DIAGNOSISA lecture given on 12 June 1950Opening Cases In this lecture I am going to demonstrate how one goes about doing a diagnosis. I’m going to show you how a case should be opened, certainly the first time, and as often as possible afterwards until a person is working very well. This is the result of an observation made in research not too long ago and an observation which is rolling down the line toward turning on sonic. One has the time track. We know about valences from the Handbook. And we know that these engrams can slide up and down the bank, being very loosely held and not very well timed. Therefore a person can get off into a valence in an engram in which he is stuck. He can then be slid up and down the track all over the place without sonic, without visio, without anything, but he is still moving on the track. Sonic can be cut off by a computation such as, "I can’t see, can’t feel, can’t hear." It can also be shut off by somebody getting over into one of these valence cabinets in one of these engrams and going up and down the track. So we try and take the person to moments of pleasure when he is winning and can be himself. That brings him— if it is practiced often enough— out of hiding, and then we can return to him his sonic, visio and so forth. This is workable in a very surprising number of cases, although it is not yet a 100 percent proposition, which is what I am trying to make it.
To start crowding a person, demanding that they listen, telling them to go back, and becoming impatient in any way with them, will cause a tendency to jar. One tries to get a person into his own valence in pleasure moments, moments when he is winning, the time he wins the fight after the neighborhood bully has been raising hell with him, the time that he didn’t happen to like his father, when he hauled off and really gave the old man what- for, and the old man took it. These pleasant moments in life are what you re- enforce. There are two points:
When one first begins to go up and down the track, one is returned immediately to moments of pain, and the sudden impact of the pain rather encourages him to foster the idea that it is agreed that he will try to escape from facing the reality of it, therefore cutting down the intensity of the experience. A neat mechanism, which defeats itself utterly. There are people who were run on the old techniques who were cleared years ago. A lot of these people don’t even know they are Dianetic clears, since in practicing such a thing I didn’t want it to get out of hand. It got out of hand too soon anyway, we could have happily used another year or so and maybe at that point achieved a one- shot clear without any ramifications. But it so happened that all of this material was escaping out from underneath us. There was less and less of it could be held close to the chest and it meant that one had to write 180,000 word letters any time one wanted to answer a question on Dianetics. People were practicing Dianetic therapy, trying to do something about it long before there was any information about it. For instance, someone on the single strength of a very short thesis on the basic laws and axioms of Dianetics started a group up in Michigan which is still running strong. They did not have any manual to work from. They had practically no instructions and so on. But they were kept informed. Now, if one has to keep everybody informed who is interested, it would be an impossible job. Consequently, before the first release of Dianetics we were getting things pretty well stacked up. It was necessary to step back. As a result it was released in a form which had been, in all of its essentials, in practice and successful for a very long time. But that form was even improved in writing the Handbook and it is further improved now. The big contribution to Dianetics in the last year is the subscience of Dianometry. l The term is borrowed from psychometry. However, psychometry, from which psychedianometry was derived, concerns the psyche. We are more interested in thought than we are in the psyche so the name Dianometry was evolved. That is not an effort to be different, it just measures more. That work was done in the last year, and was a highly important contribution to the science itself. No paper on this has been released as yet, but part of the fruits of that labor suddenly jelled and came into practical application when we suddenly observed that we could turn sonic on in people. Having made that observation one had to scramble back to find out why; and we are doing a good job of it, turning on sonic and tracing back various incidents in the past. One of our researchers took a newspaper reporter and halted him in mid- air as he was diving off a springboard. He also took this reporter back and had him go to moments when he was swimming and eating, and glanced through and turned on the reality of several incidents in full, without suggestion, doing a good, careful job, and then brought the reporter up to present time and said, "All right, now what do you think about that?" And the reporter said, "Think about what?" "Well, what did you think about swimming?" "I wasn’t swimming." "Well, what did you think about all these things that you’ve been back to?" "I haven’t been anyplace; I’ve been sitting right here talking to you. What do you mean, swimming?" He was treating a hypnotic subject and hadn’t realized it! All he did was tell the man to close his eyes and the person went into amnesia trance. Of course in amnesia trance those units up against the bank can always contact pleasure moments. There is nothing easier. So, the turning on of sonic is a highly important activity. And the method given above is the method we are using, no other. You take a person who is completely blanked out according to all purposes and there are two things that can happen: He is either stuck on the track someplace, or he is stuck in an engram, and you are not going to be able to release him out of that engram unless you take that engram into account. Try and find it and release him from it and he will fly up and down the track nicely. If you leave him in that engram, he is probably being the nurse or the doctor. The doctor is a very high altitude person in the society. He gives Mama and Papa orders, they follow them, he is a friend, he is someone one looks to when one is very ill, or when one contracts a disease, or breaks a leg. Therefore he is a very, very respected member of the community. In addition to that he is part of many engrams. This places more people into doctors’ valences than can possibly be counted. If the boy is normally in Papa’s valence, and the doctor shows up on the scene, start running the incident and you will suddenly find out that you are running an incident with the patient as the doctor. Take an engram where you are getting sonic on Mama and Papa and no sonic on the doctor. He is the doctor, only he is lying there sick. That is a shift of valence. One gets exteriorized viewsl and so forth, with a shift in valence. Or the person is not in anybody’s valence. He has simply flown out into the blue and the only place that he is safe is in the upper right- hand corner of the room. I have actually had patients who are looking down on the scene of birth from clear up in the corner of the room, with the nurse walking back and forth. It might also be dub- in, but the mind is a composite. Run one of these incidents a few times and ordinarily the person will get back into himself. So you run out the valences, and coax him back into his own valence. The easiest and smoothest way to get a person back into his own valence is to run him through moments when he is winning and when he is enjoying life. Then it is very safe to be himself. At those moments he can recover all of his perceptions. And one can go through the whole catalog of perceptics— sonic, sound, taste, kinesthesia, tactile— and one can even find moments of pleasure that contain pain, so one can turn on the pain. For instance, someone is at a party and somebody breaks a bottle of beer over him. He can distinguish the fact that it is a party, and feel the pain. Then all of a sudden he realizes he can feel pain, he can see, he can hear, and he can do all these other things without dying in his tracks, which is what the computation has been telling him before that. So you take him back to these moments when he is ill and without telling him what is there, you merely ask him to take a look. You treat these moments as though they were engrams which have got to be run out. The only moment that cannot be erased in a lifetime is a moment of pleasure, or a null moment which basically isn’t even there. Those are not erasable. Research on it has found that if they appear to be erasable, something else is coming in over the top of them and holding them down such as, "I can only touch this once," "I can only be in one place at one time and then I have to be someplace else," or, "I am so busy I can’t stay anywhere." Engrams of that character chase a person out of every place he goes to on the time track. You cannot by test deintensify a moment of pleasure. The baby is getting a bottle. Take a person back to being a baby getting a bottle several times, and he still will lie there and drink the milk. If the baby was getting a slap in the head, take him back to the slap in the head and it is less and less intense and finally the whole track comes apart. The perishable thing in life is pain. So one can go back over these pleasure moments and build them up. There was one case of this when they returned a man, not to a pleasure moment, but to his office on a random date, January 3rd, 1950, and had him walk in and open up his mail. At first he didn’t know whether he was there, then he thought that maybe he might be there and that perhaps he could hide the idea behind his hat up on the coat rack. Then he went through it again and got what seemed to be a pile of mail there, he guessed, but he was very dubious about the whole thing. They just kept returning him through the incident and each time through he started to pick up something new. All of a sudden he found out that on the 3rd of January he didn’t put his coat on the coat rack, he put it over a couple of boxes; that the top letter on the 3rd of January was from the Ultraviolet Light Company, that the next letter was from the Veterans’ Administration, and so on down the list. Then he went through these things and read all the addresses, in color. Next he opened his mail, which at first appeared to be blank sheets, but which gradually built up until he had a packet with papers in it. Next he had the slight sound of paper. Then he dropped the first envelope into the waste basket, and then went over it: "Didn’t go in the waste basket— that one went on the floor." Thus one is able to really build up an insignificant moment, further and further. The person all of a sudden begins to realize that the past is not dangerous. He can go into it. He can recognize that there is reality. The auditor is not trying to tell him there is reality, but he gets more and more certainty on it at first glance and will then go through the whole incident. One subject was found to be very hard to work, extremely occluded. This case was in Ylddish and finally some Ylddish phrase that means "on guard" was located. That case was stuck "on guard" in about 55 engrams simultaneously; he was in bad shape. He had the pale gray look that can quite often be seen in an institution. So I started taking him back down the line and he was going nowhere. It was all black with nothing there at all. Gradually he started to pick up a scrap of this and a scrap of that and suddenly he is arguing with an engineer in a swimming pool. As they step out of the pool he is still arguing about a certain principle of engineering and he starts to get a little bit hot on this. This argument is one he won. The other person finally backed down. Very shortly thereafter, this person is running through with the emotion of winning. He has been swimming, he is wet, he is listening to the other person and so on but there was this blank sonic. There were merely impressions of sonic. So I fished around in his case for about an hour and finally got into the first motion picture he had ever seen. There was Felix the Cat going down off the roof into a rain barrel. And he sat there looking at Felix the Cat. All of a sudden his kid energy and enthusiasm about Felix the Cat turned on in full. He suddenly heard the xylophone running down the scale as Felix the Cat is falling off the roof and then boom! the bass drum as Felix falls into the barrel. He was stunned to realize he had heard something. So we ran the xylophone until it was good and loud. He picked all this up on his own, nobody even encouraged him. He was terribly worried about somebody suggesting something to him. About five sessions later this person had recovered full sonic on anything he went into. The mind can thoroughly reassure itself through moments of pleasure that it has been right. The above is the form of Dianetic case opening which is currently used, unless by next week the research department and myself have dreamed up a gee- whizzer that will turn on sonic in five minutes. We are dealing here with a young and advancing science, and there is plenty to be done in this field. I want to emphasize that the material which is in the Third Book of the Handbook, concerning application, is valid. But if you know any way to make it better, that is yours. You are much less in this as a student than you are as a fellow conspirator on the subject of Dianetics, and I fully expect to pick your brains. Dianetics isn’t something that can be done by rote. You have got to think about it. You can help and we can all help. It is not a static subject. A good auditor gets a feel for it. If you have done some auditing you will realize that. It is all very neat to say that one takes the first moment of pain or unconsciousness and erases that, then we go to the next moment, and the next moment, getting off painful emotional charge, and then to the patient’s birth, and suddenly a person is clear. That isn’t how it works. Dianetics is like walking around pinning the tail on the donkey. Very often you don’t even know there is a donkey present. You learn however by experience, by watching the sensitivity in the application, because there is a very interesting sensitivity to it. For instance, the person has got a cold. We hit an engram, but the line the patient is following is way above the engram. So we are taking dives at this engram and coming out of it in a hurry, and again diving at the next phrase repeatedly. In one particular case the bouncer in the basic area happened to be "I can’t hold anything down, it’s got to come up." So, he was doing this dive and throwing his engrams. One could tell the moment of contact. Painful emotion reflects in the chest, physical pain reflects in the toes. If a person isn’t wiggling his toes, he doesn’t have a somatic, I don’t care what he says. He is not on the line of the engram; something out of phase is occurring. A bouncer in the basic area can do that to an engram. A lot of things can happen to engrams. You can tell a person to go early and he promptly goes late. Perhaps he had some obstetrician at birth saying, "Well, I’ve got to turn him around now. Now he’s all turned around," which is a very common engram. So you will find him running sonic in one level and the somatic in another one. All sorts of weird things can happen because of such a computation in the commands. Or you will find somebody that you are trying to take back to 1923 suddenly discovers that there is no 1922, nor is there a 1919, or a 1912 or anything else back there. Well, this person has had an exodontistry, let us say, and everything has become part of the bank, and will be occluded by it. Or he has a nitrous oxide experience, and there it sits with everything glued into it that has anything to do with an engram. Everything is pulled up into this bank until the nitrous oxide is knocked out. All of a sudden you realize that the case doesn’t work right, and you have got to do something else. Perhaps someone has just died— painful emotion. Or you may have a late operation and you have to handle that. Or you may have to go through an accident. Or somebody has been in an institution and had 195 electric shocks, and everything in the bank is all scrambled by this, so you have to tell him, "Let’s go back to dinner last night." And he may say, "Here I am in birth." Or you say, "Yesterday," and he is running present time and then dives back to conception. So he is to some slight degree deranged. With this unfortunate individual, you may have to start in with shock No. 1. He will go up to the moment of shock— sometimes we can find it quite easily— and the individual starts into some kind of a convulsive action. So we sit there for five hours with the electric shock going on, but it does remove to some degree. Then we find everybody who was there, with the electric shock machine, and someone was saying, "Well, you know, I sure like Clark Gable, don’t you?" And you run out all this "interesting" information, then they wheel the person down the hall and there is a manic- depressive screaming, "I’m the strongest person in the world, I’m God, that’s who I am. I’m God," which is interesting to have in an engram, particularly if this person was an apathy case, because his case has now been superimposed with a very fine Jehovah complex. This gives a complicated picture. In running it out, you have to run out some electric shocks. First you run out No. 1 electric shock, and the next one is going to be easier. If you can get them early and you can get the basic- basic out and start up the line, getting out a few severe shocks, you will suddenly find that you only have to run about eight to ten shocks and the rest of them will peel off. The first shock was the one holding the rest of them. In a high blood pressure case, you find a migraine headache and start down the bank and suddenly the migraine headache starts to turn on. (Fortunately the somatic back on the track is never as bad as the somatic in present time.) You find out that Mama had high blood pressure, and had high blood pressure attacks every other day, and that there are 283 days to the term of gestation. So we have a tremendous amount of high blood pressure engrams. However, after we have run out the first five, six, eight or even nine, the somatic has practically gone. Remember that if you can get the first one of anything, you can get the rest of them off. You cannot play it by saying, "This is the reactive mind, it goes from here to here, and it is located here and here, ‘Abracadabra, Rumplestiltskin," ’ and at that moment the first engram disappears. No, it is walking around and pinning tails on donkeys. If you have audited, you already know about this. But this is the case opening which I demonstrated at the start and that case opening will save you a lot of trouble. Re- establish a man’s faith in yesterday and you have re- established his ability to act. Here is another short demonstration of how to open a case.
Work the case, then, using very good sense. When you open up a case, don’t be satisfied with feeding a person repeater technique endlessly. Repeater technique is good if you have a good idea of what you are trying to locate. But just shooting repeater technique at the person in an effort to get him down the track someplace is bad, because you can restimulate incident after incident. In the above demonstration we were using repeater technique for one purpose only. The somatic strip was working very well; we knew there were certain kinds of phrases there that it would match, and we were fishing for something. There obviously was some kind of an incident there, but it had a bouncer which prevented the somatic being talked about. However, the incident said something about the fact that he was there. So he was held in the incident, but it bounced, so the somatic wasn’t there. Therefore we wanted to come back into the 18 year old incident so that we could clear what was holding it. We wouldn’t want to mess around with such a late incident unless we absolutely had to. So, the idea is to get the patient unstuck and moving freely on the track. And then, if you can’t find any incident, and if he is again stuck, get him moving freely by taking him to pleasure moments when he won. Now start turning on his perceptics, and make sure they are turned on well so that he is very sure he is there, which is worth a lot of work, because it means a lot to the case. We were getting very spectacular results in the early part of Dianetics. Nearly everybody I worked had sonic and I didn’t know why. It took me weeks of observation to find out. I was testing standard memory banks, l and I was testing them, case after case after case, dozens and dozens of them to find out how much a human being could retain in standard memory. By testing case after case I found that they could contain quantities of material that were absolutely impossible to compute, because even with 10 tithe 21st power binary digits of neurons with 1000 shots in each molecule, the human mind could be computed to have just enough memory storage to last a human being for 3 months and no more, if they recorded everything— and they do record everything. So I didn’t pay much attention to the theory because it didn’t work. Therefore I was going up and down the track looking over standard banks very casually and in doing so I was just naturally stabilizing cases. I was stabilizing yesterday. When I stopped doing that I started having tough cases. I have recently discovered this by checking it back against the existing therapy. Something was being done which was not being accounted for. So in handling a case, you want to take every single precaution to turn on all perceptics, not to merely run an incident and pile everything up on the track on that incident. It doesn’t matter how comfortable the patient is. That is beside the point. If you have got him in an incident where he keeps knocking in and out of birth and he is highly uncomfortable because of this, don’t get upset. That may be a tough point of view to take (one makes him as comfortable as possible of course), but it is a secondary consideration to getting the engram. What you want to do primarily then is to turn on his feeling of reality of yesterday. This is not to make him comfortable, it is not to permit him to avoid engrams, it is just to contact the engrams. He has got to be able to contact them and he has got to be able to recognize the validity of them when he has contacted them, not because you as an auditor say they are valid, but because they are valid to him. That is of major importance in case opening, and the point I wished to stress in this lecture.
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