RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY

A lecture given on 29 June 1950

Vocabulary and Cases

The education of a person into Dianetic therapy is a relatively simple task. If the person is studying Dianetics on a co- auditing basis, we have one problem. If the patient is simply undergoing Dianetic therapy and we don’t care whether he knows anything about Dianetics or not, we have another problem.

The first is different from the second only in that you can use all of your terminology and nomenclature at will. The second is difficult only because all of your terminology is so much Greek to him. So we have then two problems within the same problem. You and I know that it is not difficult to audit somebody with the Dianetic terminology if he is studying Dianetics, and we can leave it at that. But the second one does pose some difficulties.

That is the case who is wholly, utterly unacquainted with any of the terminology, who knows nothing about the reactive mind, who has no slightest concept of what a bouncer is or does, or what a denyer does, or what any of these things do. People are sometimes amazed to know that bouncers keep on bouncing a person, whether he knows it or not. Three or four times people have said to me, "Well, these people think this is what is supposed to happen, so of course they let it happen, and they’re just fooling."

I worked one little girl one time who was about 10 years of age. She had no understanding of Dianetics at all. Yet we were unable to contact the basic area because of the existence of a certain phrase, "I don’t know, it’s too early to tell yet." That was the doctor’s examination. And she couldn’t tell. I merely shot that at her at random finally, and made her repeat it a couple of times, and she brightened right up and told me about the whole thing. Then I said, "Now, you see, you weren’t supposed to tell that."

"Who said so? Nobody told me I wasn’t supposed to tell that."

And we had quite an argument. Because, as soon as those words were contacted, they ceased to have an effect upon her. She was not instructed as to what effect they were supposed to have, and as a result she didn’t understand what effect they had had. It went that way with that whole case. Somebody would say, "Get out," and I would give the patient an age flash, "How old are you?"

And she would say, "8."

So I would say, "Well, let’s repeat the words ‘Get out."‘ She would repeat the words "Get out" right back down into the engram again, whereupon another age flash would give us "2 months." So it went with that case, up and down, up and down, up and down.

I have run cases who were arguing with me continually, trying to convince me they were in the prenatal area. I was just smiling tolerably about the whole thing saying, "Well, if that’s what you understand, that’s what you understand. I’m not trying to put any evaluation across to you. If you think you’re in the prenatal area, why, that’s fine, that’s fine."

People would get very upset with me. Some man would be running through the sperm sequence who had not been informed that the sperm sequence was there, but merely sent to the earliest moment in life. Naturally, he would pick this up probably as birth as most people do, but he would wind up with the sperm sequence and wiggle on the bed going through all the motions.

People react to these things whether they know anything about them or not. Therefore, you can use almost any persuasive patter you like to secure the cooperation of the file clerk and the somatic strip. You can alter your language. You don’t have to explain to him what a denyer or a bouncer is; but you will find it profitable, if you are going to work a case over a long period of time, to give the person about a 10- word vocabulary in Dianetics. It is perfectly workable to use a side patter, but the words which you will find in Dianetics have for the most part been selected over a period of time. They have been selected and reselected and reselected, and any moment they can be selected again and changed. But the selection of those words is based on experience.

There is only one phrase I wish I could change in Dianetics and that is time track. Time track means something to people. But in 1911 there were some old cliches about "You’re off your trolley" and "I am going to throw him off the track," and things like that actually occur in engrams. It is such a close approximation that it is a toss- up whether or not it is best to retain time track and then pick up the things which throw him off the track, or to use something else which won’t demonstrate the existence of this word track in the case. But the mind takes so readily to this analogy of track that it is a hard one to discard. The word somatic— an adjective converted into a noun, actually meaning "body"— is used because the use of the word pain is very restimulative and, furthermore, pain does not cover the field. A somatic can be pressures, aches, and so on, as well as real pain.

The use of the word denyer, sets up a neologism which is not too suggestive to the patient. In the same way I have only found the word bouncer in two or three engrams. Incidentally, it really bounces when you find the word bouncer in the engram. The phrase "I’m going to be the bouncer around here" is one of them. Of course it went on to say, "and throw out these guys after they’ve stayed too late," and so on. This was hubby giving wife a lecture about a party.

A misdirector, of course, is a rather loose word which can be broken down into several sub- classes. But I have never found the word misdirector in an engram to date.

So these words have been chosen for their unrestimulative character and it is quite legitimate for you to use them. They will not give the patient the idea that he is supposed to do something just because he finds one. He bounces whether he knows it is a bouncer or not, so you are not in any degree undermining the case by throwing in these words.

However, if you have a person who dodges badly— and those people do exist— somebody with an enormous amount of dub- in who is quite frightened of approaching any engram, he may use the mechanics of Dianetics to fool you. The only trouble is that he can’t bounce well. He claims he is in a bouncer, and he may even feed you back the wrong age flash or something like that, but he is right there in the engram. You can take a look at him. Or he is not in any engram and when you repeat the bouncer back a few times at him that he has given you, you do not get him into any engram.

So there is that slight possibility of the person dodging, using these mechanisms back at you. He has been taught to dodge. This case always poses a very tough problem. Any ideas which you come across on the subject of how to knock apart a dub- in more rapidly are very welcome. There is a fellowship award waiting for the person who cracks that problem.

In the aggregate, then, it is usually time saved to educate the person a little bit. Let him read "Advice to the Preclear" which will explain what the terms are. It doesn’t take very long. Let him read the Handbook.

Of course, in the case of the psychotic you don’t have someone who can read and assimilate the material. This is the one case where you will have to alter your patter. There isn’t any chance there to explain something to this person, to educate him with anything.

For the most part, most really inaccessible, hard cases are psychotics. So when you are talking to his somatic strip, it is the usual thing to say, "Well, let’s see if we can’t look at this," or,

"Let’s see if we can’t be where such- and- such happened." Just vary your patter by more or less describing to him what you want. Or, if you have the engram right there in full play, that is easy; you just ask him to repeat it again, to say it again, to say it again, to say it again, to say it again. And the thing has a tendency to deintensify.

In fact most psychotics can be clipped out of the psychosis just by hammering away with repeater technique, although it is rather an endless task. That would be for those who are relatively inaccessible and who are dramatizing an engram.

You will find many people carrying the label of psychotic, however, who will lie down, return to the incident, run through the incident from beginning to end, and go right on through a full- dress parade Dianetic session. It is wonderful the amount of cooperation which a psychotic will quite often demonstrate. Somebody will tell you, "This is a most resistant man, we can’t do a thing with him," and you talk to the person for a minute and say to him, "Let’s see if we can’t find the so- and- so who did this to you," and that appeals! Suddenly he’s right in there pitching with you, and you will get through a session with him without making him feel that he is being ruined. After two or three sessions that fellow will really start working with you.

Of course one has to educate the person. This subject of educating the patient is one which can be made very large. When we talk about education in any form, we are going into Educational Dianetics. Educational Dianetics deals with bringing to the attention of the person the reality of his own existence.

We have in this subject a great deal of material which is, as in all Dianetics, fringe material. We have a good grip on the science of the mind, we can produce results. But month by month, if we can’t produce shorter, better, quicker results, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves, because we have here the tools of test and evaluation

We are dealing with something which has no relationship whatsoever to psychology, psychoanalysis, or any other mental healing school which ever existed. Anybody who tries to say, "Well, this was part of, and that was something else," is doing a sloppy job of evaluating. Because while some of these things with which we experiment were a portion of some healing school, as that portion and as they existed they were of relatively little use.

It was not until another factor was entered into the problem that a proper estimate could be taken of the situation in the mind, the factor of a yardstick to measure the accuracy or importance of a fact. Until one could evaluate facts in relationship to facts, the task of evaluation was too great, since it had to be done by statistical experimentation, not by derivation from basic principles. Statistical evaluation can assume the most horribly clumsy and staggering heights.

When somebody says, "Well, now, where are your statistics on suchand- so?" they are asking you out of a pattern of training which has told them that the only possible method of evaluation is by statistics. The evaluation by statistics is a lame one at best since, as any statistician knows, statistics can be most horribly unreliable. One has to know precisely what he is observing, and he may not be observing what he should observe at all.

By the scientific method, one has certain postulates, certain tenets, certain axioms to which he can submit a new fact. When he submits this new fact to his axioms and tenets, which he has already demonstrated to have actual existence in reality, he can then get a proper evaluation of this new fact.

Whether the Muckalupian Indians in the year 1821 were very fond of making people confess about their relatives or something of the sort is of no value. We would have to go in on a statistical basis from this angle: How many patients had the medicine man treated? How many changed manifestations were there in the patients he treated? How good was the medicine man? How closely did he hew to this particular scheme?

Then we would compile those statistics and we would have some percentage, but that percentage is not going to tell you anything. It is going to tell you simply that here was a method whereby somebody who, having found out data about his relatives, changed his manifestation. So, it is a circular problem.

For instance, if we know that a person is influenced in a certain way by his relatives, and his relatives are in the habit of saying particular phrases to him, and we know the action of those words in the psyche of the person we are treating, we can then free him from the habits and so forth of his relatives. We can look at this dispassionately and say, "Well, now, that’s pretty good," and incorporate it. We say, "Find out all the data about your relatives," and the person gets a little bit better. But we have to do more with it.

That is scientific methodology, evaluation- on the basis of axioms and tenets. The field of the mind is incapable at this time of properly taking an estimate of Dianetics. They are confronted with a single physical law and several observed axioms.

As a result, the type of methodology of the physical scientist is at work here. How many volts and how many amperes are coming through that light bulb? One can take a voltmeter and an ammeter and measure them, but it is not necessary for us to measure them 500 times. We will get 500 answers, and they will more or less be the same answer. We don’t go around, then, measuring something 500 times. That is the statistical method.

We say, "Well, now, there’s electricity flowing through that thing, and it should be— unless the city power system has gone crazy— 110 volts." We don’t have to measure it. Or, if we do measure it, we only measure it once. We make our instruments certain. If we want to really be certain of it we take three sets of instruments and we measure it. We only measure it three times though. We can compare the results with these instruments, figure out the instrument error and we have an accurate estimate of the situation. We don’t need 500 measurements. The statistical method and the derivation method are the two points of difference.

Your task as you enter research— and all of you, whether you want to or not, are going to enter research— is not to collect statistics. Your task is to derive new data from your observations and find out how it correlates with what you already know, and know works; in other words, to do an evaluation against known behavior.

So, if you go off on a line of research, you have to say, "Well, I think such- and- such might possibly be the case, but let’s see if the mind works this way." So we take five, ten patients, and observe it in them.

We are not trying to gather statistics that say five or ten people work this way. We are trying to find out if the human mind works this way. Having observed it we say, "Well, in a proportion of these cases, cases which don’t have dub- in, for instance, this thing is observably useful." So we have a new method and we have evaluated it to that degree.

Now, if you or myself or somebody suddenly discovers some way of breaking a dub- in case, we will not know that by putting a person’s hand in a fire for three seconds every day at 10 o’clock, a dub- in breaks. That is not the kind of information we will have. We will have information there which will suddenly illuminate some further dark corner of the mind. In other words, there is something else at work here. Now we can use it and we can solve the case with our processes, but obviously we can improve it.

So if we have illuminated this further dark corner, soon the whole principle will fall back over into our field of therapy, and the cases on which your current methods missed will now resolve. But, more importantly, you will probably get a better technique on all these cases.

What we are getting, then, is something closer and closer to a simplicity, something which is closer and closer to working every time on everybody in every case. No matter what the case does, our basic techniques already work all the time on all minds, but some of them are too lengthy. Some of them are too complex. The auditor has to be too skilled. It sometimes takes too many hours.

As a result, the gains will be in terms of evaluation of new data, not the discovery of new statistics. It is a process of thinking. It is a process of shaking up and evaluating.

It is in no way a criticism of the older methods of attack to say that it was not properly evaluated, since to have been properly evaluated it would have been necessary for that work to have been aligned with the natural laws.

The fact that one discovers the natural laws does not immediately give him the right to come down with all four feet on the head of somebody who hadn’t discovered them. I don’t think, for instance, that Maxwell was furious with the people who had the phlogiston theory of combustion which was a backward way of looking at it. But there is an entirely different mechanism at work here, that of derivation. So when one does research, such as Educational Dianetics where one wants to observe and find out something, one rehabilitates reality. In working with this we want to rehabilitate reality. We are not trying to make a person "face" it, or anything nebulous. We know that there is a validating mechanism in the mind, which, when it is put into operation, suddenly tells the person this is reality. If the exact character of that mechanism could be sprung into full view, cases would get well much more rapidly.

That discovery, if it could be put into full play, would be more useful than anything else we have, except of course our basic tenets which have already shown up the existence of this.

One finds amongst the schools of the human mind a lot of data. However, it is not evaluated as it should be, because to be evaluated it has to have a scale on which to be weighed. It would be quite profitable to conduct an all- out salvage operation throughout all the schools of mental healing. It would turn up things which we could evaluate and fit in, and we would probably have a few more white pieces on our jigsaw puzzle.

There are certain practices like the isolated datum of Homer Lane going in to talk to the worst psychotic in the institution. He was told, "He will tear you to pieces because he’s homicidal." So Homer Lane steps quietly into the cell, says to this great, big, naked maniac, "I’ve heard that you can help me," and the maniac looks at him and says, "How did you know?"

Homer Lane had a large number of successes with this method. He became very famous throughout England.

What makes that work? Why does it only work occasionally? That is a nice little research project. We should be able to find out what makes it work with about a week’s research, because we know something about the third dynamic. It’s a postulate, but it has proven an extremely workable postulate. It was predicted to exist in actuality, and when a search was made for it, it was found to exist. Much confirmatory evidence can be turned up on this to a point where there is no reason to go on confirming it. It evidently has something to do with the third dynamic, but why is it? Or what dynamic is it that could be touched in this patient or that patient?

If Homer Lane had had Dianetics at hand, he probably would have said, "Let’s see, now, a lot of these people work by an appeal, they react to an appeal on the third dynamic. Maybe some of them would react on an appeal on the fourth dynamic. There would be another one that would only act on an appeal to the second dynamic. And maybe a lot of them would only react to an appeal on the first dynamic. What is the difference? How can we recognize in these people which dynamic it is to which we must appeal?"

For instance, talking to a psychotic recently I threw out an appeal to the second dynamic, or children, but that was completely blank! But an appeal made to the first dynamic had some slight effect. An appeal made to the third dynamic was dead, no effect whatsoever. If I had made an appeal on the fourth dynamic, I might have achieved results. So this is a worthwhile piece of experimentation.

Another principle is that of dramatization. This was covered to some slight degree in The Original Thesis, but has not been developed into its full use in therapy techniques.

Here is one principle working, let’s see if it will work across the boards, because it should work across the boards if our tenets are really workable. And it does work across the boards. It was found, for instance, that if you put a person into the second dynamic, you can take him back and in a lot of cases find the sperm sequence.

All right, let’s take him into a rage dramatization in the family. Let’s take him into his own emotional moods in each one of his dramatizations. Then let’s carry him back to its inception, and we might be able to crack all the chains simply by establishing his mood in a late life incident and then by riding the mood back earlier— a very worthwhile piece of research.

You will probably find that a person who can’t be put back to the sperm sequence may possibly be reached by striking one of the other dynamics and striking one of the other tones. l

For instance, it is a fact that a patient is not recovering whose place on the tone scale does not rise. If something is keeping him suppressed on the tone scale into an apathy, let’s say, he is not going to spring up into a better state of being. It is absolutely necessary that he pass through tone 1, as a whole case, not merely in an incident. One finds on the tone scale that a person who starts in through an incident with the emotional tone of apathy will then go into it on anger, then go into boredom, then there will be some false fours, 2 and finally it will settle down on the upper three.

That incident, then, is deintensified. In such a way the whole case will function in this fashion. For instance, the person is in apathy and even actually passes through a period of being angry. First he is resentful, then he is angry, and then finally he starts to get bored with the situation and he will finally come on up the line. The tone scale is fantastic in the fact that it does follow those steps just like that. That is observed phenomena.

Now, this lecture concerns research, because out of individual auditors will come many improvements for Dianetics as we go along. Here I will delineate what one should look for, and how one can coordinate.

Do not despise, under any circumstances, anything which has been done in the field of the mind prior to Dianetics, because you will shut your mind to data which, isolated and unevaluated though it may be, can be of value. Men have been thinking about the mind for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. Dianetics came into existence only because these people had been thinking about the mind. Suddenly, by hitting at the center of the problem, the problem crystallized and we could do something about it which was certain and positive. But Dianetics could not have come into existence had it not been for the ages behind us wherein men were thinking. So there have been a lot of thoughts thought in the past, and to despise them is to close one’s mind. Naturally one has a feeling of grave distaste for a prefrontal lobotomist who, without any experimental evidence, without any proportion of good results, actually without reason, began to carve up brains. Such a person is not worthy of belonging even to the schools of the past on the subject of the mind, and the better people in those schools despise him. The neurosurgeon today is under more fire from his own profession than we are going to put him under, although we could put him under fire.

One can just see the dramatization involved in a transorbital leukotomy, or a prefrontal lobotomy. It is a dramatization, nothing else. "You have got to get a needle and stick it in," or, "You have got to get a knife and cut it out. The only way I can get rid of these worries is just to stick a knife in there and get it out. I’ve got to get it out, oh God, oh God, it’s killing me, so I’ve got to get it out!" Only it’s probably Papa saying, "I’ll cut it out for you."

I will bet that I could take 15 psychiatrists and neurosurgeons now practicing these obscene and horrible acts, and find in every one of them mutual attempted abortion. We see the dramatization. We know what lies behind it, because we know the principle of dramatization. There is no rationality connected with it. They don’t get any results. They just go on cutting up brains.

They kill their patients, quite often. The mortality rate is high although they state them in the most diffident tone. Reports on these neurosurgical operations read: "The mortality rate is surprisingly low. The number of remissions is very high." They don’t even follow out the statistical method on this. I was unable to get any data until somebody told me one time that 43 percent of brain operations resulted in remission. I asked, "What do you mean by remission?"

"Sent home, discharged."

"Discharged how?"

"Just discharged to their families."

"Where are these people now?"

"They’re at home."

"What are they doing?" Well, by running it down we found out that some of them were performing routine tasks, but a large percentage of them were under constant care at home with a nurse in attendance day and night. The failures were immense. For instance, maybe some fellow was a mild manic- depressive. After brain surgery, we find him in a cell, wet, dirty, naked, unable to control any of his bodily functions.

Transorbital leukotomy, prefrontal lobotomy, topectomy and the rest of them were imported from Europe on a statistical authoritarian basis. They have never succeeded in America, yet they are in use in practically every institution in the land. Now there is where statistics can lead you if those statistics are not derived and evaluated.

Even so, we can still learn something from the transorbital leukotomy and the prefrontal lobotomy. We can learn that they have made a mess out of a lot of human beings.

It has been discovered that when they cut up the prefrontal lobes of the brain they are unable to stir up any ambition in the person. They have found out what they consider to be the seat of the ambition, hope, fineness, friendliness, the dynamics of the individual. They have observed, when they cut up the prefrontal lobes, that these things diminish or vanish— a useful datum— however, it took over ten thousand human beings before somebody made this bright observation. But it is a datum.

In the topectomy there is a little apple corer which goes in and removes sections of the brain. They have stuck this little apple corer into various parts of the brain and removed them and found out, for instance, that if you take a certain part out the person goes blind. If you take another part out, he has no sense of taste. If you take some other part out, why, he can’t smell anything anymore. You take another part out, then every image he sees is inverted. So a lot of structural data has been collected, but the method of obtaining it is highly reprehensible and, it having been obtained, the practice should certainly stop. Most of these things are done just because somebody is dramatizing, not because they want data.

Also, the whole field of psychology has been working on an erroneous premise, which they themselves must have recognized as erroneous, that a person has to be adjusted. They have been working with a herd psychology of "What we need is more sheep." Therefore they have been putting it forth that a man should be adjusted to his environment.

With relationship to this there are evidently three general classes of mind. One, the lowest class, seems to be a mind which is incapable of adjusting to the environment. The second type, which you find in routine levels (supervised tasks), is a mind which is capable of adjusting to the environment. The third class is the mind which is capable of doing some adjusting to the environment but is mainly engaged in adjusting the environment.

As you rise on the scale and get a higher and higher intelligence level and greater and greater worth to the society, you will find that the person is more and more capable of adjusting his environment. We are here today because we adjust the environment. We are living in a man- made environment. If we were to cling to this outrageously dull tenet that the thing we must do for a person is adjust him to his environment, we would have at last on our hands a complete cave- in of our culture, because it calls for no change. It calls for no advance.

A man who is adjusting his environment is immediately labeled by the psychiatrist as neurotic or insane in this day and age. I have a textbook that I pulled off the presses just ten days before the first copy of Dianetics rolled off the press which validates the fact that this was the thought and tenet of modern psychology. It was the standard text on psychopathology for the University of Illinois, and it has all their definitions. That is in our library now; I have got it very carefully put aside, because after the appearance of Dianetics there will be a lot of people saying, "Well, we knew this all the time." But that text talks about nothing but adjusting the person to his environment. "This person was maladjusted." God, give me men who are maladjusted! You will build a world that way and reach the stars.

Psychology fell into the same trough as Christianity did when Christianity was being used against people rather than following its own philosophic tenets. The old slave traders went to Africa and said, "Give ‘em rum and Christianity. That will fix ‘em." And it did, too! It crushed the opposing tribes on the coast. It permitted the slave traders to pick up shiploads of black ivory, and it provided the United States with a rather terrible population problem in the South.

"Rum and Christianity." That was the way it was used. But the people who were using Christianity in this way never thought that they themselves would be caught with it. It is a sheep religion when preached that way, which it was never intended to be. And now psychology has fallen into the same slot and we have a sheep psychology: The thing to do is to make sheep.

In the political field one could say: "Aha, what we want is everybody adjusted to his environment. It’s a well- known psychological fact that a person should be adjusted to his environment. Therefore we are going to adjust everybody to his environment in the whole society. We’re going to make them utterly dependent upon the government. What we must take care of is the mass."

The mass has never been able to take care of itself without having amongst it people who could adjust the environment for that mass. Because a person who couldn’t adjust his environment was a person who was as good as dead as far as future generations were concerned, unless he was being helped along by people who could adjust the environment for him.

The political equation that five morons don’t make a genius has apparently been perverted to run on the basis that five morons do make a genius. So, it is a twisted look at life.

This demonstrates several things. One of these is that there is an enormous amount of data which has not yet been correlated. There are practices and skills and treatments known today (psychodrama is one of them) which are improperly correlated at this moment in Dianetics.

Psychodrama has some validity. I have studied it and used it, but a lot more can be gained. I will not go into psychodrama now. A full lecture would be required on it in relationship to psychotics. However, it is a tool somebody was using. Let’s make a better tool.

The next thing is to keep an open mind toward these things.

The next thing after that is don’t let yourself get stampeded at any time on the statistical method, because engineers who try to build bridges on the basis of a statistical method are going to get bridges that fall down. We can say, "180 bars of iron have been tested and we have found out they didn’t break." But we know nothing about compression or tension or stress— the principles relating to iron. So we take 1,000 bars of that iron and we build ourselves a bridge. We have no guarantee that those 1,000 bars don’t contain amongst them some that are going to fail. This is the statistical method. We didn’t have, right there at the inception, the metallurgical laws to hand wherein we could guarantee that out of 1,000 bars of iron there were 1,000 bars which would stay put and do what they were supposed to do.

Our whole civilization depends on the laws of metallurgy after those of fire. We have known all about a lot of this for a long time. Today we consider it very common. One can pick up a piece of iron of a certain size and say, "Well, it will do so- and- so and such- and- such and we can trust it to do that," and we don’t think any more about it. But there is tremendous scientific methodology behind that piece of iron which was not picked up on a statistical method.

Any auditor who is worth his salt is a researcher. He has to be a researcher. He is doing continual research in the human mind. Every day that he works on a patient he is confronting the subject of research. It is research, even if we have a fairly standard case, because we want to know how this case is put together which made it what it was. But we want to be able to take the things out of that case to bring about what we know will be a heightened level of activity. We are performing that search and research with the basic, fundamental laws of application.

If any auditor could audit for 2,000 hours without materially adding to the knowledge and skill of Dianetics, he ought to quit right there because the field is very big.

One of you one of these days is probably going to stumble into the mechanism of telepathy, or a validation of its existence, or how it functions. Or you may find out, as some have been stumbling into, the extension beyond present time of the time track. Or you may stumble into the extension behind conception of the time track. You may uncover suddenly with one spadeful enough new data to completely alter our techniques of application.

We have always got to look for that. Don’t do it by rote! As long as you are doing it interestedly from the standpoint of trying to make it better, you won’t fall into the sins of the practitioner. The moment that you are merely a practitioner and no longer anything but a practitioner, you are going to have cases that fail. Because you can’t do Dianetics by rote.

For example, there are the laws of affinity. We merely know of their existence. How do they function? On what do they depend? We don’t know, for instance, that the laws of affinity do not depend upon a very simple mechanism. We know about what they are. They are lined up and more or less evaluated with Dianetics, but we don’t have their cause. It is not good enough to say that one day we might find the true cause of affinity, which makes it possible for one person to sit down and audit another person. But we may have to go as far as looking on the bright face of God to discover the source.

That source may lie just five minutes’ research away from us and it might lie 2,000 years away from us, although we probably wouldn’t have to solve the whole universe just to recover that datum. What holds man together? What makes him a species? Why does he stay together? What is the cohesive force? It requires a lot of research, a lot of speculation.

You are in a live subject. When you look back at 1894 and recognize that the laws of electricity had at that time just been formulated, and we now have the atom bomb, and we see that only 56 years have intervened, we may be able to get some insight into Dianetics which actually came into existence in 1938, but was not promulgated until 1950.

Certainly by 2006 on the basis of the laws of electricity, having a science which is advancing, which is very young, which could be improved again and again, over and over and over, what will we have? I would hope maybe in five years for a one- shot clear.

But if you have got a one- shot clear, you would not have solved one one- thousandth of the problems relating to man, because these problems have a source. Just open up your mind some night, and go out and look at the stars. It is an immense universe. And all the answers to that universe are accessible. Every single one of them we can know.

Without getting lyrical about it, I do want to impress upon you the fact that as you work on a preclear you are looking at one small laboratory, one grain of sand on the beach. That grain of sand has things in common with every other grain of sand, but there may be something different in this preclean there may be something new. You are working continually as a practitioner, as a laboratory technician, as a researcher, as a philosopher. You can find things out.

In the last two weeks we have received two very marked, extremely valuable advances in Dianetics, and we should have several more shortly. If we don’t have, then Dianetics has slowed down and is getting old.

Clear is definitely established. I have made no modifications of it. It is one of these things that swings fairly close into being an ultimate. There is no reason to modify it that I know of since its definitions are very precise, and what you will find at the end of the track will be equally precise. There are no modifications of any kind on it. The subject is not well covered in the Handbook. It is probably a little better covered in the article in Astounding Science Fiction. 1

There isn’t a paper on the analytical mind which gives you some sort of an idea what the analytical mind is. A clear, after all, operates on the analytical mind. We would have to know the function and processes of the analytical mind to fully understand the clear.

The state of clear is an obtainable goal, unless somebody has been monkeying around with a scalpel. It is a person from whom all engrams have been removed, leaving his optimum state of analytical and dynamic ability. This means simply this: It is a state which is obtainable by an individual. If that individual has had a long, rough life which has left physiological marks on him, he is not precluded from the state of clear. There is no modification of the physiological state that doesn’t modify a clear. It is the optimum state which a person can obtain currently, and that state is obtainable as it is.

Let us say that he has had an eye shot out. When he becomes a clear he doesn’t immediately possess a new eye. Nor does he suddenly glow like a neon light. He has had his engrams deleted so that he can make a fully analytical appraisal of the situation, so that he can operate then on the optimum solution basis. But it is his optimum, and it is almost an absolute, as far as he is concerned. It is as good as he can get on the basis of having his engrams removed, and this is extremely good. If he is walking around with a wooden leg, or if his education was all in Russian, and completely excluded reading, writing and arithmetic and included only "Long live Stalin," I’m afraid at the point of clear he would still be in a state of "Long live Stalin" although he would be able to compute the optimum solution on this, of course.

The difference here is one of an optimum human being and an ideal human being. Unfortunately, the ideal human being cannot be postulated. What a man might be had he never had any engrams, had he been able to be reasonable and rational his whole life, had he been able to select and assimilate all the education, all the opportunities in his life, is something else. He would be very close to an ideal, given the genetic intellect and dynamic to make him a desirably intelligent and forceful human being.

So we go down the street and we find a fellow who in an aberrated state has made a very, very poor show. Nothing much has happened to him in life that is bad, but he has still made a pretty poor showing. He is not terribly aberrated. We clear this person, we find out that he has achieved his own optimum, and it may not be very high. It will be way above current normal, but it is not high in terms that we consider a clear should be.

So it is not a constant. You can’t say when a person attains clear he then has these specific facial characteristics, no more than we can say that a classic paranoid- schiz is always five foot eight and a half inches tall as some of the psychiatric texts would lead us to believe.

He is not a new norm! He is himself, without the things he didn’t want in himself. He is optimum for himself. Now that is going to be pretty good in lots of people, it is going to be quite low in others, and in a great many it is going to be tremendously high.

A person, when he has had deleted from his reactive mind its total content, when he has his entire life in full recall, when he is no longer plagued with psychosomatic illnesses, attains a desirable optimum level for himself. He is not a constant. You don’t take a hundred people and clear them and get a hundred tin soldiers, nor do you get a hundred mechanical computing machines.

The thing that has been overlooked is the terrific factor of personality. Personality is a large factor. It is born into a man. What happens to him when you take out his aberrations is that his dynamics intensify and his ability to reason is then dependent only upon his native computing ability and is limited only by his education and viewpoint. There is a clear.

It is very easy to define and, believe me, it is pretty easy to test. People keep saying, "How do you test a clear?" Well, you certainly don’t dream up a lot of tests such as if the person now desires nothing but strawberry ice cream you have a clear. What one does is continue the person on into therapy and go on down the line trying to find locks which are unrelieved. If he finds one, he will find an engram which wasn’t suspected. Or he goes straight into the engram, or painful emotion and so forth, and he just looks up and down and around and around and he can’t find anything anymore that even faintly resembles an engram. The fellow could sit in present time and remember on a straight line clear back to conception, and— hold your hat— a little bit before. But he remembers this in a straight, wide open channel, and it is all real to him.

It isn’t the fact that he is suddenly possessed of eidetic recall, because he isn’t. Eidetic recall is a trained mechanism whereby one learns. For instance, when we were scouts we were supposed to go down to a store window and look in it. After we had trained for a few days, we could finally pick out 65 items in the store window when we looked at it for five minutes. That is a trained, educational mechanism. That is learning to sweep an area so you look at a page and there it is.

We go back after we are cleared and there is this unfortunate thing— we find out that we weren’t bright enough at that time to look at the page numbers while scanning it; and we can sort of shuffle around and run it through fast, but sometimes one has to run through half a book to find the exact reference. If only we had been bright enough when we were very young to realize that Dianetics was coming forth!

This got one preclear into a flat funk one night. He suddenly realized that when he got to the state of clear it would not have changed his education a single iota. His background, experience level and so on would be exactly the same.

He was faced with this horrible fact that he still had had an unhappy childhood, and that he still wouldn’t have the book that he had intended to write, because somebody had deterred him when he was 17 or 18. And because somebody had discouraged him from going on with electrical engineering to its nth degree, or nuclear physics, or something of the sort, he wouldn’t when clear suddenly have that diploma on his wall. His aberrations and environment had robbed him.

The clear doesn’t worry about it, however; it is only on the way toward clear. A clear will pick up what he can salvage and make a very good job of salvaging it. He will have all the data that he had. Whereas before maybe he only had a hundredth of the data, or a thousandth of the data available, now he has all the data, and this makes him appear to be pretty smart.

So the clear doesn’t run like an encyclopedia. The current educational aberration says that in order to be "educated" one only needs to have a vast command of page numbers and books. The most important part of his education, unfortunately, has been neglected, and that is how to think.

A person has to be educated how to think. A person learns how to think. A clear can now learn how to think. He doesn’t automatically come into possession of good thinking processes. He may never have had them. But now he can sense the fact that he doesn’t have them all, and he wants to develop them. He can develop them rather rapidly. So when he reaches the point of clear, he is stepping off into an educational run and he goes on from the state of clear into education.

Someone from the General Semantics Institute wrote in recently and mentioned that General Semantics and Dianetics went hand in hand. He is absolutely right, because the reform of language and how to think, how to look at things, how to differentiate— all of these things are of vast importance to a clear.

A person can get up to a point where he has no more aberration and there is no more false data in the bank that is going to be thrown at him and enforced upon him by pain. Now he is free to think about any part of his life that he wants to think about and all of a sudden he finds out that he hasn’t enough data. So he starts getting data and aligning it. A person at the state of clear doesn’t sit around and gaze at his navel, which is something else that is important. Not one of these people have I been able to slow down and stop actually long enough to thoroughly investigate. They take off!

The following is an excerpt from a letter we received recently from the Institute of General Semantics:

"As I see it, the process of clearing doesn’t automatically furnish a man with a system of evaluating and a scientific orientation which will enable him to live most efficiently in our present socio- cultural environment. Nor is it supposed to. It simply removes his engrams and frees his analyzer.

"Now an Australian bushman with a freed analyzer, to take an extreme example, still doesn’t have the scientific data and orientations necessary to sane evaluating by our standards. Conversely, General Semantics, which we believe provides an optimum orientation for sanity, probably can’t be adopted fully by a normal aberree full of engrams.

"To oversimplify, Dianetics will clear his engrams and General Semantics will give him an optimum 1950 orientation for sane and effective living. We hope that workers in Dianetics can be persuaded to give thorough consideration to the notion of Dianetics and General Semantics as a working team. To this end, I am inviting information, advice, suggestions and so forth from Dianeticists on Dianetics and its role. In return, I hope that we workers in General Semantics can contribute something of value to Dianeticists, and Dianetics.

"If you and other workers in Dianetics could come to our summer seminar workshop, we might cooperate to our mutual benefit and to the eventual benefit of people everywhere."

In this, we are now dealing with the field of education. There is Educational Dianetics. It is a rather precision proposition. For instance, it starts out with definitions of a datum and continues on through with evaluation. It covers the field of logic and thinking and the evaluating processes of the mind, and it covers the optimum way to teach, and so on.

General Semantics and morphological thinking are all very well, but remember we have suddenly moved into the field of education. Here opinion can exist, and the self- determinism of the individual. That is not something you can enforce.

You would no more be able to push down the throat of a clear how he should think or what he should use for the basis of his thinking than you would be able to knock the Empire State Building over by sneezing.

So it puts education straight out of the authoritarian realm. Education goes into a very strange state on this because it says the mind, if it is going to be right, reserves to itself the right to evaluate. If the mind is being forced to evaluate, it cannot then guarantee that it is going to be right.

Now it may see reason and it may say, "That’s right. I can use that."

And someone else says, "Well, now, Professor Blimp over at Oxford says definitely that the rear end differential on the Conault Integrator is nothing to use in a problem like this."

"Well, I think it’s useful."

"I know, but Professor Blimp says it isn’t." .

And it gets tough right there.

This poses a very bad social problem in the field of education because education has its own social problems. It means that a man cannot have thought a thought in the year 1900 and still reign supreme. He will have to think another thought in 1910 at least.

Continued usefulness and indispensability is a factor. It also teaches that altitude training is no good.

My staff have occasionally detected me snarling didactically when some patient was walking around in a small circle with spots in front of his eyes. But I don’t think any of them have detected me saying, "You’ve got to believe this." I am highly antipathetic toward the idea of forcing something on somebody, because if one does that the use of it for him is limited. Just as a problem is as solvable as it has reason applied to it, this is as solvable as reason can be applied to it.

For instance, if 20 of us are thinking about something and each one of us is running as a self- determined unit on it, no one of us is standing around waiting for somebody else to solve the problem; there are 20 brains working on the same thing. If they are working in a self- determined way, we are going to see progress. But if 19 people are going to stand around and look at the 20th one, expecting him to start turning up all the answers, and then just using what he says by rote, we are not making any vast effect because there are 19 idle brains.

This is not to state that there should be vast disagreement, because if a thing is observably workable or right, it is only observably workable or right if somebody else agrees that it is.

For example, General Semantics was of use to Dianetics. I started going back looking for the first time a word had appeared. It was obvious to me that the first time a word had been defined would carry more weight (due to some experiments I had made in hypnotism).

There might be some misdefinitions. I discovered some very interesting data this way. I found out that although a child might have had the word slaughter defined accurately in the first grade at school, the word might have been defined when the child was 2 years of age in a highly incorrect way. The child would still then carry forward the habit of defining slaughter to himself from the time he was 2, but would remember its definition at the time it was taught to him when he was 6. That was very interesting to me.

Next I found out that the word very often meant an action which had nothing to do with the meaning of the word. So therefore the word would be upset by this action definition. Papa, for instance, had a habit of breaking the furniture and saying, "God, God, God, God, God," which meant that God equalled Papa breaking furniture, to the child. A little later the child would go to Sunday school and he would hear that God was the God of Vengeance, and he would say, "Yup." But what he would see would be Papa. In such a way, misdefinition as far as I could see (and this was very early in my researches) was undoubtedly responsible for a lot of this. I started looking for where it had gotten misdefined— it was obviously the source of a lot of trouble— and it had gotten misdefined in the reactive mind, out of sight.

I started looking for the most hidden moment of definition, and it turned out to be an engram. Then the rest of the mechanics more or less fell into place. So General Semantics is definitely of use in the definition of a word. Korzybski might have gone a lot further than he went, but he went far enough to be a great deal of use.

As a matter of fact, to Breuer’s first belief in the subject of mental catharsis and to Korzybski belong the only acknowledgments that Dianetics really would care to make. Because both General Semantics and Breuer furnished some data.

Sigmund Freud is not in there. I will be polite sometimes to a Freudian and say, "Yes, Freud was a great man"; but actually Freud, when he started to do thinking on Breuer’s work, jumped the gun, went over into the libido theory, then in 1911 saddled us with the delusion theory, and as far as I can tell was wrong all the way on up. But Breuer was pretty right. It was Breuer’s theory that full recall equaled full sanity, as near as I can discover from existing papers.

The jump is from Spencer to Breuer to Korzybski to Dianetics. Freud indicated Breuer’s theories and was working hand in glove with Breuer, but he disagreed violently with Breuer right afterwards.

There are evidently some natural formulas of thought on which the mind runs. One of those natural formulas is the optimum solution. A clear runs on the optimum solution. That is to say, the solution must take into account as many dynamics as possible in relationship to the time involved.

Altruism is not an optimum solution, for instance, because that neglects the first dynamic. There may be situations in which altruism has to be used as a solution, but it would not be a really good solution. The solution whereby the boy stands on the burning deck and goes down with the ship is the worst solution in the world. That just doesn’t even begin to be optimum. But if by staying there his comrades could escape, judged on the basis of time, it could become an optimum solution although it completely wipes out the first dynamic.

One has to work with correct definitions. For instance, somebody was objecting to going clear one day on this basis: "I wouldn’t want to be a clear. He has to be good."

And I said, "Well, what do you mean, good?"

"Ah, you know, good. Wear clean clothes and go to Sunday school and so on."

And I said, "Well, let’s get our semantics straight. The word good is used because it is the closest word to what we mean. We have to define good."

A good action is one which is creative and. constructive, and evil is something which is destructive. Now, those are both modified by viewpoint. So it is a relative value. Something that is good for one person would not be good for another perhaps. So we have to evaluate good each time in terms of the individual or the race or the town or whatever.

Look this problem over and inspect it very carefully and you will find something quite amazing. You will find out that it is not a good solution to kill off Russia. That is a bad solution. Time might at this moment dictate that it is desirable on the basis of time alone, but it is not a good solution. A solution is as good as it contains creativeness and constructiveness for the greatest number of those concerned in the dynamics, and as bad as it contains destruction.

It is impossible to work out any problem that does not contain some destruction. Destruction is going to be present whether you will or no. In order to build a new building you may have to destroy an old one, or reductio ad absurdum we would at least have to kill the grass in order to dig the foundations. So it is a "good" thing to do, even though it contains some destruction. I cannot think of a single major action which doesn’t contain some destruction.

It is a relative problem from individual to individual. A clear is good, therefore the clear naturally tends to resolve a problem in terms of the optimum solution, which of course includes terms of minimal destruction. But that doesn’t say that he won’t kill, because that might be the destruction contained in the solution. It may be on the basis of time, that he has time to do nothing else but kill. A man would certainly starve to death in a hurry if he didn’t at least kill vegetable cells.

What has snarled us up here is the Hegelian grammar system that we use— a grammar of absolutes. There is the word accurate, which is supposed be a precision point. There is no such point. In Dianetics it is considered that the absolute is unattainable.

The more closely the individual approaches the absolute of potential survival, the more right he is. But remember, all four dynamics have to be taken into consideration.

In other words, the more right he is, the better he will survive. The more wrong he is, the worse he will survive. The lowest level of death would of course be the death of mankind. That would be about as wrong as we could get.

We can’t reach absolute wrongness, because absolute wrongness would be the vanishment and destruction of the entire universe. If one person were absolutely wrong, it would postulate this impossibility that the universe would fall in.

We could go back to Schopenhauer and dig out his tomes and find out that the best thing to do is just stop procreating. The only trouble is that observed data on this varies widely from the works of Schopenhauer.

As I have rattled around in the world, I have found uniformly this to be the case: The more evil man thought his fellows and the universe contained, the less he himself was surviving. That is to say, his survival potential was lowered in that ratio.

We have been taught pretty well through people like Freud and psychology that the individual doesn’t count. It is the big mass of individuals. Somebody has gone all out for a very specious thing. Somebody had a manic on the third dynamic, and a zero on the first dynamic.

The mass, that’s the thing, yes, sir! "This fellow is maladjusted. He doesn’t conform." Well, that fellow can be pretty valuable to his fellow human beings, believe me. Because if everybody conformed, we would all be dead. Yet they say individuality should be submerged into the mass?

It so happens that in Washington they have run into something which they themselves do not recognize in their formulation of the welfare state and their emphasis upon the mass rather than the individual.

It is absolutely necessary if one sets up a kingdom to have people dependent upon him. The way one makes people dependent in a state is to make them indigent. One has to go about actually making them indigent in order to make them utterly dependent upon the state. When one has succeeded in doing this, then he has an opportunity to rule supreme over these people.

It may be very wonderful for one man to rule vast millions, but I have never yet found what was really wonderful about it. The nation is as good as it has individuals. If we start talking about this thing called masses, masses of people, the social level, adjustment to a certain level, and so forth, we are talking not just balderdash, but death for our race and for man.

Adjustment of the individual is the same problem. It is not how many people will do the same thing, it is whether that thing is right or wrong. Take the case of voting. Our voting is pretty sloppy. For instance, did you or I get a chance to vote on whether our ships and planes would go firing into the people of Korea? No. But a government, if it were a true democracy, would have to run on an almost instantaneous voting system. It should be able to gather the opinion of the people as a whole within an hour.

Actually, in this day of advanced communications, it would be quite possible for all of us to register an opinion in Washington and for that opinion to be completely integrated in a matter of a very few hours. But we are not asked for that opinion. Instead, we put it indirectly through secondary things. So the actuality of it is we have two patients from some insane asylum, and we are told that these are the two candidates for an office and we can vote for either one. And people throw in a protest vote for a third one.

It is idiotic for anybody to believe at the present time that we are running on free determinism as far as the people are concerned, because we definitely are not. So they have smashed it down. They say history goes along just a certain length of time, then finally the social order congeals and brings about exactly the right conditions, and then suddenly out of this potpourri there springs an idea.

Similarly they talk about folk music, the music of the people. We go out listening to folk music and who do we hear? We hear Stephen Foster and we hear this fellow and that fellow. They are individuals. There wasn’t a piece of folk music that sprung up spontaneously like a mushroom in any society in the world.

Homer was Homer. The situation was not optimum for the appearance of Homer, and Homer didn’t suddenly begin to sing because the situation was such- and- so.

They say that history does not depend upon individuals. It is absolutely true that there has to be some combination of circumstances for the individual to make use of, but it is not true that the individual is negligible in history. We have too many examples of it.

Yet we have been fed the sheep psychology so continuously about how the individual has to adjust, that we have begun to curse those who don’t adjust. I read a newspaper story recently reporting on an election over in the Balkans. A newspaper reporter went out through the rural areas and talked to the peasants. It seemed that people could either vote for the nationalist regime of the country or they could vote for Soviet Russia to take over. They had the choice between a bunch of fascists on the one hand and a bunch of communist loops on the other. The returns of course registered in the direction of the most pressure and propaganda.

This reporter made the point that there was no issue brought forward before the people on which they themselves would like to have taken a vote. If the issue had been rugged individualism, there would have been no question how that government would have gone. Both the fascist and the communist regimes which were being offered them would have been swept over the falls. Neither one could have won in the face of an issue which said the individual is important. That is peasantry talking. That is the land. That is the man with his two hands who has got a chance to stand out in the fields and think a little bit. He knows the world runs on individuals and by individuals and not crowded masses of sheep.

It is interesting that a sheep society does behave like sheep. Get close to a flock of sheep with a cliff right behind them, sing out loudly enough, and if nothing stops them on the other side, they will go straight over the precipice. They stampede. The only thing that stabilizes them or that could stabilize them would be individuals who would not stampede. A goat society would be a lot more desirable than a sheep society.

Dianetics does have one great and grave difference between psychology (as it is formulated in universities) and itself. That is that the psychologist is teaching sheep psychology, adjustment, and Dianetics is teaching with malice aforethought complete and utter maladjustment.

It does seem that genetically in some strange way, woven into the woof and warp of the personality, is a basic purpose in life which is stated in rather general terms, but it lies there.

You can take someone and clear him, and maybe you are clearing him toward his educational goal which was being a civil engineer. And when you get him all finished, he takes up the guitar. He has always tried to play with music, but maybe his family pressed him very solidly in toward engineering, and the further he goes toward clear, the more he inclines toward his own basic personality. He will finally look back and see all the instruments that he has taken up, and he will start to integrate his musical experience. His basic purpose was to make music.

It is a fascinating thing to see the splits in life where the compulsion and education have driven the person far off his goal. You usually have a bit of failure when this has happened. For instance, I know a doctor whose basic purpose was denied by him. He didn’t believe that his basic purpose was to heal. I have watched him coming along the line, and day by day it shows up worse and worse. His basic purpose is to heal.

He sees somebody who is all gimped up and he will do a cure on the patient before he will do research. His basic purpose is to make that person well, right now and as soon as possible. He is lucky. Look at the years he put into getting educated!

Dynamics amongst individuals vary in importance. They are also quite variable in one individual. I imagine you will find individuals who when cleared will still be extremely strong on the first dynamic and very weak maybe on the fourth dynamic, and maybe only mediumly strong on the second.

In the aggregate, when you are clearing a person you are bringing into view an individual. He becomes more and more and more individual and less and less and less a conformer. His basic personality has very strong high spots in it. Start taking the weak spots which were aberrations out of the valleys and you finally get nothing but a range of mountain peaks.

Generally speaking, females tend to have a strong second dynamic. So do men. The female does, as far as I have observed it, tend to be a little more conservative than the male. The male has a greater tendency to take on the world and change it, and the female has a tendency to try to stabilize it to a point where she can raise children.

I have observed this. I am sorry if it offends anybody, but it is her job to make sure it is stable. After all, she is incapacitated for a certain length of time in her life, and she can’t easily transport or move through an unstabilized world little children. She keeps a pretty close eye on that and will protest before the man will against what seems to be a wild and radical departure from past activity.

But I daresay what confuses the male and female is that so many men are in Mama’s valence and so many women are in Papa’s valence that you couldn’t make an accurate estimate of what a woman potentially was and what a man potentially was.

Now we have got an opportunity to compare the two. There is a difference, and it is marked enough so that I have already observed it considerably.

The only thing you can be sure of when you are clearing somebody is that he will become more and more and more self- determined. Selfdetermined in what direction you will not be able to regulate. He will become stronger and stronger and not necessarily more willful. He will become more cooperative as long as he has something with which to cooperate. But don’t try to cross him up and force something down his throat.

An army of clears would be absolutely unbeatable— and utterly uncontrollable. We won the American Revolution as long as we let our people operate as self- determined individuals. And we lost every battle where these rugged individuals were herded into ranks. It is a nice lesson.