SENSE OF REALITYA lecture given on 27 June 1950Rehabilitation After a diagnosis there is nothing wrong with starting and resolving a case quickly, but picking up the patient’s sense of reality is very important. It should be done at the beginning of the case. I seldom dive on a case without looking it over fairly carefully, but when you do dive you want to resolve that case as fast as possible in its initial stages. That is vital. It is the dullness of tackling a case when you don’t know where you are going in it that is the hard, brutal approach, because you could very easily slug a case around and get it all tangled up and stuck in 15 places. The target is to get the painful emotion off the case as fast as possible or the physical pain engram in which the patient is held. You want to relieve that case quickly. Although your primary consideration is not patient comfort, patient comfort is an index of how far you are getting, and an index of whether or not basic personality is satisfied. BP knows all about this. In a case I took up recently where the patient was stuck somewhere on the track, we eventually found him going appetite over tin cup off a tricycle, which seemed to be tied in with the back somatic he had. That was the incident that was covering the earlier incidents, so we were diving from that incident into the earlier ones. Therefore we were exciting that incident of falling off the tricycle continually without ever spotting it, and the case would have gotten more and more uncomfortable until we discovered it. The following is an auditing demonstration of picking up a preclear’s sense of reality.
When I ask for a bouncer, we get a holder. I ask for a denyer and we get a grouper or something else. That is the manifestation of a self- control mechanism at work, Control yourself, control yourself. A person is fully equipped to control himself without having an installed light trance that he carries around his whole life telling him what to do, back and forth and vice versa. Something to note here is that your assurance that the somatic strip is going to be where you say it is going to be is the single test. When you automatically assume with confidence that it is going to be somewhere, it goes there. That is the best test. There is no sense in coaxing a person’s somatic strip around. You don’t have to. The bulk of slow starts and minimal success runs happen because people don’t realize that the somatic strip is doing exactly what they ask it to do. They will assume that because they are not getting data immediately, that the somatic strip is not doing what they have asked it to do, and so they will ask it to do two, three, four things at once before they get anything out. The somatic strip by this time gets pretty fouled up with the bank, it is hard to move it, and the person gets stuck. Then you have to go through the procedure of finding out what it is stuck on. Note also the use of the forcing technique of counting and snapping one’s fingers. This doesn’t work too well on some patients because somebody back in the early part of the bank may be telling somebody to count to five and when you count to five, this may mean something very bad. However, if you run up against that, just recite from A to D or something like, When I count from A to D and snap my fingers, such- and- such will flash into your mind. A very workable technique is one whereby you merely tell the patient to close his eyes, you install a canceler and flash him back down the line by telling him to go to the front part of the incident with the words, The somatic strip will go to the front part of the incident; or if you know what you want the somatic strip to go to, you merely tell it to go there and then count to five and get the first phrase that flashes. He will recount it. Get him to pick up the somatic and spot the incident so he is not going to bounce out of it, spot a bouncer, spot a denyer, generally chop it full of holes before you run it, and then just start in at the beginning and run right straight on through the incident. Something that has to be rehabilitated in a patient is his feeling of reality. Never neglect the rehabilitation of that very fact. An auditor must keep in mind that he is going to run across people who don’t know five minutes ago was real, who are floating about eight feet off the ground as far as reality is concerned. One isn’t asking them to face crude, sordid reality, merely trying to put them in contact with the living world a little more solidly. It is very much worth an auditor’s while to spend a lot of time trying to find out who knocked out reality for this person. That can be done on a straight memory basis sometimes. The straight memory circuits are set up to validate reality and what they get is real. As far as the bank is concerned that is real too. However, the person knows it is real when he knows it is real. There is no sense in going back into a prenatal and running a lot of material out and chomping around on it if you haven’t made a person’s sense of reality come to the fore. We are not asking a person to go back and play with delusions. The incidents are there. The worst enemy of a man’s stability is a sense that everything is false and unreal. It compounds the felony. In short, the aberration is now not only furiously active but also pronounced utterly unreal, and between these two things he gets pretty well cornered. Sanity is reality. Therefore one has to be able to contact a reality, but in order to do that you have to contact the things that make reality unreal. The chief factor in this society today that makes a reality unreal is a small group in the world devoted to mental healing, with their pronunciamento that all insanity is childhood delusion. So some poor person tries to go back and contact a reality.. If he does so with some of these past schools of mental healing, where very often people have gotten into birth and the prenatal period and all up and down the line somewhere, he is immediately challenged by the healer to the effect that what he is remembering is delusion. And one of two things happens: h i s c a s e gets worse or he gets angry. One has the remarkable situation of the psychiatrist who told two people who were remembering back into birth and prenatals that there was no validity to their memories about any of this. So the people started in just remembering with each other and at the end of a year had practically every psychosomatic illness that was on file in the reactive mind in furious restimulation. Then one of our students on the night course showed them Book Three of the Handbook and told them, You start in here and read, and don’t do it any other way but this or you will keep on getting in trouble. He worked on their cases to a point where they were fairly straightened out and comfortable. So the practice of knocking out reality has more than one repercussive result. If a patient has an impeded sense of reality, that’sense of reality is impeded in pleasure as well as in pain. You should rehabilitate it for the later moments of his life until he can be sure about these later moments, and they are more easily validated. So make sure that you know whether or not he considers yesterday real. If he doesn’t consider yesterday real, do something about it. The 15- minute technique where you tell the preclear to remember, Who told you this? Whose fault was it? and so on will handle it. Don’t ask, however, Who destroyed it? because destroyed is a bad word inferring that it has been destroyed which it hasn’t. If a person does not think that today is real, then he is psychotic, and we would have to practice Institutional Dianetics on him. The subject of reality then is the first factor in the following case which needs solving. That is not too hard to solve, but it had better be solved now before the whole track is chewed up from one end to the other.
I’m just demonstrating that the rehabilitation of a sense of reality can actually best be accomplished by stimulating the standard memory. Reality is most commonly knocked out by:
In one case Papa and Mama were dull enough to let themselves get caught with an AA in progress. Little Johnny in gr. eat terror went and told a neighbor’s child about it, and it was all over the neighborhood in a hurry. Papa had to use heroic measures, and of course invalidate everything that little Johnny had said. In addition to that, little Johnny’s own AAs were keyed in at that point. He was in great terror and then the giants descended upon him and I think in this case Papa used an electric shock to teach him better. So this is something for an auditor to check, and this is why he should use a diagnosis at the beginning of the case, why he should check a person’s sense of reality, why he should check the character of the parents and so on. Naturally, although this gets validated on the straight line memory bank circuits, one hasn’t achieved the primary source of it. But having gotten that far, when one gets to the primary source, the source itself will be accepted. Because there is material like this in actual engrams. One can, however, continually hammer at a person that he is wrong, and practically destroy that person. The person has to stand up pretty solidly on his own two feet. Once a person’s sense of being right is knocked out by the connivings and hammerings and infiltrations of aberrees around him, he is almost done for. The mind is set up to be right. Even though a person is working from an engramic background, and even though he himself has the feeling that he might be, remember that is still data that is in the computer, and until it is relieved it is still right. He doesn’t go around being wrong. A big computation goes on in this society today that You’re too fond of being right, or You insist on being right all the time, and so forth. Yes! Insist like fury on being right. If you have somebody around you who insists continually that you are wrong, that you don’t understand, that you don’t know, that that is not the truth, and you are getting a continual knockout of your data, your conclusions and so forth, there are only two things to do to that individual: either a la Rigoletto wrap him up in a sack and give him the deep six, or use Dianetics on him and shut him off as far as having much validity with you is concerned. Because it is a cinch that one human being in a fairly alert state who is thinking, who is not in an institution, absolutely cannot be wrong 100 percent of the time. The whole computation of that person insists that he is right. If his conduct seems aberrated, to buck that conduct, to break the dramatization by telling him continually that he is wrong, is a foul trick. If one wants to drive a person insane he can do so by convincing him absolutely that he is wrong, and wrong forevermore. The analytical mind is so set up that when it recognizes that it has made a miscomputation (on its own power and determinism), it hastily re- evaluates the situation. But if the analytical mind has to accept on somebody else’s force that it is being wrong, and has to admit it is wrong because somebody says it is wrong, then that analytical mind has received another engram which says it is wrong, or it has received a lock on an engram which says it is wrong. In other words, there is no reason involved in it. A person cannot argue very much against engrams. He can push buttons, and he can handle them in other ways, but to blunt them and to use force against them is impossible. On the other hand, when a man is right he knows he is right; and if he analytically discovers that he is wrong, he will correct the. computation. The rehabilitation of reality also covers the field of the maintenance of the auditor’s own sense of reality. This is pretty important to him, because he is going to get a lot of patients when he is tired who may argue with him and try to knock his own reality out. Where an ally has said the person is wrong, that can be remedied; because the instant one discovers that this person has no analytical recollection of something, one knows that it is pretty deeply messed up in engrams. You can still head for those and ease those if you know what you are doing. It is quite ordinary for Grandma to be the great ally, to have saved the child’s life, and to be very pleasant toward the child. But the only way you could spoil a child is the way Grandma quite often employs, which is to give the child everything and let him own nothing, to make the child undetermined about things, and to undermine his determinism. The child says, I want to go outdoors and play. Just because Grandma wants to be the boss where the child is concerned, and she wants to show the child that’she is really caring for it nicely, she says, No, the sun is shining too hot. So he has made up his mind one way, but he has been proved wrong. Then she says, Why don’t you go and play with your blocks. So he rather long- sufferingly may go and play with the blocks. All of a sudden it starts to rain, so he says, All right, that’s fine, and he gets all squared around ready to go outside and play. But Grandma says, It’s now raining. But you said it was too hot, it’s not hot outside now, it’s raining. Well, that’s different. But what’s the matter? I don’t understand this. Well, you’re not supposed to understand. You’re too young and I’m going to take care of you. Or he goes and gets a new pair of shoes and is told, These are your shoes, Georgie. They’re all yours. But then he starts out to wear the shoes and she says, Why are you wearing those shoes today? Why aren’t you wearing your old shoes? In other words he is kept in a continual state of indecision. He is never permitted to make up his mind for a moment. He is in an environment where his mind finally becomes terrifically confused. As such he is not a happy child. His sense of reality is being destroyed because he isn’t getting a chance to be right, ever. As an auditor you want to know this and recognize it for what it is because you are going to find this in a lot of patients. Grandma is the great ally. She took care of the child when he was sick. Or the nurse was the great ally, or somebody else was. That nurse or Grandma, the ally, never gave the child a chance to be right; the child was always wrong; but the child had to depend upon that ally for his very existence, according to his reactive mind. For instance, in a period of illness she says, I will take care of you, Oswald. I’m going to take care of you. Now I’m right here. As long as I’m here you’re all right. Just do what I say and get well. Now do what I say. You want to do what I say. You want to, don’t you? Now lie back and get this nice cool towel on your face, and so forth, with the child in a complete delirium while all this chatter is going on. So afterwards he does exactly what they say. Supposing Grandma now says, You know you are wrong. Why are you always so wrong about these things? You’ve got to do what Grandma says. You can break out a whole chain of you’re wrong’s by finding out why the child had to believe so implicitly. Knock out those reasons, and all the rest of the computations disappear as locks. For instance, in the above demonstration the patient has a computation that he has to believe his father, he has to mind him, otherwise he would have argued with him. It’s irrational for a child not to fly in his father’s face under such a computation. My father told me I was wrong two or three times in my life, but only two or three times. I had a big computation that I had to mind my father which had gotten negated against completely. He was sudden death as far as I was concerned. He was not to be tolerated at any moment. None of his adjudications could be considered right. So if he said, Mind, the instantaneous reaction was to scratch his eyes out. So whenever he told me I was wrong, he would get hell raised. I went back down the line and sitting there isolated in conscious memory was a time when I was about 2 years of age when he came in and said, You never finish anything you start. Now you want to clean up this stuff around here. I immediately said, Get out of here. You’re the one who never finishes anything he starts. And to my surprise, he backed up. He was a quarterdeck naval officer too. I looked back on this and I was amazed at the temerity of it. But the strategy was perfect: I turned his dramatization on him. He restimulated resistance, so I just threw it back at him and that handled it. Since then my father has always treated me with the gravest respect when he could treat me at all. He had a set of dramatizations which were fortunately not permitted to take root. For instance, I would come in and say to him, I was just down to the——. And he would say, Oh, you were just down to the corner. No, I was down to the store. Oh well, corner, store, what’s the difference? So you were just down to the store, huh? What were you doing down at the store? Up to no good, I suppose. I was about to tell him that I had spotted a kite down there that I thought I was going to buy. Then he would pun my words so that they would be lopsided, and my meaning was all horsed up one way or the other. I got even with him once though. He was having a big, important meeting with a lot of officers around and I was being patted on the head. I was about 5 years old. My father was telling some long- winded tale about a time when he was down in South America on some important trip, and I looked at these people and said, Don’t believe a word this guy tells you, he’s the awfullest liar in the world. Now this doesn’t mean that as a child I was hurt particularly, but it does mean that a child can and will take extraordinary measures to safeguard his own right to be right. Because if I had ever permitted him to do anything else, he would have proven me so wrong he would probably have wound me up in an asylum someplace. So I never permitted it, and I wouldn’t mind him. I couldn’t accept anything he said, because that was sudden death. Now, on the other hand, in the demonstration earlier in this lecture, there was a reverse computation on it. The child had accepted the computation that he must mind. His father was undoubtedly a reactive mind ally. He may argue that he accepted the minding part but not what his father said, and that he had his own mental reservations that he was right and his father was wrong, and that the only thing to do in the situation was to let his father go on believing that he did accept it. However, that was a surrender. The mind won’t really recognize a compromise down in its depths.
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