DEMON CIRCUITS

A lecture given on 26 June 1950

Identity

Psychosomatic illness is caused by actual injury. There is no psychosomatic illness without an actual injury. If you wish to demonstrate this fact, all you need do is ask people to imagine various pains. When you ask them for a pain where they have had a pain, they will experience a real pain. But when you ask them to imagine a pain, they do not experience one. They merely tend to say, "Yes, I can imagine...."

The command somatic is confirmatory. It acts as a holder. It acts as the aberration, and it will lie with or over an actual pain. At the moment that a command is uttered which says, "My stomach hurts, my stomach hurts very much, I can’t stand it," there may be no pain; the person is stuck. But at a later moment, in an attempted abortion, a thrust is received through the abdomen followed by some complaints to the effect, "My stomach hurts so," and "I’ve got to lie here until it gets better."

If there were no commands in an illness, the only restimulators present would be the noises and the smells around the person’s environment. They would be relatively slight. However, an actual injury which is confirmed by an engramic command will not disappear.

Take the unfortunate man who walks around with the continuous statement "I have aches and pains all over," yet he can demonstrate no aches and pains to anyone’s satisfaction. He has been unfortunate enough in this current society to receive a series of engramic commands without at the same time receiving enough automatic damage to justify it. We call this gentleman a hypochondriac. There’s no real pain in order to justify an engramic command. However, the engramic command all by itself can influence fluid flow to the point of "I have to throw up." Fortunately, postpartum, there are enough nauseating illnesses about— all hanging together by morning sickness— so a person can throw up. The engramic command could state, "I feel terrible. I feel very sick," and this would some time or another coincide with the fact that the guy was feeling very sick. But if a fellow isn’t fortunate enough to have such a coincidence, he is labeled as being a fake, it’s all in his mind. And that is the truth, it’s in his mind; it unfortunately is not in his body. As a result, in the society at large there seems to be a great deal of feeling about the fact that a person to be ill must be able to exhibit damage, just as in an army dispensary it is absolutely necessary to have a fever. One walks in, his temperature is taken, and if the temperature is normal he is restored to duty. I imagine there have been cases when a fellow had a broken leg, yet he was still restored to duty because he didn’t run a temperature.

Such is the nature of a psychosomatic illness. Don’t just look for a command, look for the damage. You can find a lot of commands that would seem to justify that illness. But if that illness is demonstrating itself in the form of calcification, chronically cramped up muscles, bad headaches, or something of the sort, you had better find the actual injury too. When you find that, the psychosomatic will key out.

Nevertheless, hypochondria can be knocked out very rapidly.

A child is in an unfortunate state who has had antagonism from one or the other parent. This basically can thrust him into the hands of an ally. Although his reactive mind doesn’t do this to be comfortable, it will very often result in the confirmation. This is the second confirmation. This establishes the chronic nature of the psychosomatic illness; so that a psychosomatic illness which is truly thriving has with it a secretive factor done by an ally.

The fetus applies the personal pronoun to itself or to somebody else. He will mostly favor "it" prenatally or "I." However, "you" is also received. The human being doesn’t receive plural, doesn’t consider one a "they."

The demon circuit works on a "you" basis. Someone says, "You’re going to listen to me talk. You’re going to listen to me all the way through. You don’t know what you’re doing, I have to tell you everything you do. You’re going to follow my orders from here on out. Now, damn you, sit right there and listen." That sets up a demon circuit which is outside the immediate valence the person is occupying, and this causes actual voices to impinge upon "I." Here is "you" being set up as a separate "I," which then dictates to the person.

"I" is applied to self, "it" is applied to self, "you" will sometimes apply to self, and "you" can also get in there as a demon circuit applying to "I." But mostly we get a situation whereby "You are no good" sets up a demon circuit all by itself.

Now, how is this used by the aberree? The demon circuit says to the aberree, "You are no good," and the person himself believes that he is no good. But as long as he can thrust this out and rechannel it so that it applies to other people than himself, he does not have to feel it. He has this selected target. It goes toward himself unless he can give it to somebody else. For that reason this person goes around with a great deal of plain force turned against him—" You are no good, so to hell with you." And then it is broken down to the point where he is afraid to act all of these abreactions. In other words, the exterior world has blended back what this person feels to the point where he is the exterior world and the interior world and they are all interior. So his demon circuits can decide to go around and carry on a conversation inside his head, and argue with each other.

One person had a demon circuit which said, "Now this is what you’re supposed to say. Now you say this," and when the demon circuit came into play it would cut out a piece of the analyzer. It was a thinking circuit and it said, "Now the best thing to say to this fellow is . . . well, all you need to do is shut up." That was not an engram, merely a thought up attitude which was said by the demon circuit to "I."

"I" listened to the demon circuit and then retransmitted, so that nearly everything this person was saying was dictated to him by that part of the analyzer.

A circuit could say, "Now tell him to grin," and the person would. Or a perfect stranger might come up to him and a demon circuit could dictate, "I don’t like guys that wear pink neckties. I don’t like that very much."

But this is thought. When he thinks something over carefully, there is the demon circuit which says, "You’ve got to think these things over carefully. You’re really pretty stupid, and you’re going to listen to me." So he listens and thinks, "I wonder what I was going to do?" and gets a reply, "Well, things aren’t running too well. It would be a good idea to go down to the garage and get the tires changed on the car." These computations are going to be in milliseconds, and the demon circuit has to receive the answers and carry them forth into a vocalization. So he says, "I don’t quite know. But I think it would be a good idea to think this over carefully." This is so common that the whole society has it in its head that it must vocalize and that the ensuing stream of consciousness is active thinking, whereas it is actually the most inactive thinking a person could do.

The case mentioned above had a second circuit which was vocal. It spoke in a real voice. He heard these voices completely. A lot of people merely get the impression. In this case he was getting sonic where the whole circuit itself was sonic. So the second valence would sit on the other side of "I" and say, "Well, I don’t know— going down to the garage to get the tires changed— it’s awfully hot. You can’t really be sure. I don’t know whether you ought to do that or not. I don’t think you’re up to it."

And the first voice would say, "Well, the best thing to do is to get the tires changed because they’re going to wear through." Now this person had a third circuit, also sonic, which nullified everything said, and these voices had pictures. So he would finally, between these two other conversations, make up his mind that he was going down to the garage to have the car’s tires fixed, and then the third one would say, "Nya, I know you’re gonna make mistakes anyhow, nya. Sure, you’re going down there. Probably going to get charged all over the place, nya." Or he would say to somebody, "How do you know what the cost of this thing is?" And this little subeircuit would say critically, "Nya. How do you know what the cost of this is?" Everything he said when he was conversing with somebody on various subjects would get "Nya." Every word he uttered would get echoed by this circuit.

The knocking out of a demon circuit is very necessary to our business. The original command from which a demon circuit stems concerns the psychosomatic illness, it concerns many things, but it creates all by its lonesome the demon circuit. It has become a speaking entity within the person and although the speech may be just impressions, they are computed impressions.

Running a circuit would be about as efficient as setting up a telephone line between myself and you by routing the line to San Francisco, then down to Mexico City, and by radio over to Paris with a teletype sitting there, and having the teletype come out with what I’m saying to you. Then put a censor in San Francisco who edits all the copy and takes out everything there that is antipathetic to the engram, and put another one in Mexico City who puts in a lot of material that wasn’t in the original communication. Then the fellow over in Paris translates it all into French so that a German can read it, and retranslates it back into English again with the resulting loss of phrases and words, after which it comes back and the linotype sitting in front of you is broken so that it only gets out every third word. That will give you some idea of the accuracy of communication and computation of these demon circuits.

Computations are made in terms of milliseconds. The mind quite commonly handles a hundred variables, and actually posits for each one a value. For instance, it does a computation on "Is it going to rain next Wednesday?" It starts to flip the problem, and you will find that there are all sorts of variables entered into the problem and the fellow thinking it over will get some kind of an answer. We are fortunately not running on an arithmetical computer which can only give an answer when there is a precision answer available. It can give lots of imprecise answers, which are still usable answers. That the answers are imprecise means that the question which is being asked is imprecise.

All this comes under the heading of Dianometry which is how you most efficiently feed and receive data from the computer. One doesn’t much interfere with the action of the computer itself.

I’m speaking now of the analyzer as the whole computer. You could postulate that "I" was a series of monitor units which are aware of being aware, and that these have the task of feeding the computer and taking the data back from the computer— in the meantime operating a similar computation to keep tally on the data being computed. It is not arithmetical mathematics one needs in order to feed this data. If we were to take the computer and throw into it vocalizations, a stream of consciousness, and other things, this computer is so able that it can still function despite all the accessories that are hung upon it.

Here is the computer running off a problem: "I’d like to go to Maine and hunt moose." The person doesn’t intend to go to Maine and hunt a moose at all. But there is nothing much happening, a fellow has seen a picture about Maine and says, "Gee, that would be fun," and could actually sit back and without thinking about it go and enjoy moose hunting.

But no, we have to interfere with that. It has to be rigged up that a person shouldn’t daydream, and imagination is pretty bad— engrams, engrams, engrams. He should be able to sit back and smell the north woods, even if it is dub- in, and see a moose and listen to a moose call— which may be a duck quack because he has never heard a moose, but it is a satisfactory moose call as far as he is concerned. He wouldn’t push effort at the computer to force it to do something.

The moment one starts pushing effort toward thought, the computation becomes deranged. The thought process is a pretty automatic proposition. "I" stimulates the computer and it gets out the computation; that is the smooth way of running this computer. If one did that, and went to Maine to hunt the moose and so on, he could actually sit back and he would get an automatic three- dimensional colored video with smell and tactile of hunting moose. He wouldn’t have to figure how, the way we think of figuring how. He wouldn’t have to think, "Well, let’s see, moose are pretty big animals." No! The moose would be a big animal. If the person had never seen a picture of a moose he might put an elephant in its place and call it a moose, or he might dream up something that was highly unrealistic, but it would be a satisfactory moose to him and he would have a good time hunting it. It would all go into the computer and it would come back out, and he would have the picture. So, the "I" attention units are not distracted by observing the computation.

It so happens that the monitors of "I" by an analogue could be postulated as able to inspect circuits. They could inspect any circuit. Let’s say we have a thousand units of "I," we have a lot of engrams influencing the analytical mind, and we have a large number of circuits which have compartmented off pieces of the analytical mind and are using them just as though a monitor unit had flown in from somebody else’s mind and is busy at work there. Actually that isn’t what has happened but it is a good analogy. These are parasitic circuits.

Now some units of "I" could be said to go in and look at the loops of the computation. This detracts from "I" one unit of awareness. In addition, for example, we have another computation going on over here that has to do with whether or not we are going to get paid next Saturday. So we watch that computation. There is another unit of "I." In view of the fact that we may have several problems going on simultaneously, we have to keep taking away attention units from "I" and putting them in there to inspect the circuits. We inspect more circuits and more circuits and more circuits. It is like asking a centipede how he walks. The centipede starts to worry about how he walks and starts inspecting these circuits. The more circuits he inspects, the less attention he has. When the computer is running smoothly, all of "I’s" attention units are directed toward his present reality, his past reality, or his future reality which he is busy wanting.

He could go on thinking up some wonderful schemes to make a million dollars and he has thought of this for three or four days and played with it for a while, thinking it over. He has got a lot of attention units working on this problem. He is working it, you might say, up here on the front board. He is adding it up one way or the other, and he is getting paid money for it. Now all of a sudden he says, "All right, that will work itself out, I’ll get an answer to that somehow or other," and it goes back into a closed loop circuit. That circuit is not now inspected. It answers whether a thing can or can’t be done, how it should be done, whether it is a good idea and so on, and the answers come out in due time at the moment he needs it. He can compute it right now if he wants to, and get parts out of it; however, he does all of this without thinking. Or it goes back to this closed loop, uninspected. There is where the computations are justified. Those are the only computations that are worth anything. The rest of it with the demon circuits are all gingerbread and rococo. A person will sit around and laboriously think, and when a person has to laboriously think about anything it means they have got so much analytical shutdown that there is no automatic computation going on.

There is this beautiful computer which works automatically. But if one starts to subdivide it, shut parts of it down and do everything on a supervised basis, the attention units depart from "I," and one becomes less and less attentive to reality, and less and less watchful.

You can even set up a prediction circuit in this computer. We set one up on the basis of black and white squares, and just two little tabs were put on it. If the answer was right after a swift glance over the situation, the white square would flash. If the answer was wrong after a very cursory glance (there obviously was practically no data), the thing would flash black.

Now, one did a conscious computation looking at all the factors involved. You did a computation on the front board, saying what the things were going to do or not do, and noted whether or not the prediction circuit said it was right or not, but you didn’t permit that to influence the conscious computation of it. The conscious computation on this thing had the interesting characteristic of being almost 80 percent wrong. Yet the strange faculty there is that those other computations were right. They would predict almost anything within reason and they were predicting futures.

So I set this thing up and then documented it, doing a conscious computation on it, and the board would flash yes. I wouldn’t give any attention to it because I had no way of knowing whether or not the future was going to work out as this flash system predicted. But the future has a habit of working out to be in a very high percentage what the flash circuitry says. The flash circuitry was a closed loop circuit set up with black and white squares. (It could be set up in red and green too, it would look prettier.)

The way it worked evidently was that it took a sample of a problem, not a typical problem to solve but merely a sample of one. For instance: Is Gracie Legs going to win at Pimlico today? Well, not being at Pimlico, this puts it into the realm of metaphysics. But let’s go down and stand in the grandstand and listen to people and look at the horses led out before we begin to make an adjudication, and the prediction starts to go up. Now we are observing a great deal of data "unconsciously." We aren’t inspecting the observations as they come in; they go straight into the computer and all this material is absorbed. It is apparently just a clean, clear prediction out of the blue.

There is a rather complex mathematics of prediction. Quite in addition to this there is the faint possibility of clairvoyance and clairaudience. These are all uninvestigated. Parapsychology is wide open as a field. There may enter into this thing a radiolike telepathy as an actual perception. A lot of things can add into it that we needn’t say exist, but we have no good evidence to say they don’t exist.

In short, the brain untended as a computer will roll out all manner of problems. One can say, "Now let me see, we have four cogwheels here, and this little gimmick is supposed to light up a brilliant purple. I wonder if this tape is all right? I wonder what this tape is for anyhow? Never found the words to clear it up. Couldn’t mean anything particularly." We can stir inside the computer and worry about the computing mechanism, and about whether or not it is going to do the job it is supposed to do, or get all snarled up with what somebody else has said it should or should not do, and in short wind up inspecting circuits that won’t work when they are inspected. In such a wise, if you set up "I" on an uninspected circuit basis you will get a wrong phrase.

So something very interesting happens when you tell a person that he is wrong. The monitor units of "I" (the inspection units) have the data that this whole thing is liable to be wrong. So it sets up a computation— being wrong is being dead. The ultimate in being wrong is being stiff and stark, so we don’t want to be wrong. Well, let’s start inspecting circuits. We inspect circuits and send off unit after unit to inspect more and more circuits, and then inspection units that go off and inspect the inspection units.

The reason for this, of course, is the existence of demon circuits. The computer is getting compartmented off by engrams taking over parasitic circuits. If the person is being convinced continually that he is wrong, his attention units are being thrown into a turmoil inside his head, and they finally stop inspecting entirely and won’t inspect anymore. They are just left idle, all out of alignment, not knowing what to look at. They have run the computation through 5,622 times and they still get the first answer, but that answer according to everyone was wrong, although the answer itself as far as the computer is concerned is completely right. In view of the fact that the computer could be influenced by an engram, the engram as a stet datum in the computation could throw out the whole answer. As far as the brain computation is concerned, not being aware of the engram, the computation is right; yet it’s wrong, but it’s right.

In such a way most normal minds are doing a tremendous amount of inspection of: "It can’t be right. Let’s set up an auxiliary circuit to see whether or not we can’t check and counterbalance the solution. Now let’s test it all by something or other. Well, Grandpa was always right. Let’s use the way he looked at things. But then Grandpa dies, so he couldn’t have been right! Because that is as wrong as you can get. So let’s close off that valence." And one gets a tangled picture. None of this, however, is the part of the mind which is doing the real thinking.

It is an interesting fact that the computer is so vast and so complex that it can be subdivided and impinged upon by engrams, and new circuits laid down by itself encountering other circuits which were laid down, and yet the person still has enough room with which to think. But one does, and that room gets bigger and bigger and more and more circuits become available, to a point finally where you are running on closed loop circuits without any of these things. You ask for results and you get them without stress and strain, but it’s a lot of fun asking for the results, and it’s a lot of fun trying to figure out the proper question to ask to get the proper result. That is conscious level thinking. It is feeding the computer, not solving the problem.

If one just went ahead and got rid of his painful emotion, he would evidently take off some of the charge. But the demon circuits seem to be confirmed whenever a lot of painful emotion comes into being. They can almost be considered to grant pieces of life to it. Grandpa is dead but Grandpa is still alive because here is this circuit, and this circuit is Grandpa. This circuit doesn’t come into highly active and aberrative being unless Grandpa’s departure or death throws enough painful emotion in there to set up a circuit.

In the field of navigation, for instance, the computer will run on an educational basis using the data of arithmetic and so on. These things are learned. The computer will evidently turn on its own mathematical strain; and once the person has done the problem by rote, by the books and so on, the computer will then check it and tell him how right he is. A navigator who can’t do this is a very bad navigator.

In Dianetics, we are not constructing a computer from raw materials. We are trying to take the gadgets away from the computer, or off it, which have inhibited its operation. So, when one is dealing with demon circuits, the wrong approach is to tell a person that it is a demon circuit. The right approach is to simply knock the demon circuit out.

A demon circuit which is thinking, which has part of the analyzer absorbed, is a difficult thing to locate. This is a real lie factory at work which will manufacture engrams and other things. It won’t manufacture somatics, but it will sometimes manufacture muscular jumps on a basis of mimicry.

You can tell pretty rapidly whether or not you are getting material out of this case. The best test is a person changing his aspect toward existence. That is the final test. The next one is that a certain aberrated attitude he had toward something diminishes or disappears. So we have an exterior check. Another test is: Is he becoming more self- determined as we run these things out? That is a good one and one I use to determine whether or not a man is released— no manifestation of transference either way.

At any time if part of the mind is absorbed by a parasitic circuit, it is not going to do as good a job as the auditor can do.

Another point is that a person who is running a lie factory engram won’t change it. Furthermore he is getting no diminishment of the somatic. You actually would have to run one of these people (they are very rare) to appreciate what this amounts to. It is easy to detect.

One of the things that a person with a lie factory will do is to run an engram in the following fashion: Let’s say the engram runs, "I am willing to go with you but I’m not going to take any more of it. Stop it now, go away," and the fellow runs the engram through and doesn’t bounce on the phrase "go away." We know the thing should have been aberrative, but there is no slightest bounce on "go away." He runs it through just like that, word for word.

In normal engram running, phrases drop out of it and new phrases appear in it. So in the first run of the thing the words "You’re no good anyway" might suddenly appear right in the middle of it. That was the deepest point of unconsciousness, so the words would be more deeply buried. Now the thing will get up to a point where the tail of it starts to drop off, and finally "You’re no good anyway" stands there as all the engram that is left, and then we knock that out. That is rather normal behavior for an engram. Even in a reduction, new words and phrases will appear and old phrases will become so uninteresting to the person that he won’t say them.

If you don’t find new material in an engram on the third or fourth run, somebody is doing it by rote. If it doesn’t change any, or if he can’t quote it as he did before, those are all symptoms of a lie factory.

However, if the patient is pretty far advanced in therapy, bouncers won’t have as much effect on him as they do in the first stage of therapy. Well along in therapy, the person will hit bouncers and won’t bounce; but you couldn’t have gotten that far in therapy had you had a lie factory.

The aberrative content of the material depends on who is speaking the commands, what valence the patient is normally in, and other factors which enter into it. For example, Papa says, "Keep your mouth shut. Shut up." And Mama says, "I can’t say anything." A person will just run this, moving his mouth, and then all of a sudden is unable to open his mouth and he starts talking with his mouth shut!

In working lots of cases, the aberrative person won’t appear. For instance, the preclear is perfectly willing to run Papa, but you get chopped up dialogue such as, "Hello, honey, I’ve been very busy today." "Oh, that’s too bad." They will run this as an engram with Mama’s dialogue missing. In such a way the auditor should develop dialogue sense.

If someone says, "How are you feeling?" and there is no reply, somebody either didn’t hear the statement, at which moment it would be repeated probably; or the other would be in a sullen mood with no answer, which would be followed by, "Well, why won’t you talk to me?" or something of the sort.

Or, "How are you feeling?"

"I’m feeling pretty sick."

"Oh, well, that’s too bad, honey, I’ll get dinner for you."

"Oh, would you? That’s so good." That would be the engram.

So if Papa is practically nonaberrative you will find him in patches of conversation, followed by silence, and the person is definitely out of valence when that happens.

He would be in the valence of the person he is being. But he isn’t going to get any sonic on that person, or, if he does, he is going to run a circuit in there so he can get it dub style. You will find this in case after case.

For instance, you start clearing up, let us say, the cough chain. In this case what Mama says is not very aberrative. So there will be a cough and then "Excuse me" and then another cough, "I don’t feel good," and another cough. You can just keep running out these coughs until you get a notion after a while that there is probably somebody else present. You go back to the first cough which has flattened, but immediately succeeding "Excuse me" was "I hope you feel a lot better, honey," which was Grandma. But she has been missing from this scene although she is the strongest ally in the case. Or Grandpa may be present in the prenatal area, and later he is missing.

Some big holes have been left in it and the most aberrative material is the most occluded. In consequence the person runs coughs, coughs, coughs, and he runs all sorts of attempted abortions and other things without changing his manifestations toward life at all. He still uses the same cliches and so on. When this happens, you can count on the fact that you have missed the ally.

You can use flash answers in this. Flash answers are quite mysterious and could come through in a number of ways. If you have a good, solid demon circuit, and you know you have got a demon circuit, the flash answer can be pretty distorted, but it is still usable. Don’t give full credence to any flash answer. It probably won’t be right more than 60 or 70 percent of the time. So when you ask for age, don’t count on it absolutely. Use it as an indicator. It is always better than no answer.

When you get a person who consistently and continually says, "It’s blank, there’s nothing there," that is a real indicator. You are bucking against a case which has a lot of material in it which is extremely aberrative. If you ask a person to dream and you get no dream, that’s better than a dream; because although it does not have any specific information in it, it says this subject is absolutely forbidden.

The way one finds that out is to go ahead and punch around and eventually, by flash questioning, by getting more material, by getting flash phrases, sooner or later you will crack the incidents.

There can be an engram in the case which has the whole case tied up that you should make it your business to find. This is the aspect of demon circuits where the flash answer comes forward on a circuit of its own, or it comes via a demon circuit. You could get three flash answers on some specific question which will be three different answers to that question. There you are working through three demon circuits, or maybe two demon circuits and a lie circuit.

But you are going to get material and although you shouldn’t place absolute reliance on it, it is useful material. You can use the flash answer for age, even if it is sometimes wrong. You can also use the flash answer on a person by saying, "How many times does this engram appear before in the bank?"

If he says, "This is the first time," you take it with a grain of salt, and then you watch the behavior in the engram. If that engram doesn’t start with any of its phrases and so on, you can be pretty sure that this is much later than the first time. After you have run it for a little while, you may be able to send him back earlier.

All of a sudden there is another engram and you say, "How many times is this in the bank before this?"

And he says, "Twelve." Or he may keep saying, "Two." When this occurs, he may have such a number stuck in the engram bank.

For instance, when you ask him how old he is, he says, "Two."

Or, "How many engrams before this?"

"Two."

"How far is it to the moon?"

"Two, uh— what?"

You are simply getting an engram response.

Let me take up demon circuits more specifically. A demon circuit is laid in by a command that has to do with speech and answers. It is laid in forcefully and with pain. You can locate the source of all demon circuits very simply, using direct memory if possible, by finding out which parent wanted to be the boss, or wanted to be this or that. You will find out that that person also wanted to be the boss as far as the child was concerned. Or we may find out that a grandparent, not an ally, was the boss. And we will find all manner of demon circuits.

Demon circuits are normally antipathetic. They are seldom sympathy circuits. They are accusative circuits and didactic circuits. You get these by scouting down the person who is most likely to have put in the circuit; get the most likely moment for it to have been put in; find some sort of an injury which might associate itself with such answers; and you may find yourself slammed or slamming the patient right into the middle of the demon circuit. This is one place where he very normally does not want to go because it is talking back at him and you are really trying to address part of the computer which is sort of off the track.

You could actually get a person very upset in trying to take away a demon circuit. A writer, for instance, may have been writing for some time with the aid of a demon circuit although he is perfectly able to set up his own demon circuit and write profusely.

You can install demon circuits in people in this fashion: Hypnotize them and say, "Now your life is going to be run for the next 10 days by the great god Motaw. l And the great god Motaw is going to stand alongside of you and give you word for word everything you’re supposed to say, everything you’re supposed to think, everything you’re supposed to do. All you have to do is just call on the great god Motaw for anything you want to know and he will tell you." And you leave poor old "I" sitting there with about two and a half grasshopper- power units. You have moved the whole computer sideways. So the great god Motaw then stands there and says, "You had better be a good boy." So he is a good boy.

If you make the great god Motaw merely a friendly character, if there is nothing else earlier in the bank which postulates another demon circuit which can be used— you just lay it on top of the other demon circuit as a very friendly circuit— the person isn’t going to pay much attention to it.

But let’s make the great god Motaw tougher than nails. "He is the god of vengeance, and if you don’t do what he says, why, oh man, he’ll kill you!" Now the person in consulting him is acting with a fear reaction. That demon circuit now has more altitude than the person has himself, but it is circuited in his computer.

The circuit will now turn out perfect replies. It will plan, for instance, the exact way to put 15 suitcases into a station wagon so that every one of them will go in and sit very snugly and the whole job will be done with a minimum of effort. All you have to do when you have a great god Motaw working is follow orders: "Now you pick up the tan suitcase, now lay it on its side, no, turn it a little further on its side and shove it all the way back." The person just works as an automaton under the behest of the great god Motaw. So he packs the whole thing up, and he doesn’t think a thought during the whole operation. Then it is all packed, and it will be packed perfectly.

Or, if it can’t be all packed that way, the great god Motaw will say, "Well now, you go get yourself a trailer, and put it on the back of this."

"Okay, where do I go to get the trailer?"

"Well, you go down to Ninth Street and Park Avenue."

The person will drive down to Ninth and Park, and there is the trailer place. He didn’t realize that that trailer place was at Ninth and Park before but, "By George, the great god Motaw was right!" Of course, he noticed this place time and time again. He never stopped there, it wasn’t in his immediate sphere of observation.

But he has got this gimmick working and it will run his whole life for him. It will take over his life and then from two and half grasshopper- power of attention units, now he has got one and a half grasshopper- power units, which then dwindle to half a grasshopper- power unit. He doesn’t realize that he has given the great god Motaw that much altitude over him.

One case I worked had this "I am the big I am" God demon circuit. "I am the big I am, that’s who I am. I’m going to tell you what to do. Yes, I am going to tell you what to do, I am." Well, that is TO BE. That is existence itself, and he could very easily skid over into it.

The proposition of going from one valence to another in a psychotic becomes a very marked, sharp affair. A person can have 50 valences. We talk of ambivalence. I never knew an ambivalent person. I never even knew a quintivalent person. Everyone has lots of compartments in an aberrated state. In a relatively unaberrated state, the compartments are a tenthousandth as wide open.

Scout for the most likely planter of the demon circuit who would be the most aberrative person and who would still be more or less antagonistic. Knock those things out because they could really get in the way.

I never found a positive suggestion capable of doing more than reinforcing an engram, and I never found an engram doing anything more than aberrate. But I have set up circuits in people who were releases, which would run out other circuits. However, I have not found this workable. By setting up circuit A to run the engrams out of the engram bank, one finds that even in his sleep at night this poor man has been doing nothing but run engrams. They will be going through his stream of consciousness continually. But in view of the fact that we would have now fixed it up so that everything gets stirred up and nothing gets deintensified, we would soon have a mess.

The first engrams in the bank, being basics on their own chains, are erasable.

Now, I want you to be very cognizant of the demon circuit setup, as it relates to the flash answer and as it may mess a person up. About all I can do is to ask you to be on the qui vive for them; you will see some of them working. You may be able to inspect some of them in your own head right now. Speculate on the source of that circuit and you can deintensify it.

You will find that a verbatim recall has probably been heavily edited. This is what Freud ran into when he postulated that wild one about the censor. There are censors all through the mind, because parents are rather censorious, and I expect his were particularly.

I imagine he had a couple of demon circuits running and one of them was talking about sex. We can read about the product of that demon circuit in any of his books on the subject. He figured that the censor was something you couldn’t get past, and whatever lay behind the censor was translated by it. I can just hear his mother saying, "Now, if it weren’t for myself and my training of you, you would be a wild little savage. Therefore you have to listen to me. You listen to me. Now I’m going to tell you what to do, you little brat. (Bap bap bap!) Yes, sir! Now you try to get past me with that stuff and you are really going to get in trouble. Now I’m going to tell you what to do because you are actually a nasty, dirty, primitive little savage. But I’m going to make you into a civilized human being, damn you."

The material reads as if it is on a sudden pounce- rage basis. Mr. Demon Circuit was sitting there and you couldn’t get behind it because of this. But in such a wise all of us have censors. All the censor manages to do is bring up savage and barbaric behavior, keep it in the engrams, then repress it off into some other corner, and then tell the person continually that he is liable to do this unless something else happens. Although it is suppressed, it is in a continuous state of foment and unrest. That, unfortunately for the tenets of Mr. Freud, had nothing whatsoever to do with the civilizing process which has been going on in our race for the last fifty thousand years.

A person who is in that state is in a state of anxiety. He is afraid he is going to do these things. But he has something there which represses these things from happening. He believes it is his basic nature, that he is no good, that he has to put on some sort of a front, otherwise he is liable to break out with sudden irrational acts, that he is barely being restrained from doingthese things, and that Mama and Papa or even some relative or even a sergeant in the army have to "train" him.

The person’s full pattern then is devoted to the engram trying to move out into action and the demon circuit sitting there telling him that it is repressing the engram, which it actually isn’t. The engram is repressing itself. But there is this very confused, crazy picture whereby people will object to having some of these demon circuits taken away from them on the grounds that they will have lost this voice of conscience or their most "rational" behavior.

This may not be very specific, but I wanted to apprise you of the condition of the normal person and his stream of consciousness, and make you aware of the fact that such a stream of consciousness connotes a dictatorial attitude by somebody in the engram bank; and that when you have succeeded in clearing an individual you won’t have any of these demon circuits left in the mind. His mind will run quietly without a lot of chatter.

For instance, I’m not setting myself up as any example, but I can sit here and put up a demon circuit over on one side and set up a censorious demon circuit on the other which says, "You shouldn’t talk to these boys that way, because they have rather tender minds. Some of them are extremely apt to have like conditions operating in their own brains. It will unsettle them about flash replies." And I can just break the circuit down. That is an audio circuit that I could set up.

Or we could set up a self- critical argumentation about taking the wrong course, such as, "You should be doing something else." Or one can set up an "I" that is going to tell you what the proper course is to take, and where to go and what to do about it. You can set it up to say, "You shouldn’t be doing all that stuff, this is what you should do." Or, "There are reams and reams of papers which have been written on the subject of the mind, unfortunately. Time after time I have told you that you are wasting your time. Being a great writer is enormously advantageous over doing what you are doing in present time because then you go down to posterity, particularly in the field of poetry."

You can set up a vocalizing circuit on almost anything. You don’t have to set it up as a relay. The moment you set it up so that it does a relay to you, you lose some of it, because after all you are only setting up maybe one little loop which is not doing very much observation.

To do a political speech on the subject of Dianetics, you could set up a demon circuit with a microphone speaker system so that "I" would merely have to repeat what is said with no effort, such as, "You people who are sitting here little realize that tomorrow will be a strangely changed existence," and so on.

These things are all part of the analytical mind and its functions. Whether they are good or bad does not matter. You could set them up simply on a jackleg basis of this thing is going to do this now, or this thing is going to do that. Self- control, for instance, as an engram is very bad because it inhibits a person’s ability to control himself. "You’ve got to control yourself" imposes some sort of a circuit as an engram, and the person then doesn’t control himself, he merely makes the effort.

None of these engramic computations are really successful efforts. You can set up demon circuits, critical circuits and analytical circuits. Something that requires a little more care and a little less levity would be to set up something like a mathematical circuit in order to add up a set of books, which then goes on and adds or subtracts and goes to the proper columns and the proper ledger and so on while you just sit there. But there’s no reason why it has to be short- circuited through "I." You can throw it right down into the somatic mind and add up the books by hand while sitting thinking about the races at Pimlico.

When clearing somebody, a lot of times you can expect to find apparently rational conversation which is a straight demon circuit talking, the contents of which are not an engram. If a person’s speech appears to be rational, but it contains a rather specious logic and you can’t quite put your finger on it, don’t look for what he is saying to be engram content. He can sweep on and on and on without uttering a single line out of an engram.

But he can be talking 100 percent out of an engram. This is observable in some psychotics, and they are the tougher psychotics because they aren’t giving themselves away.

Therefore when you see this manifestation you must suspect a demon circuit, and you must realize that it is a particular engram which dictates specifically that the person must do or say what he is told to do or say, and that the deliverer of the engram is somebody in the person’s past. By an inspection of the person’s past we learn who was most likely to have uttered such a line, and then we can try to trace one of that person’s dramatizations which will not be a demon circuit. There we will get the thing in its raw state.

It is not only more or less knocked out, if you have succeeded in contacting the engram which contains that demon circuit, it collapses and this is a highly valuable gain in therapy because you have made more analyzer available.

There is another condition of the man who is merely reacting to a sympathy command. That is not a demon circuit, but he is nevertheless obeying. That is just some engram phrase dictating: "I’ll tell you what to say. Now you say only what you’re told to say and you’ll be all right, because anything you say will only make it worse, therefore I’ll tell you what to say." But the "I will tell you what to say" is from a source alongside of him and it sets in a separate valence. So he is not going around telling people what to say. Someone tells him, "Now when the cop comes up here, why, you tell him that there’s just us chickens"— he doesn’t criticize the remark at all, he will deliver it.

You will find this in people who, when you feed them repeater technique, merely repeat ad infinitum anything you give them. You give them "Ducks have feathers," or "Chewing tobacco produces brown juice when the tobacco is masticated," and ask them to repeat these things as parts of engrams, and they are very likely to go on and repeat them very faithfully and endlessly. Realize that you are running on one of these "Now I’ll tell you what to say" circuits. Normally it is a fairly simple kind of circuit, not the dictatorial type. But it produces a manifestation that anybody who comes along can tell this person what to say, particularly the pseudo- ally of the person who made the original remark.

The flash answer is something that can be carried to an extreme, and a flash answer should never be admitted as evidence when the actual engram itself is in sight and what is happening is contrary to the flash answer. Nevertheless a flash answer is valuable, and the somatic strip will move with great rapidity from this to that. It is also quite possible that one can solve a case rather more rapidly by flash answer than by simply plowing away telling the somatic strip to go there and run it.

You can get a person’s flash answer circuit so relied upon that he will start depending upon his flash answers rather than his own thoughts. In view of the fact that he may be using a demon circuit, you would have removed him a step from reality. Nevertheless the flash answer is very usable within those limitations.

When you have to work an engram which is very reluctant to come up, in X which the person seems to be very securely nailed down, you don’t seem to be getting very much in the way of result, he’s jumping into and out of it, and the somatic is turning on and off, you should tentatively conclude that this engram is not the thing which is holding up the case, but that there is another engram which is more or less a partner to this one which is more accessible. A person should be started at the beginning of an engram and should then be able to proceed to the end of the engram, not jumped all over it and jumped to other engrams, back to this engram again and through it. What you want and what will produce the best results in the long run is a steady run through an engram.

The engram which is most available in the case we can postulate to be runnable in a very orderly fashion and that it can be deintensified. Now where that engram rests in a case is a matter for the auditor’s discovery. He can and should find what that engram is, and if that engram is deintensified the case will start to resolve. You can get that with the file clerk and you can get it with a flash answer. You can also test engrams with flash answers, and so on. The best method of showing you about this is just to take a patient and run a test on what engram is most available, to attempt to get the case resolved.

The case I will use in the demonstration which follows this lecture has been very reluctant in the hands of several people. Material is coming off the case, but the engram which is the apparent holdup is not really it, otherwise it would have resolved already.

The mind as a whole does not wish to be aberrated. It can apparently desire to be aberrated on a prosurvival sympathy engram basis in psychosomatic illnesses, but it is not willingly doing so. As a result it will give you, for your confident address to the problem, the engrams which are most aberrated.

Discovering the location of that key engram is a very, very important thing in therapy. You must be able to discover what engram it is which you must relieve in order to resolve a case. This should be given your very close attention, because I have seen many auditors hammering away at some part of a case which is inaccessible and therefore slowing the case down. Cases should progress fast.

There are people of course who are so wicked, so mean, so recalcitrant, so utterly devoid of all human feeling, principles, conscience and integrity that they will go hundreds and hundreds of hours still protecting and nursing to their bosoms some engram which they will not deliver!

Those are demon circuits.