taken 10. There was an interesting variation of data. .

So the Auditor’s Code has to put up with this sort of thing. It is bad enough when some aberree in the vicinity of a patient suddenly calls him on his data. He can fight that back. "Aw, you couldn’t remember what happened to you when you were in the womb. This is a lot of bunk," and so forth. He will get up and fight because he has gotten rid of it.

But the auditor is the sentry. He is up there bucking the world while helping the person buck the engrams. It’s a team effort, and everything will go along smoothly unless the auditor violates some clause of the Auditor’s Code, whereupon the poor patient is instantly thrown underneath the engram, fighting the auditor. The analytical mind of the auditor plus the impact of the engram is now impinged upon an analytical mind which is reduced. This is extremely important and cannot be overstressed, because you can just stop a case in its tracks if it is violated.

The question has been raised whether telling the patient who starts giving "garbage" to get back on the engram may intimate to him that you don’t believe him. This is true; however, his amount of analytical shutdown while he is in an engramic area is usually quite marked. If the patient is giving "garbage," you get him back on the engram with smooth tact without inferring that you don’t believe it. You can say, "Let’s go back to when you had a somatic," or, "Let’s go back to that somatic now," and just try to get him back, and you will generally get chunks out of the engram that you are working in dub- in.

Regarding getting flash answersl from the file clerk, I won’t guarantee anybody’s file clerk. However, except in a case which was operating under almost 100 percent delusion, most file clerks generally come up with correct material, even though the aberrated personality very often denies it. One asks the file clerk for a date by saying, "Give me a date. The first date that comes into your mind."

And he says, "Well, it’s a funny thing, it was December 31, 1931."

"Give me a time of day."

"Two o’clock," the file clerk will say.

"Well, what happened on this day?"

"Nothing." And that was the day he was run over by an automobile and was put in hospital for two months!

A patient gave this to me just a few days ago: "Nothing ever happened to me when I was 16. I wasn’t sick. Nothing happened." Yet the flash answers gave 16. That is the file clerk handing out data.

So I said, "All right, now just close your eyes and give me the first words that flash into your mind."

"Wait."

That’s a good holder, so we ran out the doctor saying, "Wait," and somebody else saying, "Wait," over on one side of the engram. Then all of a sudden he said, "You know, I was lying out in the park and the sun was shining and the birds were singing in the trees and the nurse was saying to me, ‘Now, you wait here for a moment, honey, ’ while she went off to get a policeman." This was very interesting information, because the person was supposed to be 16 years old.

It is an interesting fact that people very often have sonic on the exact instant on the track where they are held. They very often have sonic at that slight moment and at no other moment. So- if you pick up a person who is held on the track and ask him for it, you will get a sonic if you are patient. It may be something like "Stay here, you bastard!" and he will be very amazed and surprised at the insulting language that he has been hearing around the womb. Several times recently I have found sonic on that point, and investigation is being carried forward.

The nurse in the 16 year old incident of the above case was an associative restimulator for his nurse when he was a small kid. So the doctor says, "You’ll have to wait here for 24 hours until we find out if you have appendicitis." That, you figure, is the holder, but that isn’t the holder. The nurse walks in right after the doctor has just been pounding all the way up and down his spine, examining him for appendicitis (why doctors check the spine in such a case, I have never been able to figure out), and while he is lying there all bruised up she says, "Well, you will have to wait here for another 24 hours while the doctor checks this over." So he waited, and he had been there for three and a half years! The same engramic commands was latched on to an incident way down the track.

A gentleman and his wife were here recently and I said to the husband, "Now let’s go down to a couple of pleasure moments," followed by, "Now give me what is causing your discomfort," and he was in the middle of birth.

His wife was sitting there very happy about everything and she said, "You know, that’s a very funny thing, but every time he gets an ulcer attack he rocks back and forth and then he rolls from side to side, and says, ‘My God, if I could only have a baby I’d be cured." ’

Then she lay down on the couch for a diagnostic run to test her sonic and emotions and I said, "How did you like your mother?"

"Well, she’s all right."

Then I said, "Now let’s pick up the moment she gives you a smack," to see what chain could exist for that. So she picked up a moment.

But this girl had sonic, and "Ooh," she said, "that’s awfully loud."

And I said, "Well, come on up to present time."

"I can’t move."

I figured out that her mother had told her to sit down in the chair and not move. But that’s what I figured wrong. The husband in running his birth had said, "If he can’t move, I can’t move, I can’t move, it’s not moving, I’m going to die," and her birth engram and her husband’s birth engram were in chronic restimulation. Both of these cases newly opened were in engrams which would not deintensify and had to have hours spent going early on the track and so forth.

It is different with students on a course. They have lots of time to work these things out. But these people had merely called one afternoon wanting to know about Dianetics and then wham! they were in birth, which was not a hostly thing to do, because I couldn’t run out much of it. She went home feeling fine, but she was in a manic at the end of birth. A manic on birth will last for 24, 48 hours, sometimes up to 60 hours.

Then there was a lady that thought Dianetics was absolutely wonderful because after her case was open for about 15 minutes she went into a wonderful, beautiful feeling. Of course 3 days later it disappeared, because she was on the manic on the end of birth with Mama lying there, and Papa saying, "Oh, what a beautiful little girl, what a beautiful girl."

Now I want to get on with something more vital than these minor anecdotes of Dianetics. If anybody’s case goes into a flat spin, we, of course, are perfectly able to take care of the situation. I expect some cases are going to have to flat spin for the first couple of months.

It almost never happens that the first couple of weeks in therapy are 100 percent comfortable. Very often the person does beautifully, and feels fine and everything goes along well. But the usual procedure is that in the first couple of weeks he races down the time track to the bottom where it says, for example, "Get out," so he gets out, but there’s one right after it which says, "Come back." So he comes down the bank and he stops halfway, and all of a sudden he has got a headache and he says, "Oh, my God, I’ve got a headache," which takes him low in the bank, and so on.

The only friend you have got in a case sometimes is the file clerk. You never have to make friends with a file clerk. As a matter of fact the file clerk will run the auditor very often. But if you clamp down on your case too much it will restimulates an engram.

Sometimes in entering a psychotic or an incipient psychotic case Mr. File Clerk has just been sitting there with the patient saying, "Now I’ve got a new somatic," or, "I keep thinking of these words and there just must be something in here that says ...." The file clerk has gone mad. But you don’t have to coax the file clerk. It is an operating mechanism which works or doesn’t work. In a neglect case the file clerk quite often will not work, but it will do absolutely no good to try to persuade him to work.

It is unnecessary to harass a file clerk, because the file clerk will operate with you 100 percent of the time if he can operate at all.

A case can become very agitated and very disturbed and nervous sometimes, and he starts haunting you saying, "I’m sure that my mother and father must have had a terrible fight and I’m absolutely certain that I have five AAs in the bank and I know that if I can just do so- and- so and so- and- so, we could get at this stuff and we could do this." And he is extremely agitated.

All of a sudden, by some happy piece of brainwork on your own part, you suddenly decide to send the file clerk to the incident which is holding up the case. You just say, "The file clerk will now go to the incident that is holding up the case," and quite often the file clerk will hand out the engram that has everything mechanically drawn into it.

That is a grouper. A mechanical grouper such as a nitrous oxide incident is one in which the bank is right up there all in one piece.

Groupers are very hard things to find in a case. Denyers, bouncers and the rest of them are easy, but groupers are tough. One says, "When I count from one to five and snap my fingers a phrase that groups things together will appear in your mind. One- two- three- four- five (snap!)," and all of a sudden it will appear.

The file clerk starts to run this incident off, he gives you a few phrases, and suddenly this person is perfectly content, he will go to work and will live his life and so forth. He will lie down and run it out, the file clerk is now happy and the case will rlm.

But whenever a person gets agitated about it, you can be absolutely content that you have not hit the situation. In the case of a psychotic who begins to get abusive, and continues to get more and more abusive the longer you work on him, be assured that that file clerk is not satisfied with the way you are handling his case. I sometimes wonder why these file clerks, who had such a tremendous command of Dianetics, didn’t bother to let me know before!

The question often arises of how familiar should the patient be with the terminology of Dianetics. The answer to that is in the back of the Handbook where there are several pages devoted to advice to a preclean That is all there is to it. I have discovered that since Dianetics has been known to patients, and they have a good idea of the working principles, they do not work as easily as the people I used to work on that knew nothing about Dianetics. As a matter of fact, in order to keep the work very quiet and so forth, I have even told people that this is what they do in the Woodoo temple of ancient Egypt, and they have been satisfied. You tell them, "Well, we don’t care about the subjective reality of this material, just tell me your troubles now. If we just go back to a time when the spirit first entered the body ...."

"Ouch!"

Dianetics works a lot better on a person who is completely ignorant. But for someone who knows about Dianetics, or who has heard about Dianetics and doesn’t know what to expect, that so simple section on "Advice to the Preclear" is in the Handbook to save the auditor his vocal cords.

Of course, one couldn’t tell the file clerk to go somewhere if the patient had no idea what the file clerk was, and his own file clerk didn’t yet know its name. However, he finds out pretty fast. You can’t say, "Give me a holder," if the person doesn’t know what a holder is. Put it differently. One can say, "Give me a phrase that would make someone stay in one place." Or you could give an example of a holder, and then say, "Now, give me something like that. When I count to five I want you to give it to me. One- two- three- four- five (snap!), " and the person very often will.

One can envision the time track from conception to present time as a strip, composed of all the perceptics. It is a bundle of perceptics, not just one line, and it runs up to present time. If he is running properly on his time track, he can then connect with most of his perception He should be able to connect up all of them, plus the thought he was thinking at that moment, plus the imaginary things that he was seeing at the time and so on. Everything including kinesthesia and tactile ought to be there.

But it doesn’t work out easily that people who have engrams have these things available. There are two reasons why this occurs. One is computational. The computational reason says, "I can’t see, I can’t feel, I can’t hear, I can’t do anything. I am blind, I follow you till I am blind, deaf and dumb." Or, "I am tired, I’m going to sit right here until you make up your mind." This is a computational shut- off. Any mind contains some of these.

Then there is the mechanical computational shut- off which is on the borderline, whereby it is computational but it has a mechanical action. Here is the engram running on a certain plane and it has below it in the basic area a bouncer or sometimes lots of bouncers, which is why people can’t get back there ordinarily. If they can’t get back fast, there is a bouncer in that area and you have to depend on your guesses because there is so little energy, and the file clerk very often can’t push back that far. You have to rely on repeater technique to get him down there.

If one goes down into the basic area of the track, one finds such phrases as, "Stay away from me, don’t touch me, stay away, don’t touch me, now get out, get out of here, don’t touch me." All the way up the bank one is liable to find this person running the engram, only he is stabbing at it from much further up the track. He breaks the engram this way: He will repeat himself down into the engram and out of the engram and for just an instant his sonic will turn on. But he isn’t there long enough to really get a sonic, so there is apparently a sonic shut- off on it.

For instance, the patient will dive into the engram with the words "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you." That is caused by something which holds the person above the moment when something is happening and, although it is computational, it has a mechanical aspect. It is holding off something.

Then there is the one where you knock out the basic areal line and go on, and all of a sudden the person settles down and runs right straight on through the engram, which happens in lots of cases.

One could envision the time track running up the line with what look like leaves attached to it, on which lie engrams containing valences, together with a chute up the side of the track which holds boxes. Then there is the trinity of Papa, Mama and Baby, which has been in existence for many, many thousands of years.

Baby is on the time track, but Papa is on the side of the time track and Mama is also on the side of the time track, which gives us two boxes and the track.

At this point Baby still has some contact with reality and existence, so he can scan this track up the line. If, for instance, all Mama’s valences are over on the side of the time track, he doesn’t get sonic when he is running in Mama’s valences. Very commonly you find this amusing circumstance where the patient can hear everybody but Mama. Of course he is being Mama, so naturally he can’t hear himself think, or some such thing; he is over in the series of boxes which are just off the time track.

If he gets into one of these boxes in a valence, and this engram has a holder in it such as "Stay here" or "Go downstairs now and stay there," "Go upstairs" or "Stay here and then go upstairs," you will have the illusion of the whole engram moving up to present time in one of these boxes. An engram can be slid up and down the track. That is a horrible and grievous fact. I wish it were not so. It is your worst enemy. These boxes are not solid on the track. They can be slid up and down it. If you want proof of this, and if you want to drive somebody utterly mad, slug him over the head with a piece of lead pipe and say, "You can remember everything you have ever heard, seen or felt, in present time at the same time." The Dianeticist that could untangle that case would be a real genius if he just walked in on it cold, because this incident would be in present time with everything else on top of it. So the Dianeticist would have to start trimming around the edges not knowing quite what had happened to the person. Although it would be rough, it could nevertheless be undone.

Several years ago when research was very intense, I learned this the hard way on a young man who maintained that he could run his own engrams. He kept insisting on it. He wanted all his engrams up in present time where he could run them himself.

So finally I swamied him into a deep trance and said, "You can remember everything you’ve ever felt, heard or seen in present time. You can remember all these things in present time." That’s it, just you can remember— permission. There was enough material in the bank to pick up the whole bank and sweep it up just as one might take leaves and brush them into a pile.

That fellow was in misery, he was in agony. It took me about a week’s work to straighten his case out to the point where he could breathe, because naturally that positive suggestion went down the track, and latched on to whatever was there. The reason he wanted me to do this was an engramic reason which approximated in its wording what he wanted to be told. I was very obliging. I told him. Up it came to present time. Headaches, knitting needles through him, both legs broken, he was in very bad shape. He didn’t run any of it in present time either.

Although that was very valuable from an experimental standpoint, I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t known about what was going to happen to him and about how I could untangle it. However, I didn’t think it would be that hard to untangle. But to find the light locksl that I gave him with hypnosis, and try to pull it off and discover at the same time that the incident which should have been underneath it was now lying parallel with it was very, very rough.

However, let me assure you that in all the researches of Dianetics there hasn’t been a single human being who has been permanently disabled in any way. There have been a lot of people who have been very, very uncomfortable for a couple of weeks or a couple of months, but you are benefiting from what they went through. I have always patted them on the back too and told them they gave a great boost to science.

Positive suggestion in hypnosis works very interestingly, but this is not a lecture on hypnosis. If you are interested in hypnosis I advise you to read up on it. There are books by such people as Bernheim and Charcot on the subject. There are quite a lot of them available in public libraries. It is valuable to know but not essential.

For instance, if one put in a hypnotic suggestion on the time track which says, "You can write," and the next day put another positive suggestion on the time track saying, "You can’t write," the person will go on writing. The first one in the bank has priority. This is also true in running individual engrams. The first one has priority. If the first engram in the bank says, in a Junior case, "George was a skunk," George will go on smelling very badly for a long time, even though the next engram says, "George is a beautiful wolf." The priority is number one.

Therefore, engramic commands are not reversible by hypnosis, hypnotism to the contrary.

There are hypnotists who have studied Dianetics who no longer practice hypnotism, and they are very happy to have a theory which explains a lot of what hypnotism is doing.

One can have a case of the engram staying in one place, nailed down on the track in an orderly fashion, and one can have a case with a grouper in it which has pulled all the incidents up to present time. That person is generally psychotic.

There are these various compartments. For example, a person is stuck at the age of 5 months after birth in a scarlet fever engram or some such thing. The nurse was very nice and mother was very nice and father was very mean and so on, and these compartmented boxes sit just off the track. Now the person takes the winning valence. The boss around there happened to be the nurse. Papa and Mama had always been mean to him, but the nurse won and so he is back there in the nurse’s box. Now you can run this thing all the way up and down the track. He is in the engram, but he will actually move on the track. But because the nurse wasn’t anyplace else, he isn’t going to get sonic anywhere else. That is the current theory we are working on which accounts for this strange fact of sonic shut- off.

As soon as you take somebody down the track and find out who he can hear and see, and who he can’t see, you can bet your bottom dollar that he is in this situation. To complicate the picture, he can be in five or six of these boxes on the track simultaneously, and any given situation may throw him into another one. And he will shift valence back and forth. When one tries to run him in therapy, he gets off into one of these sonic blocks and he will go up and down the track picking up the information which is over to one side. But although he is getting this impression of the information, he is not getting a somatic.

All this is mechanical, it merely has a holder in it, that’s all, and there will be a shut- off in every engram except that one because he is not on his track. He is into valences.

This is very simple. One only has to run somebody to find that because Mama says, "My back hurts so badly," this person has been going around most of his life with backaches. It isn’t his backache. He may have a backache in the bank someplace, but at the same time he has been going around with Mama’s backache.

There are a great number of men, for instance, in Dianetics with bad cases of morning sickness, who are, of course, suffering from Mama’s morning sickness. They are in Mama’s valence and get Mama’s somatics. Somebody else may be skewed around in the bank in Grandma’s valence and Grandma died of skin cancer. He has got Grandma’s somatics, but they are manifested somatics, so he contracts some weird kind of dermatitis. He is that person to that degree, and to that degree he has lost his own identity. The thing to do is to get him out of the false identity which he is in.

You will find somebody who is so thoroughly shut off sometimes that he not only can’t see or hear anybody but he is everybody.

When we start moving a person out of these slots onto his own time track, this action alone very often scares into view the fear, terror, pain, or other reason why he mustn’t go on with something. He has got to be the winning valences in this case.

For example, Grandma was wonderful. But Mama was Papa’s boss, so if he were driven out of Grandma’s valence he was the third character down the line and if he were really hard up and the dramatization of Mama and Grandma had both been broken, then there would only be one thing left for the fellow to do and that would be to be himself, and what was himself in this case was that he had scarlet fever. We break this dramatizations and the person breaks out with a rash which they call allergy.

There are two things involved, the computational and the mechanical. The rest follows in this fashion: Up the track the person goes flitting along in Grandma’s valence. Grandma is an ally, Grandma is the person to be, Grandma is the boss of the family; and the child is doing just fine as Grandma, with the analytical mind having made in its basic region this computation, and the reactive mind having definitely decided that this is the thing to be, all hands in agreement: the way to live is to be Grandma. But when he is 7 years of age Grandma dies. That seals the valence and charges the whole bank. Grandma is dead. Well, he was Grandma. So we get repercussions on the death of an ally. This is an explanation and this theory is predicting new data.

The intention then is to shake the person out of these boxes on the time track. This can be done in several ways. We can knock out the painful emotion. And the person won’t be able to get out of those areas very easily unless we do take some of the painful emotion out of the case, such as the death of an ally. Discharge that and we have the bank fairly clear. Now, he will start swinging back onto the track, but as he tries to come onto the track, and hear, see, feel and so forth, there is some reason why he can’t feel. And this incident sometimes suddenly springs up into view.

In other words, he skids under the track and goes into an incident where he is being very badly beaten around, or something has happened to him. So, we are cleaning up then the reasons why he cannot be on the track. Therapy is devoted whenever possible to just getting the person on the track, in the knowledge that any time you start to run a case that has non- sonic, nonvisio, and the case keeps on running without somatics, without this, without that, out of its own valence, picking up words out of thin air, that case sooner or later is going to jam. This has been the big trouble in the past and one that occasions many hours of therapy.

Even well after release the patient can still be in possession of a couple of terror engrams, for instance. So he is still tricky, he is not up in present time, he is really not moving on the track, and although you have the illusion that he is moving, in actual fact he is over on the side of the track, moving up and down in an engram.

So you pick up an engram, but then you find that you can’t run it because it has a holder. The next one has a holder in it too, so now you have got two engrams together. Then you find that you can’t run the next engram out because it has got a bouncer in it and so forth. You are just putting everything on one point. Now you keep telling him it is time to come up to present time, but you won’t be able to bring him up to present time with any great degree of precision. You can move him on the track, and he will feel better and so on, but we are not doing a good clean job of it. Therefore the thing to do is to try to get the person on the track. The way you do that is find the moments when he was winning, when his own valence was safe.

But remember he really has to be in his own valence at that moment he is winning, and you try to persuade him to be there by gently putting him back to pleasurable moments when he is winning. Keep on trying to pick these up. He may be in somebody else’s valence at the time he is winning, and that win may be no good to him. He may not think he deserves it, so it depends on what he wants.

We pick him up at a moment when Grandpa is proud of him. So he can be himself. He likes Grandpa anyway, and he is probably not in Grandpa’s valence. Now we take him and we crowd him out of Grandma’s valence, where he sits, and sooner or later as we try to pull him out of one of these valences something is going to come up.