REDUCTION OF ENGRAMS

A lecture given on 28 June 1950

One Reduces What One Enters

The subject of this lecture is the reduction of engrams. It is very important that an auditor should understand the necessity to reduce everything he contacts. By failure to reduce an engram, the patient can be placed in a state of restimulation which may cause him to do strange and irrational things. For instance, although he is not rendered non compos mentis, he may suddenly get an urge to eat pretzels or pack his bag and go to Cleveland, even when he is normal or at most slightly neurotic.

So it is necessary when one has restimulated an engram that one do something to relieve that engram. If it is not going to reduce, he should go earlier on the track to find a similar engram before it which is holding it up and, by walking backwards down the chain, find the basic on that particular chain that he has touched and reduce that, even though it doesn’t erase.

If any engram which he has touched has in it intensity of action (that is to say a person’s muscular reaction to it is great), that will deintensify in any event, and the deintensification of it will take away its aberrative force.

One must reduce what he enters in a case. It is very desirable to erase an engram or reduce it when the person is in his own valence, has full sonic, and has all perceptics present including emotion, but that is not absolutely necessary. You may touch an engram which causes the person no great reaction. The patient may lie there straight out, not in his own valence, getting word content, with some very mild somatic or no somatic at all, and with no manifestation which would encourage one to believe that he was going through an engram at all. However, don’t be deluded into leaving that engram in place. No matter how slightly you can get into it, for heaven’s sakes reduce it, because if you don’t you have restimulated it and, having restimulated it, it will be very active when you bring him up to present time. So don’t leave engrams scattered all over the track.

If you are running someone who produces no manifestation but merely runs things off in a monotone and who doesn’t seem very interested in the engram, there is a good reason for this somewhere in the case. Try to find that reason. But if you miss, and contact another engram which is very mild with no intensity, don’t make the error of leaving it and going on to something else. Reduce it.

In other words, you could jump all over a person’s time track, hit five, six, eight engrams and then bring him up to present time. Even though he may have no great psychosomatic reaction from it, he will have a psychic reaction. The thing may not have gone physically into the muscles in the body, but it has in terms of thought, and one mustn’t overlook this fact.

Just because a person doesn’t come up to present time with his right arm aching, or scratching himself, is no reason to believe that an engram has not been put into restimulation; because an engram goes into restimulation in two ways:

As a psychic command
As a psychosomatic ache, pain, or illness.

Don’t neglect that psychic angle.

Recently a gentleman from Cleveland was run into five or six incidents. The auditor said, "Well, there was no manifestation in the incidents," and dropped them.

A few hours later I got word that the patient had packed up and was going home in a rather strange frame of mind. An engram had been touched in the case which commanded him to go home. So he did. It settled out in a few days as any engram touched in reverie will, but there is no reason to stir up a case.

In this particular case, although nothing seemed to be reducing, the auditor definitely should have picked up the manifestation, somewhere. He ran over an engram twice and decided to leave it because it wasn’t reducing. However, two runs on it is not really enough to develop an engram.

Even if he believed that it was not going to reduce after four or five runs, he should not just leave the subject of that engram. He should immediately find the engram underlying it. It is not only important, it becomes urgent at that moment that he find an earlier engram on the same subject which will reduce.

The auditor in this case had his hands on the sperm sequence, ran it twice and neglected it further. He had there what might have developed into a real basic on it. It should have been run four, five, six times, to find out what was going to happen, because that is obviously very early in the case. One should find out what the engram is going to do before one leaves it.

Let me caution you with gravity on this fact that you can do a case a great deal of harm by failing to reduce what you have contacted. If the somatic disappears but not the words, you have just confronted a reduction, and that is adequately covered in the Handbook. It means that those phrases occur earlier but that a similar somatic is repeated only a very few times before this. As a result you will have reduced the aberrative effect of it. A reduction is perfectly valid, but it means that you are not as early in the case as you can get, not by a long ways, even though you have placed that engram in a situation where it cannot reactivate.

There are three things you must know very, very well.

Erasure. When you see an erasure, it is not possible to mistake it. It may be that the engram erases without the person being in his own valence, without his having had a very severe somatic, and yet after you have run it a few times the words begin to drop out. They vanish. But they don’t vanish on a recessive basis, they actually go.
The general manifestation of an erasure is a recounting, together with yawns. If you don’t get yawns, either you are not getting an erasure or you don’t have the basic, and that is a recession. If you do get yawns off it, and most of the time laughs, and a rather confused state on the part of the person because he knew something was there and now he can’t pick up the words again, that is an erasure. He can tell you more or less what was there and what kind of an engram he was running, but now it’s gone.
If you carry out an erasure with a person in his own valence, where you are getting some somatic on the incident, it will erase down to a point of even knocking out the visio.
The visio on all prenatals is blackness, and when there are little white squares with it, that is a real erasure. The person will actually see little white squares. If he has a phrase left in it that you haven’t gotten, there will be a black square left where that phrase is. This manifestation is very common.
A reduction. In a reduction the somatic disappears, the discomfort disappears, the person is no longer concerned with it, yet the words are still present. This means that you are working just a little bit late. But a reduction is valid therapy.
Don’t put too much importance upon curling up, or jumping around, or flipping into other valences and so forth. These are all manifestations but they are not necessarily part of an erasure or a reduction.
Beating an incident into a recession. You can recount an engram into a recession where the personnel disappear and where everything more or less drops out of sight. That engram will have to be addressed again. You can take almost any engram and beat it into a recession by just grinding away on it. But there will be no yawns, and there is no relief. There is no laughter. It is just a grim grind which can be noticed very easily.
It is possible in an erasure, when basic- basic is not yet out of the case, for the entire incident to disappear rather easily, particularly when there have been muscle jerks and manifestations in it. If the incident deintensifies— the words vanish but no yawns come off— the first moment of unconsciousness has not been contacted in the case. There is still unconsciousness on the one that has just been run which will have to come off eventually.

So, one can get what is actually an erasure, with everything erased in it except the unconsciousness. If one goes earlier in that case, one will find a long series of yawns, and when those are gotten off the unconsciousness will lift off the later one. This is a strange aspect of the basic area, that the unconsciousness is pretty thin, and you may be able to get the thing to erase without it.

One finds this most ordinarily in patients who are delivering a great intensity of muscular action, who curl up in a ball and so on; and occasionally with such manifestations one gets an erasure in the basic area without a yawn.

A word of advice as to the state of an engram is that if you touch it and there is a mild somatic which does not seem to be troubling the person, you have left something out of your calculations if you say, "Well, we can safely leave this." Because although that psychosomatic illness may not be very severe when one is returned to the incident, when brought up to present time the aberrative effect of it multiplies greatly in its severity. For instance, a migraine engram all the way back on the track may be producing a fairly mild headache, but if you brought that person up to present time suddenly with that migraine headache he would have a very bad one.

It will work exactly the same way with the aberrative effect. So if the patient has this engram which says, "I want to go home. I have to go home," he doesn’t jump up off the bed immediately and pack his bag and go home. But if we now bring him up to present time and turn him loose, he will walk around in circles for a little while and then suddenly say to himself, "You know, I have to go home," so he packs his bag, climbs on a plane and flies seven hundred miles to get home. Then when he gets home the thing has settled out and he says, "What on earth am I doing here?" So he will let a few days go by and then he will come back. That may be very good for airline business, but it is not good Dianetics.

An engram can be treated in three ways.

You can run the engram consecutively all the way through, just one for one, straight on through. You will find that this is very efficacious if the person will go on through the engram all the way to the back of it, over and over.
Pick it up at the first phrase and knock it out with the initial impact. Then pick up the next phrase and knock it out, and then the next. When you get to the rear end of the engram, it is gone. So you are erasing in sections.
Send the somatic strip along the course of the engram to the bouncers, the denyers, the misdirectors, the holders, and knock each one out, deintensifying each one so that you can then go through the engram smoothly. This is a valid technique, particularly if you are working a case where you have a hidden engram that you have not been able to discover yet, and you are just shooting holes in an engram to make it possible to gain access to the one you really want. However, if you use this technique of just shooting holes in an engram, be sure to go back to the beginning of it and recount it consecutively through again, because there is a lot of aberrative material you have not yet contacted.

Even if there is no word content in an engram, remember that there is probably noise in it. There is also tactile and visio, even though the visio is just blackness, and you can sweep through that engram rather rapidly. That is why a 36- hour labor can be reduced in one to two hours, because maybe the word content was not great. Just sweeping through it reduces it, and you will even get yawns off blank spots in it and so on.

In stripping an engram you could go all the way down the bank on the phrase "I don’t know," until you find an early "I don’t know" that will erase. Then you run the whole engram. Don’t just run "I don’t know." You will find a lot of early engrams that way.

Once you go down and erase the bottom one, you have deintensified the chain of "I don’t know’s" to a large degree. Don’t go back up it again.

Any auditing is a matter of using your wits. But get the first "I don’t know" and it will certainly make a difference in the way the case runs.

Simply pounding "I don’t know" at a person is no good because there may be engrams in there that say, "I don’t know," although there is also the possibility that the person himself may not know.

Keep coaxing it back. The person says, "I don’t know, I don’t know," and then we go back by saying, "Let’s get to an earlier ‘I don’t know." ’ The only trouble is you may have an "I don’t know, stay there," at which moment you will lock the person up on the track by "stay there" having been reactivated but not having been touched. So watch the fact that the person is still moving when you are going back down the track this way.

Keep telling the somatic strip to go earlier and have the patient tell you if there is a different somatic appearing. If the person is not moving he will normally tell you, if you let him know what you are trying to do for him.

Something in which you must pick up your skill is recognizing an engram when you see it, finding out what it is going to do, and then doing what has to be done for it. If it is not going to reduce or erase don’t sit there and beat it into recession, just find an earlier one.

Sometimes you will have to run an upper one (which is going to beat into recession) two or three times in order to spring the earlier one into sight. But once you have sprung the engram similar to it which was earlier, you will find that the engrams above it which have a similar content will have deintensified enough so that you can leave them alone at that time.

If, however, you have excited an engram to a point where it is now holding him solidly on the track somewhere, you had better find the holder and knock it out. If you can’t find the holder, then knock out a denyer, find the holder, and get him moving earlier. If a person is going to be held on the track, you can take enough intensity out of the engram in order to get him moving earlier. Watch this carefully, and you will see how it operates. But the only way to do that is simply to go ahead and do it. If you have a case which is not going to behave at all as you’re working on it, there are reasons why it won’t.

Now, if this were just a simple mechanical matter of finding an engram and going earlier, it would take no brains to audit it. But it does take brains. There are other computations in the case which will hold it up. There are all sorts of things that can hold a case up.

When you get hold of an engram, don’t just touch it lightly and go off to something else, do something to it. You can find out by running its first phrase what is going to happen to that engram, because there is going to be a somatic on that first phrase if it is an engram. Try and run it by rolling it a few times, and find out if it recedes. Find out if there is intensity on the engram, because if there is you can always take off its tension. If there is nothing, then the first phrase isn’t going to do anything but sit there. So that is a method of testing, although all of these things are things which you have to use your judgment on.

An auditor must realize the extent to which the somatic strip and basic personality are cooperating with him. The file clerk and the somatic strip will cooperate with him to the limit of their abilities. So if he gets the somatic strip locked up someplace on the track, then it hasn’t stopped cooperating with him, it simply can’t move and it is up to him to find out why. There will be a reason which the auditor can do something about to start it moving again.

One can take a case and go into it and jog it around this way and knock it around that way and send the somatic strip someplace and then decide that isn’t what one wants and send it someplace else, and then go earlier and perhaps run one twice and then suddenly decide it was maybe birth after all and go up to birth— about this time the file clerk and the somatic strip will stop cooperating. That is a factor that must be recognized.

If one mishandles a case at its entrance, the cooperation will slack off until suddenly the patient will not cooperate with you at all. In such a way you have spoiled a case and made it very difficult for yourself or for another auditor to unravel. Nevertheless it can be done. One lets the case settle and then does something sentient about it.

You might say that the file clerk and the somatic strip will go on strike against you because you have gotten the case all stirred up, you are not using the combination necessary, and you haven’t asked for their cooperation. You have merely jarred into the case, hammered around on it, driven it in some direction or other, gotten it restimulated and then gone off and left it.

However, you will be able to overcome that engram if you have not antagonized your two allies there, the file clerk and the somatic strip.

Open up a case brand new and start to run that case with good sense, and the cooperation will start to pick up and it should go on a rising curve which may not be very great at first; but the moment the file clerk and the somatic strip know that you are going in there and you are approximating it the way they would like to work, they will go on cooperating with you right straight along.

But if you go into the case and mess it up by getting it into a fine state of restimulation without doing anything about it, if you overlook the obvious combination necessary to resolve the case, if you haven’t asked for cooperation but just driven the case from here to there, the file clerk and the somatic strip will finally say No! and quit.

The file clerk and the somatic strip are your allies, they will work with you. But you have got to treat them as allies. You can’t give them two orders consecutively. For instance, you can’t say, "All right, the file clerk will now give us the incident necessary to reduce before we can reduce birth," and then not send the somatic strip there to the first phrase, but simply say, " Oh, well, let’s go to some late life painful emotion."

The file clerk has already pulled one forward. It is waiting. Now if you tell the person to go to some late life painful emotion, he may go up to late life painful emotion; but if we don’t find any emotional discharge there right away and say, "Well, let’s go to conception now," there are now two commands not carried out. We didn’t run that late life painful emotion, we just took a glance at it and said, "Aw, that’s no good. Now we’ll go to conception." So we have sent the person to conception and run it into restimulation and then all of a sudden said, "Well, maybe we can get birth now. The file clerk will now give us birth— no, let’s go to that first AA," and about that time the file clerk and the somatic strip are going to close down just as cold as an icebox.

Or give him a command like this, "The somatic strip will go to the first part of this engram. All right, now run the phrase ‘I don’t care." ’ But that is not in the first part of the engram. So the somatic strip has gone over to the beginning of the incident, but you want a phrase run in the middle somewhere. So the somatic strip has to adjust back over to this phrase again and you are getting two consecutive commands.

All you have to remember is that as far as the file clerk and the somatic strip are concerned they can only do one thing at a time. Know what you are going to say to them, know what you want them to do, and then give them all the help and assistance you can in doing that thing. But realize that the file clerk can’t talk to you. Don’t ever ask the file clerk to cooperate; the file clerk is either cooperating or not cooperating. It isn’t something you ask for. It will cooperate beautifully if it can.

If you are sending a person back down the track, remember it takes five, ten seconds to get there, no longer than that; and it takes the somatic strip three or four milliseconds to get from one part of an engram to another part of an engram. If the thing isn’t being handed up within ten seconds after you have asked for it, it is not ready to come up. So just nullify the command. Say, "Well, that’s all right, we don’t have to have that now, it’s not ready to come out. Let’s take up what is ready to come up."

This is a cooperative endeavor. Never set it up that the file clerk and the somatic strip are under your absolute command. You are cooperating with them, they are cooperating with you. They will do all they can to help you, and you must do all you can to help them. If you ask them to do things which they cannot do, don’t suddenly assume an unreasonable and commanding attitude toward them.

They will sometimes give you the engram, and the patient quite often will absolutely refuse to touch it.

You don’t then suddenly run in repeater technique, because that would change the position of the somatic strip and the file clerk. He may be talking out of an engram 15 removed from where you are, or part of a bundle of engrams. You merely say, "When I count from one to five, the first phrase of this engram is going to flash into your mind."

"No, no, no, no, no!"

"All right. The first phrase is going to flash into your mind when I count from one to five."

Don’t make the mistake of believing the file clerk and the somatic strip are verbal. They cooperate with you quietly and unspokenly. The engrams will talk, and when you have somebody back down the track someplace, the engrams very often do talk. But as far as what the patient has got to say at that moment, it is invalid material.

He may be saying, "I’m not going to go through this one again. I’m just not going to do it. That’s all there is to it. It’s just too tough, it’s not ready to come up yet." You know very well it is. The patient is jerking and jumping around; there is tension on the thing. The file clerk is sitting right there holding it for you and the somatic strip is right there at the beginning of it, right where you put him.

All you have to say is, "All right. Let’s roll."

"No."

"Well, just give me the first phrase of it anyway."

You are actually working on a trio. Let us consider the first of the trio, aberrated personality, who is a rather recalcitrant little boy of very low voltage when he is way down the track. So you are working with this rather querulous, sometimes tantrumesque child, if you want to consider it that way. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t horsepower lying right underneath that, because there is.

The person is saying, "No, I’m not going to go through this engram. Oh, that’s too painful. You’ll never get me into a situation like this again." That is not the file clerk or the somatic strip. If they are cooperating with you, you can run that engram.

So actually the auditor, the file clerk and the somatic strip are closing in on aberrated personality. And the three of them, working properly and in cooperation, can really make hash out of aberrated personality.

As far as flash reply is concerned, you can sometimes get an imperfect connection. It is usually pretty good but not absolutely so, because it may come out on a demon circuit and get filtered. The flash reply is as close to talking as the file clerk will get. He has got lots of data and lots of computer to work with, even in a psychotic.

You have to assume, because it is true, that a case which has not been thoroughly messed up by somebody telling the somatic strip to go to one place and the file clerk to go someplace else, and saying, "Well, he doesn’t want to roll this now, so we’ll go off to something else," has the file clerk and the somatic strip positioned right where you want them. If you have overlooked the fact that they are, it is something like going out to fight a war and telling the territorials that they should attack on the left, and then changing your mind and after they have had a six hours’ hard march to get around on the left flank telling them, "Well, we decided that you should go over to the right." The territorials will go over to the right maybe once or twice or three more times.

Now if they are told all of a sudden, "Well, you lead the shock troops," and then after they have gotten into the attack a little ways they are informed, "Well, no, I don’t know, we can’t trust these people anyway. We don’t know where they are so turn your machine guns on them from behind, " they will eventually quit.

It would look like that to the file clerk if you had really led him astray. He would no longer have any confidence in you. It is a matter of confidence. At the beginning of a case the file clerk and the somatic strip are going to do their level best the moment they get an inkling of what you are doing. They will do that even on a psychotic, homocidal maniac. This man may be growling and snarling and screaming, but his file clerk and his somatic strip will still work with you.

It is an astonishing fact that there is such a level of cooperation in existence. It is part of the whole principle of affinity.

There is a research project going on which involves a new technique of putting a person into a pleasurable sexual moment without getting a recounting of it. Don’t ask him to tell you what he is doing, but put him in a pleasurable sexual incident, and with this technique you may be able to reach his own conception and run it out as an engram.

Run it out two, four, six, eight, twelve times, it doesn’t matter, but see if you can develop some pain in that engram. Get him earlier, to the ejaculation. Then see if you can get him around being the ovum. See how much track you can open up there at the bottom by starting a case with the sperm sequence.

I have always gotten the sperm sequence somewhere along the line of a case and treated it as an engram, reducing it. But if we could start a case with this, that would be basic- basic. Usually in trying to reach it, it is found to have numerous bundles of engrams around it. I have always considered that possibly we were running coitus, but let’s make a good, solid test on it and find out whether or not by relieving the sperm sequence as basic- basic as an independent thing, we can achieve erasure right at the beginning of a case and thus shorten therapy.